BONUS EPISODE | The Collapse of LIV Golf: From Golf’s Great Disruptor to Sport’s Biggest Failure

0:00Pet topic, pet topic time, Live Golf. Live Golf, as we've just mentioned on the main show, it's in its death throes, certainly in its current state. I think we're calling that it's probably in its death throes for a stop. It's been for a while. Yeah, and it has been for a while, but we're seeing the final thrashings of the corpse on the road at the moment. But I think it might be useful, Charlie, before we go into the current implications and broader sort of conclusions drawn about the Live Golf fiasco, it might be useful just to sort of frame it with a quick recap of the history of this. Yeah.

0:382021, when the concept was first announced, it was really the first major challenge to the PGA Tour's dominance of golf, the monopoly that the PGA Tour really had in golf. Yes, you had the European Tour, DP World Tour, you had the Asia Tour, but the PGA had got to a stage where really it could do pretty much whatever it wanted. We just talked on the main show about the power of tennis and prize monies, etc. The PGA acting centrally rather than having individual governing bodies, let's say, around it to influence, had too much control in the eyes of many. And Live Golf, when it came about, was a challenge to that.

1:12It was basically saying, look, we're going to give more power to the players. We're going to give them ownership opportunities in the franchises that they participate in. We're going to pay them money, not just to come and play here. We're going to pay them money just for turning up. And as Dustin Johnson, I always come back to this point. I've talked about it so many times on the show, but it just sticks in my head from the Netflix Full Swing documentary when he was explaining the reasons for going. He said, look, if you offer me more money to play less golf, spend it with my family, do the other things that I want to do, I'm going to take it, right?

1:39I'm going to take it. And that was at a time where Dustin Johnson was right at the top of the game. Absolutely. You had Brooks Koepka right at the top of the game. Yeah. You had Bryson DeChambeau right at the top of the game. Yeah. You had Cam Smith. Yeah. Right at the top of the game. Yeah. And so when you had a lot of these players moving in and leaving the PGA Tour for Liv, let's be honest, the bells were ringing for the PGA Tour. Oh, big style. Everyone was like, oh my God, this is the end for them. They could be in major trouble. And if they get Rory and Tiger, which reportedly were major offers put on the table, about 700 to a billion, right?

2:12Not that that, as we know, would mean much now. But if they got those players to move over, then the widespread belief was that the PGA Tour would, crumbles probably a bit extreme but you know really really struggle it was an existential threat to the uspga tour and it's quite interesting just sort of tracing back where this all comes from right so this is born out of the back end of the pandemic era um and it was a time when the saudis the saudi government in general had determined on something called vision 2030 which was an attempt to transform both the perception of Saudi as a country, but also actually the underlying financial economic structures of their society, which have been basically a petro state.

2:57You know, we sell our oil, we take that money in, we push it around our population. And it was a sort of an understanding headed by the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, who's a young man, was then, still is now a young man, saying, well, if I'm going to be running this country for the next 50 years. I want to make sure I've got a wealthy country to run. And at some point, the oil will run out, or at least maybe even there'll be various parts of the world that use less oil, and therefore perhaps our bargaining power in terms of pricing will go down, etc. So we need to do something to fundamentally rebalance Saudi society.

3:30At the same time, he was coming out the back end of a PR disaster over the assassination of a journalist, um at the saudi embassy um in in turkey um and he had been personally blamed for that by um world diplomatic society um and was suffering a lot of blowback um from that there were countries looking at placing sanctions on saudi arabia and all this type of stuff so it was a it was a real moment in time and i remember funnily enough i remember one of their advisors one of the saudi government's advisors i remember speaking to him pretty much like the week or two before the pandemic hit so this is early 2020 um and him saying have you got any big ideas at the moment because i'm telling you there's about to be a lot of money spent and he didn't mean on golf specifically he meant we the the saudi the saudi state is about to start spending a lot of money and anyone who has a big idea which could fit into vision 2030 and could change you know perception and change reality has got a good chance of it happening, right?

4:35Enter stage left Greg Norman, right? And I think, you know, his role in this is gradually being forgotten over time because effectively he was booted out of it about a year ago. But he was the founding CEO of Live Golf. And Greg Norman had had a longstanding antagonistic relationship with the golf authorities and with the USPGA Tour in particular, dating back to the time when he was the number one golfer in the world and did not feel back in those days that he was listened to enough or that players were listened to enough, did not feel that prize money was high enough, felt there were a lot of people living off the fat of the land, which was being created by golfers like him.

