Greg Norman’s 1994 Pipedream Golf World Tour And Recent LIV Vanity Project is Dead: Its Dead, Jim….
Arrogance can cause problems for humans and when egos get thrown in the mix the potential for complications increases exponentially. Combining the two almost never works out well, particularly when logic and reason can’t break through what can elevate into near delusional hubris and self-confidence.
Which most often results in just rewards, a comeuppance, and travesty for many who get caught up in well-intended but ill-considered schemes.
I made the case over the course of my previous two articles that having Greg Norman as the face of the breakout LIV Saudi Arabia Sovereign Wealth Fund initiative was problematic for a number of reasons.
Not the least of which was Norman’s previous attempt in 1995 to create a World Golf Tour—that he suddenly announced at his season ending tournament–somewhat of a forerunner initiative–at a time when the expansion of pro golf beyond the two major dominant tours in the US and Europe was—at best—problematic, but moreso fledgling.
The King–Arnold Palmer himself—put the kibosh on Norman’s idea and that, was that: the end of it. Palmer felt the idea of doing some type of super tour would leave many professionals in the top 125 but not considered top tier for whatever reason—behind in terms of benefits, opportunities and purses.
In truth the idea of doing more international tournament venues was in the works and subsequently expanded greatly over the years starting in 1997—which reportedly caught Norman off guard as if he had some license or exclusive right to the idea.
As well the notion of including top tier players from other tours–particularly Asia—based on a revised methodology to calculate the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR)—in majors and top-rated tournaments in terms of field strengths, purses and competition aspects.
Some of these initiatives can be attributed to the pressure Norman’s World Golf Tour idea put on the governing bodies of golf to address the expansion of golf worldwide.
But truth be told Norman’s desire seemed a bit more than self-serving, in that while he was considered a topflight golfer in the world, having occupied the number 1 OWGR ranking for some 331 weeks over time, there was somewhat of a “sense of the golfers” that his efforts focused not so much on elevating the world golf status of other tournaments and players so much as diminishing the power and influence of the United States Professional Golf Association (PGA) tour.
Which Arnold Palmer wanted nothing to do with. In truth it was an ill-thought-through idea that would not demonstrably benefit the members of the most dominant tour in the world that all golfers aspired to that Palmer had been instrumental in building, the PGA tour: Why mess with a winning formula?
Norman was no doubt a great player, a World Golf Hall of Fame 2001 Inductee who won some 88 golf tournaments worldwide. He is in the top 40 (tied for 35th) with 20 wins in terms of PGA tournament winners of all time, which is a significant lifetime milestone wherein you are guaranteed a tour card to play on the tour. Norman is tied for 47th (with 40 other golfers) in terms of Majors with two Open Championships.
I covered in previous articles that Norman established somewhat of a back handed record in the majors called the “Saturday Slam” in which he led all four majors in 1994, while only closing the deal at the Open Championship.
Which many believe was the basis for the “LIV 54” moniker referring to the number of holes for the LIV competitions.
Nobody in golf history is known for or has lamented that if the tournaments were shorter, they would have won more: that is simply not a thing.
Norman did not win a US based major while winning with dominant performances in many other tournaments, including the so-called 5th major, the PGA Tournament Players Championship. He was in fact in position many times to win, but a combination of being outplayed, the “C” word (choked,) and plain bad luck (good luck on the part of his opponents) combined to keep him off the board.
Norman’s and therefore LIV’s Achilles heel that bordered on malfeasance was the inability to receive until 2026 OWGR points for LIV tournaments. LIV applied for certification in 2022, was denied in 2023 and withdrew their request in early 2024.
Which from day one was problematic and required a favorable decision from the governing bodies of golf, including the Royal and Ancient (R&A) based out of St. Andrews, Scotland, which has domain over the world with the exception of the US and Mexico, which are governed by the United States Golf Association (USGA.)
The governing body established OWGR policy centered around 72-hole golf tournaments conducted at stroke play, a strength of field consisting of at least 75 golfers and typically over 150, some form of cut or field reduction mechanism–which translates to no guaranteed purses—and there being no separate team competition conducted within or as part of the stroke play tournament.
