The Riviera Country Club always plays host to great golf tournaments. Amateur tournaments, collegiate tournaments, and professional tournaments are always fun events when they take place at Riv. This week's Genesis Invitational was a phenomenal event and had great golf to watch. I thought the tv coverage was better than it typically is and I feel that CBS did a great job covering the event. Joaquín Niemann went wire to wire and fired off 63-63-68-71 to win by 2 shots over late pushes by Collin Morikawa and Cameron Young. This was Niemann’s second win on the PGA Tour and the Chile native is looking to use this momentum for a great year. The course is one of the favorites on tour and is a great course to watch tournament golf. It definitely didn’t let us down this year.
A huge topic of late in the golf world is the Saudi Golf League. There are tons of rumors out there of insane amounts of money being thrown at certain golfers to participate in this league and jump ship on the PGA Tour. It seems that most of the golf world has come around and decided that the PGA Tour is the place to be and they aren’t willing to tarnish their reputation for a large sum of money that they possibly could earn through playing on the Tour anyways. Some of the bigger names that took the longest to come out against the league were Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, both of whom pledged their allegiance to the PGA Tour in statements made today. There is one giant name that hasn’t publicly come out against the Saudi Golf League yet--Phil Mickelson. Phil is the second biggest golfer in my lifetime behind Tiger Woods. He seems to have always had a great reputation with the fans and these last few weeks has made some comments that have done nothing but backfire on him and tarnish his good name and reputation for being an ambassador of the game. Do I think Phil will actually leave the PGA Tour for the Saudi Golf League? No, but the fact that he is publicly using it for leverage against the PGA Tour is an insane thing to admit. Most professional sport leagues would have suspended him already for saying that. Phil has always been a character but this time, it seems the public isn’t on his side. It comes off as extremely tone deaf and greedy that he would even speak about the possibility of playing in a Saudi backed league with all of the things that have gone on there in the past (which sounds like Fyre Fest in my opinion anyways as there are zero people who have publicly said that they were committed to playing in the league).
Most of the top American golfers have finally come out against the Saudi Golf League. Phil Mickelson is one of my favorite golfers of all time and I hope he makes the right decision soon and is able to save some of his reputation from being ruined. The fact that this has been going on for 700+ days and not everyone has been against it either means that greed is at an all time high or that many of the golfers have no idea about what is actually going on. A journalist getting his limbs pulled off for pissing the Saudi’s off is too much for any sane person to even consider getting mixed up with. If this league is able to happen, who knows what could happen. I hope everyone is on the right side of history with this for themselves and their conscience. With the popularity of the game of golf being extremely high due to there being nothing else to do during the pandemic, the PGA Tour doesn't need to deal with players potentially jumping ship to another league that will probably fail anyways. The PGA Tour is the premier professional golf tour and it has the best players in the world competing on it. Golf needs the Tour to stay that way for the betterment of the game.
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