5:12And, you know, for those of your generation, it'd be hard to understand how big a star Greg Norman was in the 80s and 90s. He was an absolutely massive star. But didn't he try and do a breakaway in the 90s? World golf tour. Yeah, it was sort of, did it actually end up happening? Well, he pretty partnered with Fox Sports. Yeah. And it was blocked by the establishment. I think it was exactly. But as in the concept of being… So the concept of, I don't like being hemmed in by the USPGA Tour. I want to do something big. And Greg Norman is, you know, he's never been just a sportsman, right? He's always been somebody who's been a bit bigger than that.

5:49Massive golf architecture business has always been involved entrepreneurially in other things and has always been very outspoken. I mean, he was just a big star. And that was an era when golf had quite a number of big stars. This was sort of the Sebi Ballesteros, Nick Faldo era. That was his time. So second half of the 1980s, first half of the 1990s, that sort of decade in golf was very big in those days, as it is now, but it was very, very big then. And Norman was always the sort of slight sort of the outsider. you know the aussie who came the great white shark as his as his name as his nickname was um and he never won as many majors as his talent sort of especially you know he blew up in a few he blew a few when he when he should have won what was his personality like i mean his personality i mean i've you know come across him a couple of times when i was a journalist is he's immensely charismatic he's one of these guys who he's quite a big guy with a big handshake and a piercing eyes and this type of stuff and you know and very much a an alpha male a real alpha male and i think that you know the authorities on the us pga tour back in those days you know he he brushed up against that you know his his whole style you know his golf head covers used to be you know great white sharks and all this type of stuff he used occasionally wear one of those aussie hats um you know like in crocodile dundee yeah that type of stuff you know he he really lived that big life and funnily enough I saw him literally a couple of years ago I was having dinner at a restaurant in London and he was on a table two over and when he walked in he's one of these guys when he walks into a room you know he's walked into a room it's quite a busy restaurant you know he's got big broad shoulders even now he must be in his mid-60s but he carries himself like he is still the star man so really live is the coming together of an aspiration by the Saudi government to do something massive matching up with the long-standing ambition of Greg Norman to poke the USPGA Tour in the eye, right?

7:47Those two things came together into this massive concept, which is actually the USPGA Tour is just the golfers. If we get a whole bunch of the very biggest golfers to join something which is not the USPGA Tour, the USPGA Tour will be screwed, right? And effectively, when it all came out that this was going to happen in 2021, and then when the big moves started to be made in 2022, there were rumors in 2021 that some of these big discussions were happening, that some of the big golfers were talking to them and all this type of stuff. And then it became clear in 2022 that some of the very biggest golfers had signed and the other big golfers were, you know, looking at potentially signing.

8:28And then the questions were being asked, well, what would the USPGA Tour look like if their 20 biggest stars started not playing on the USPGA Tour? You know, in terms of sponsorship, in terms of TV revenues, what would that look like? And you're absolutely right in saying what it effectively ended up boiling down to, really, was Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. Now, it's funny to think now that five years ago, Tiger was still, albeit injury-wise, was starting to come towards the end, but he'd been such a dominant presence in professional golf for 20 years. It's the messy effect that we talked about when he turned out to events.

9:05Yeah. Events sold. And then you've got McElroy, who's obviously at this point in his early 30s, right, going back five or six years, but very much sort of the younger, charismatic, major winning, big character type of person who people pay to watch, right? Tiger and McElroy being those, probably Bryson, who'd just been coming through at that point, was probably the third leg of that. that well if they got tiger mcelroy and bryson what's the uspga got to go to war with when it comes to its tv deals when it comes to its sponsorship deals and yet the uspga tour has got this enormous overhead going on they've got huge costs got a massive circuit to fund etc etc so the threat back in 2021 going into 2022 which is when the first tournament happened which actually He was here in the UK at Centurion Club.

9:54Now, at this point, not all of the big players who would end up playing on Liv had yet signed to Liv. But it was a stake in the ground saying, this is happening. It is real. This is not just a theory. It's not a concept. We are holding a tournament, and this is real. And at that time, it was announced that the first season for the full tour would be 2023. and there was then a mad rush on during 2022 to get as many of the top players signed up as possible to make the tour as attractive as possible and obviously particularly to try and get Tiger and Rory on board and as you say vast sums were offered to them because it was one of those situations one of those beautiful situations to be in never happened to me but I have observed it in other business situations where effectively you are the entity that holds the the the key the key to the to the Golden Vault, right?