Whereas an advertised novelty with LIV tournaments was a 54-hole format, fields typically under 60 players, no qualification possibility to participate for non-LIV golfers, a team competition format conducted concurrently with the stroke play tournament and the trivial but distinctive allowance of golfers to wear shorts (short pants) during tournaments.
After Norman departed as LIV CEO in early 2025 effective August 2025, LIV leadership made some format changes and finally achieved success in gaining OWGR points for the top ten finishers in their tournaments in November 2025, based on a compromise with the OWGR ruling body.
LIV nonetheless criticized the decision immediately after having fought since it established itself to gain such recognition. There is still the issue of the limited number of players in the field–under 60 golfers—no cuts, the fact that outside golfers have no way to qualify to play, guarantied purses and team competitions ongoing within the stroke play tournament.
Norman was gone as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) by this time and many attribute the impasse of nearly three years to Norman’s aggressive posture which many believe was a fight he deliberately took on by ignoring the here-to-for OWGR conventions which none of the governing bodies had agreed to revisit in light of the LIV plans.
Norman’s greatest failure as CEO was his inability to break bread with the R&A and USGA on the OWGR issue. But the far worse problematic issue was the devastating affect this issue had on LIV players who suddenly found themselves as somewhat pariah.
Having jeopardized not only their potential to garner OWGR points to qualify for exemption into the most important tournaments such as the majors, but also the status provided by membership in their home tours such as the PGA and DP World European tour which qualified them for participation in prestigious events such as the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup.
Leaving golfers like Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, and dozens of other topflight golfers with no path other than previous and current performance in the majors to maintain or gain OWGR points to qualify for the majors.
Truth be told there is a tough schift factor 9.9 for these players who willingly took the guaranteed money without any solid promise of a resolution to the OWGR question. Although there was hope and belief that a resolution could be worked from the get-go, largely put forth by the marketing and optimism of Greg Norman—who apparently believed throughout that the issue would be resolved in LIV’s favor: he was totally wrong.
One can’t help but think that Norman obstinately believed that if he could get enough of the world’s top golfers signed to LIV, the R&A and PGA would relent and be forced for the betterment of the game to compromise on the OWGR issue in order to satisfy what golf fans around the world desire, which is to see the best players in the world competing against each other in the biggest tournaments.
Which a cynic would observe was already happening until Norman’s vanity project—funded by what many consider tainted Saudi limitless dollars—turned things upside down from a business model standpoint.
Transforming–by turning the business model upside down–a sport where independent contractors—golf gunslingers—had no guaranteed money except for merchandising contracts and started each week on an equivalent footing with everybody else in the field competing to finish in the money during tournaments.
Who accrued points based on performance throughout the season in order to qualify for the season ending culmination events where the performance merited participation as the field sizes were cut down to the focal point of the season where only 30 golfers competed for what had built up to be the biggest purse in golf: until LIV came along
Norman’s LIV in theory went one better over the worlds prevailing golf tournament model by paying contract dollars to lure players to LIV where there was somewhat the rudimentary principle of a draft to form teams and a season qualification review to determine who performed well enough to stay and who would be relegated.
Although top name players had multi-year contract obligations which would have made it at the very least awkward but moreso exposed the hypocrisy at the base level of the concept if a top player had a precipitous drop-off in performance and yet was on a >100M dollar contract for several years.
In Jon Rahm’s case he has two years left on his LIV contract, but there might not be an LIV to compete within going forward and he would then have to solve the conundrum of where to play.
The guaranteed money was not trivial, as Jon Rahm signed up for 300M, Phil Mickelson for 200M, Brooks Koepka 130M, Dustin Johnson 135M, Bryson De Chambeau 125M… Purses in the first-year tournaments were 25M, with one tournament at 50M, while the 2026 purses average 30M.
Phil Mickelson is perhaps the most impacted player of all, despite his healthy guarantee of 200M. Phil was likely a future Ryder Cup and definitely a President’s Cup Captain based on the success of his PGA tour career where he had just astoundingly won the PGA Championship, becoming the oldest golfer ever to win the title.
All of which went out the window with his defection to LIV. Which begs the question that this article gets at, what–in the final analysis–was the point?
Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed have already availed themselves of somewhat of a severance package from LIV which enables them to return to the PGA Tour. Golfers like Bryson DeChambeau signed through 2026 and missed the potential window to return to the PGA tour. He now faces the prospect that he is a man without a tour, likely relegated to playing the DP Euro tour until some manner of time or monetary penalty is paid. Jon Rahm has 2 years left on his contract which is now somewhat nebulous.