10:45Which is, if Tiger and Rory go, then the whole thing gets blown open. And that's where the equity piece became powerful because we had a situation where players were being offered the opportunity to own a percentage of franchises of the teams they played for. So Liv was made up of 13 teams, 13 franchises, and the captains would take 25%. So it's the captains that had the big equity players. I'm not actually sure what other players on the team. I'm not sure if there was anything kind of collectively in their broader incentivisation. But the captains, the Shambos eventually John Rahms those guys were very much incentivized by your franchise in however many years time is going to be worth 1 billion plus guys look at what franchises are selling for in other sports right it's 1 billion it's 2 billion it's 3 billion it's 4 billion it's 10 billion right this is golf is the true global sport right totally global sport obviously football is but you can't have franchises that doesn't really work in football so in golf in sporting terms, you are going to end up owning 25 % of something that could end up being worth billions.

11:48So from a financial perspective, Charlie, if you stack it up, the offer was extraordinary. We're going to pay you a massive signing on fee. Like life generational family changing signing on fee. I mean, absolutely. Open family office, have loads of people running around investing your money for you. 100 million, 150 million, 200 million, 250 million, 300 million. signing on fee, number one. Number two, when you turn up to our events, you are guaranteed to be paid for appearing at those events, right? So the whole appearance thing that you mentioned earlier on. Number four, these events are going to have massive prize money.

12:28On top of that, 30 million bucks, right? So the actual prize money is going to be bigger as well. Number five, I mean, no cut. So everyone's going to be earning. Even if you have a bad week, even if things don't quite go your way. You're still earning. You're not going to have one of those nasty weeks that even the very top players do have from time to time where you pay to go to a tournament. You pay to be there and all this. You're a psychologist and you're a coach and you're a physio therapist, et cetera, and you miss the cut. You make no money. You're down on the week. Which is fixing a topic of contention that has existed around golf and the PGA Tour for a very long time where players have not been satisfied with the fact that they do not get compensated if they don't make that cut.

13:06Right. So again, clever, right? Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge. And then on top of that, then on top of that, also, as you say, the equity piece and all this other stuff. So you can say, OK, I'm sat here and I'm Dustin Johnson. I'm like, OK, I'm getting paid 150 million just to sign on. Right. I'm then going to get I'm becoming a team captain. And let's just say my franchise becomes worth a billion. I'm then another 250 million in. I then play on this tour for 10 years. And the prize money is so massive that pretty much I can't avoid making 20 to 30 million a year just because I'm turning up to events.

13:39I'm being guaranteed money. The prize money is massive. And I'm good at the game, etc. So I'm going to make another 200 million in prize money. So if I stick with this over five to 10 years, I'm going to make something like 600 million US dollars minimum. There's an equity piece in there where if this is really successful even further, my value just increases. Right. Now, for any professional sportsman to be able to look forward and say, over the next five to 10 years, I'm going to make 600 million dollars. that is, I mean, you know, off the scale. If you think that, let's say, the top tennis player or the top golfer in the world normally might expect to make 20 million a year, right?

14:20So over a 10-year period, assuming that they finish top every single year for 10 years on the USPGA Tour, they end up with 200 million. And here they're being told, to a much higher level of certainty, no, no, it's not going to be 200, it's going to be 600. So it's a 400 million difference that was being dangled in front of their face. Much of it guaranteed. Much of it guaranteed. Much of it not especially tied to having to win majors and all this type of stuff. Now, of course, you've got endorsements on top of that, right? So that 600 million probably ends up being a billion. So you are talking about joining the plutocracy.

14:55You're talking about joining the oligarchy. You're talking about earning the kind of money that somebody who starts their own tech business and floats it. You know, it's these types of sort of these who fly around, who don't share a private jet between three or four. You've got your own private jet that flies you around the world. You know, it's a totally big. So it's not hard to understand why Varys, these guys, took up Greg Norman's offer, I guess is what I'm saying. Yes. It's not to say that I think that what they did was a good thing or a great thing. Tiger Woods, when he was turning it down and he turned down a number that was much bigger than these guys, right?

15:30he said, I think these guys are forgetting where they come from, where they came from, and what's made them, by which he meant the USPGA Tour, right? Which is they're only in a position to be like this because of the USPGA Tour. And there's a history element to that, right? Which is the USPGA Tour has been built up over 100 years. And it's the stars of the past. It's the Arnold Palmers. It's the Jack Nicklases who created this huge thing, which is the USPGA Tour. so effectively what it boiled down to was are you the type of person who respects tradition or are you the type of person who thinks bugger that it's all about it's all about dollars on my bottom line two things can be true at the same time charlie look i mean i i would come on let's be honest right let's be honest i respect tradition massively i would want to go and emulate my heroes of course but if that money is being put down to you it is it is so difficult to turn that down and yes the credit to McElroy and Tiger Woods is extraordinary for a 700 to a 1 billion let's just say signing on for the offer the flip side of it you could say is that those are the two that could afford to turn it down and I know if they had a doubt about the longevity of this Rory has been playing the card of I saw this coming right you guys being owed money shock horror yeah Tiger Woods was you know he's a billionaire yeah Rory is not far off I don't think for his total value so you know those guys had a very strong very strong position to stand from and they knew very smartly they knew the loyalty that they would have from the PGA Tour in doing so would give them far greater opportunity to earn because what what I think they realised and I would love to have known what the conversations would have been like between Jay Monaghan the previous commissioner of the PGA Tour and let's say Tiger and Rory at this time, would be how quickly the PGA came to decisions around player equity schemes that they have now put in place to raising prize money that is now, what, 200 or so million more.

17:34If that was quick enough when these guys were getting the money, then them sitting there and turning it down, and it's still extraordinary. You pulled me up when I, the other day, was saying, oh, Bryson, you know, wouldn't be that bothered because he'll be thinking about, you know, how other ways he can make money. 500 million is a huge amount of money. 700 million is a huge amount of money. whether you've got billions it's a huge amount of money but I just wonder how much of this stuff all around it going in made that decision for those two and the opportunity for them to really sit on the right side of this as you've said the right side of it but with a level of security behind them already a little bit easier yeah I think that's totally fair I mean it's very hard to get inside people's heads and sort of judge you know what would Tiger have done 20 years previously before he became a billionaire but I still want to get back in the history of it would you have said the characters that went that they would be the characters you would have expected to have gone.

18:20Yes. And that's my point, I think. I think that is my point. My point is that when you look at the John Rams of this world, perpetually a bit grumpy, perpetually looking like the world owes him a favor, never looking that happy to be a professional golfer. You know what Dustin Johnson said? You know, if someone offers me the opportunity to play less golf for more money, that presupposes the idea that he doesn't really like playing golf. Really? Same for Brooks. Same for Brooks. Patrick Reed. Everyone's against me. Right. It's a lot of people. till hatton angry it's a lot of people with chips on their shoulder okay who would play into the greg norman narrative of the uspga tour screwing you they used to screw me as well they're screwing you oh yeah they're absolutely right greg yeah they are aren't they etc etc now i want to go back to you mentioned jay monaghan this central figure in this and so i think a slightly unsung hero of how this all got sorted out because he had to take a lot of right i mean he you know oh yeah he copped it he really copped it right you should have seen it happening blah blah all this types of stuff, as if you could.

19:18In retrospect, as has been proven by the fact that it's turned out to be a terrible idea, who on earth could have predicted that any entity in the world would stump up 6 billion to try to take on the US PGA Tour? No one could have foreseen that. There probably is only one entity in the world that could do it, and that's the Saudi state, right? Maybe the Qataris, right? Other than that, no one could do it. It would have to be a sovereign, for sure. and it would have to be a sovereign who cared more about certain other things other than just making money because making money out of a six billion investment was never gonna be a straightforward perception it was a reputational thing so effectively what happened was um going back is that that between 2022 and 23 there was vast pressure on the us pga tour to come to terms with live do you remember that period right and there were various meetings that were brokered and even including up to, you know, very senior politicians getting involved, Trump and all this type of stuff, where it's basically, come on, guys, look, there's room for you can all get together.

20:19And perhaps Liv should take over a chunk of the USPGA tour and, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be. And there were meetings, Jay Monaghan was pressured into having these meetings to show that he wasn't being stubborn, right? Which is you could be the commissioner who sees the entire USPGA tour go down on your watch. Now, in retrospect, what the USPGA Tour did was strategically brilliant, which is they effectively played for time. They strung out these conversations into a sort of framework where it was like, well, we'll have one meeting then. We'll have one meeting now. We'll have one meeting there.