A good question is whether Norman has any pecuniary liability or potential legal problems given his failure to deliver as CEO the OWGR accommodation during his time at the helm. Which you have to believe was the elephant in the LIV contract negotiation room all along.
This is an issue for all LIV golfers, but particularly for the younger upcoming golfers who took the money and found themselves in an almost impossible position from the standpoint of being unable to establish any bona fides in terms of the OWGR and thereby having almost no route to the majors other than through qualifying opportunities which costs time, travel, money and disruption of what was most coveted with the LIV model: control of a players time and schedule.
Norman had a number of personal issues that proved difficult to work through or around. Early on when asked about the moral aspects of having Saudi Arabia as a boss, he spun things by pointing out that he did not work for Saudi Arabia, being under the Public Investment Fund. Which is Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund controlled by the Crown Prince who Norman insisted he did not work for or answer to at LIV.
With the involvement of Saudi Arabia, we learned a new term called “Sportswashing.” In May 2022 when asked on Sky Sports News about Saudi Arabia’s extensive human rights violations and how Norman felt about working for such people he stated: “No they’re not my bosses. We’re independent, I do not answer to Saudi Arabia, I do not answer to MBS.”[119] LIV Golf Investments is on the public record as being under the majority ownership of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). This fund has been controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler since 2015.
Norman’s public claims that sounded more like defensive protestations that LIV was an attempt to “grow golf through international exposure,” an idea that was somehow inexplicably value-added to the ongoing efforts of the two predominate golf tours, was a hard sell looked at with an increasingly jaundiced eye by golfers and the golf world alike.
Particularly as LIV struggled to get television exposure and resorted to hosting tournaments in major markets in the US and Europe, often in seeming competition with the existing tours: which LIV struggled to build interest in or a following.
Which–taken in the whole from a top-down perspective–exposes some of the folly–the original questions–about details that were simply not clear when talking about that Greg Norman vanity project from 1994…
I don’t wish the LIV tour ill, and certainly not any of the players. But they clearly made choices and took the money and sailed that ship into a somewhat uncharted voyage that—in spite of the guarantee of the upfront money, the closest thing to a salary in golf—had many red flags in terms of the non-monetary but important “schtuff” that has always transcended golf’s purses.
Like representing your country in the Ryder Cup, the President’s Cup, participating in the four majors–including the Master’s Tournament, the most famous tournament of them all—but also the income benefits that come from playing on the most well known golf tours in the world and the increasing purses that have come about, no doubt driven by the competition LIV represented.
With the recently announced PGA future plans, the PGA Tour is going to 7 Championship Series Events in the near future, which are limited field, no-cut, top 70 or so qualified events with elevated purses on the march to the season ending FEDEX Cup. Signaling that the PGA has responded to the obscene LIV purses by going to a similarly obscene monetary compensation plan in response.
It remains to be seen whether future changes will be welcomed by the players, although it is hard to argue against merit-based fields where the all-important metric is week-to-week performance.
Some would argue that what Norman’s LIV vanity project fostered was a way to help the best golfers make more guaranteed money in their prime, to the detriment of the emerging or developing players that many consider the future of the tours. Resulting in further marginalization and a relegation of those not in the top tier for whatever reason to crumbs on the margins.
While not providing a development path that the PGA and DP Tours have focused on while extending their development programs down to colleges and local community focused opportunities, events and competitions.
The annual efforts of Augusta National–in particular–for top Woman amateurs as well as the Pitch, Putt and Drive competition have been well received and are replicated in a lot of communities across the country and will only get bigger over time.
The culmination of the FEDEX Cup at the Atlanta Country Club-the Home of Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones, Jr.–is a remarkable story that celebrates how golf helped turn that community around.
Which is one of the things—in the final analysis—that golf should not lose sight of in the drive to obscene purses and renumeration a la LIV: golf has always been about communities, charity and good causes.
If it becomes focused on making already wealthy players wealthier and forgets its roots in somewhat hard scrabble communities across the US, that is ultimately a losing proposition for all.
Arnold Palmer (RIP) would never support the idea…
Max Dribbler
27 Aug 2026
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