20:51Let's see how long these guys can keep going without coming to terms with us and without Tiger and Rory being on site. Let's see how long that takes. and that really only I would say the first time when it became clear that the USPGA was not going to pursue those conversations those negotiations and didn't need to was probably only a couple of years ago 18 months it wasn't that long ago that people were still saying uh when's the next meeting between live and USPGA well sorry so that was what I was trying to get the date on here because do you remember when that there was the merger the shock merger that was announced in 2023 which then led to the whole uh rory being betrayed by the pga that's right and all of this um and and you're right you know really it was always the commercial entity as well which was interesting because there was a huge part of live from just a money-making standpoint that had a huge question mark over it it was a commercial set of partnerships and it was a broadcast i i don't i always had one problem.

21:54Where the hell do you watch it? Oh, you mean the Liv Tour itself? So you had tours now with two separate issues. You had one with the quite great players and had a lot of money. You had a PGA which had great commercials, great distribution. Distribution, yeah. Bringing something together, which was announced in 23, which Monaghan had been talking about here and said it's a historic day for the game. He said, it was intelligent because I don't actually ever know what came of this agreement. It was all playing, in retrospect, it was all playing for time. But the communication clearly was lacking between some of the top players like the Rory because he came out, didn't he?

22:35And was publicly very upset by this because he had turned down 700 million. And then these guys could just reintegrate back into a system having taken a huge fee. So while he was smart and intelligent about how to buy for time, there was clearly still a gap in the communication that needed to happen between the top stars on the PGA Tour to try and build a better publicity around? Because the PGA suffered for this. As you said, they suffered for this for a little while. Two years. I mean, okay, let's just play it the other way around. And let's just imagine that Jay Monaghan and the US PGA Tour hierarchy had started to actually discuss openly what their strategy was with Rory, whoever.

23:10Rory then speaks to his agent. His agent then speaks to somebody else. The whole thing just becomes public. So I think what they had to do was to say, right, we're going to carry on and we are the US PGA Tour. we are in discussions with live because for the good of golf blah blah blah blah blah we don't think there should be a split blah blah blah blah blah blah blah so we'll be in discussions with them and we can come to some sort of framework deal potentially whatever it might be now whether they were deliberately playing for time i think they were or whether actually it was just a happy coincidence it gradually became clear that more big players were not going to join and it also gradually became clear to your point that no one was watching and anyone who runs sports organizations knows professional sports organizations that fundamentally you either need people paying to turn up and watch your events or and and you need people paying to watch on uh watching on tv and preferably paying to watch on tv or at least knowing where to go to watch it on tv in the first place so the lack of a mate the lack of distribution as you put it the lack of having networks who actually wanted to televise these events turned out to be the key achilles heel for the entire thing.

24:17Because when you think about financial viability, what do the sponsors want? The sponsors want to make sure that if they do sponsor it, their brand is visible. So if you can't tell them that they are going to be on major channels watched by millions of people, then effectively your sponsorship deals are going to be way down here. Not to mention, of course, your broadcast deals because by definition, you get paid by the channels for that. So in retrospect, what they actually had to do really was tie up major TV deals kind of first to give them the distribution to make sense out of the entire thing.

24:48Because without the distribution, it's just never made sense. So you've got these massively well-paid players playing in a very expensive tournament, very expensively staged, which 5 ,000 people turn up to watch, i.e. a drop in the ocean in the big scheme of things. 5 ,000 people, 10 ,000 people on a golf course seems like quite a lot, by the way, just to be quite clear. But in terms of ticketing revenue, it's not very good. especially when you've got the overheads that they have huge overheads so effectively the lack of tv deals the lack of distribution the lack of visibility is a thing ultimately that enabled the us pga to let it just die quietly because that gap in the lack of the tv deal that lack in in the in the lack of commercial revenues is what meant the saudis had to keep on putting money in if there's one thing that i've learned you mentioned earlier on reference to bryson and his you know potential sort of loss of the 500 million he might have been banking is the more time i spend working for or alongside very rich people or entities um and i advise the qatari government for quite a long time so got rough experience i mean no one actually really likes losing shit loads of money in the end you know i've worked for billionaires who cry like babies over having to write a£2 million check.

26:04It's still£2 million. The bottom line is they might now have a billion of assets all over the place, but£2 million, the opportunity cost on that£2 million is very, very substantial. They could go to one of their favourite charities and transform that charity's entire future by giving them£2 million. They could give it to their children who could then do something interesting with it. They could go and get themselves a bigger yacht. They could do all sorts of things. Now, if you think about the Saudi state as being an equivalent to an ultra high net worth, but on a much, much bigger scale because it's a country rather than a person, there was this underlying narrative of billion here, two billion here, three billion here, four billion here, who cares?

26:46It just doesn't work that way. Life doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way when you're getting nothing back for it. Yeah. And so I think if, to your point, if you created a league which had a distribution model that got people obsessed with Live Golf and was working, right, was still struggling to maybe make the money but was working from the PR perspective, from the perception perspective that played a huge part in its origination because it was doing nothing for Saudi sport internally. It was doing nothing for Saudi Arabia really internally. Yeah. If that was working, then it's the kind of cost that they would have attributed to a global pioski.

27:20Would you have gone to major networks around the world and said, and this is in the framework of the sheer amount of money that was being invested full stop yeah right would you have gone to major networks and have gone tell you what we'll pay you to screen this for the first two years 100 right you could go to something like the bbc which has lost all of its golf coverage because they can't afford to pay for it fundamentally and said i'll tell you what i'm always reading about how you're quite short of money we're going to pay you 50 million to screen our events in the UK, right? We want you to screen every week on BBC Two and we'll give you this money for screening it.

28:01And then we'll talk at the end of two or three years. And in the meantime, build the audience, build the dependence, that sports love of dependence. I love watching this. This is great. I'm able to watch some of the greatest golfers in the world on free to air and all this type of stuff. And then once you've then built that audience, you've then got a case to go to the pay TV people and say, this is what the audience is. What you create hopefully in that is a competitive tension for the rights. Yeah. I would have gone to Canal Plus in France. Yeah. I would have gone into Spain knowing that I had John Rahm.

28:32Yeah. There. Look at, you know, we would have got, you know, I mean, my God, can you imagine what they could have given it to Supersport in South Africa with Dean Burmester in there? But yes. But to be fair to Dean Burmester, he's not just a big star in South Africa. He's actually, he's the biggest star on the planet. Right. Right, you'll remember that. Yes, especially now, I mean, Messi retiring from international football. Yeah, it's Burmester all the way from here on in. You've only seen Burmester shirts. But look, seriously, yes. Because if what you had to do was you had to put it in front of people, fuck it, I would have put it on YouTube.

29:05What? Where's your YouTube deal, right? Because also, the whole point of this was also to revolutionize how people consumed golf. It was a three-day, not a four. It was shotgun starts, i.e. you start on different holes of the course. it was pubs and atmospheric moments around the game it kind of it bred to what we would class now as i don't know like more of a kind of entertainment creator type culture an experience that you didn't get in the traditional we must be quiet when someone's on the putting green in golf so if you're really going to play that and you're really going to buy into it you could have had the the deals where you'd have creators working with live golf to create live golf content on on their channels i would have done far more i think there was a bit of that charlie i did see some of that and and of course the biggest creator of all in golf is bryson um who definitely did a lot of that um from the get-go did they have no no because by then it's too late i know it came in later most of that came in later and i think the other problem is is that some of their innovations supposed innovations basically just didn't work right And that's fair enough.

30:14Sometimes you try something and it doesn't work. The problem is if it's core to what you're doing, then you've got an existential problem. And the big thing that did not work was team golf. That was their most of the rest of the stuff I could put under the heading of how can we make golfers' lives easier? Turn the tournament from four days into three days. Great for the golfers. Is that great for the fans? Not really. It takes away one day optionality on me going because you're most likely you're not going to go to all four days of the event. You're going to go to one day of the event. And sometimes that might want to be a Thursday rather than a Saturday, whatever it might be.

30:45It doesn't really help the fans. Getting rid of the cut definitely doesn't help the fan. That helps the golfer. So there's a lot of stuff that they were doing that I thought was very led by the need to bring golfers across and make their lives easier. But the thing that they did, which was really meant to change it, and this is all bound into the franchise thing that you mentioned earlier on, is team golf, right? So you build the concept of week-to-week team golf as opposed to having the Ryder Cup once every two years and the President's Cup once every two years. And you say, right, week-to-week, you, the fan, are going to get passionate about these teams.