RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Every good story needs a villain, that’s why I welcome LIV golfers at the Masters

There’s a video of Brooks Koepka that’s been doing the rounds for the past week.

He’s a big ice hockey fan, Koepka, and the Florida Panthers are his team, so he went to see their NHL game against the New York Rangers. That’s where the phone footage captures one of the greatest golfers of this era as he calls Aaron Ekblad, a player for the Panthers, from his hospitality box.

Koepka later confirmed that he was ‘hydrated’, which could explain his yelling at the defender while waving a real one in his direction.

You see, it was a dig at Ekblad’s apparent lack of mobility, and Koepka was unimpressed, so he then held the cone in front of his crotch before further clarifying his sentiments: “Ekblad, you suck.”

The video has been viewed more than a million times, meaning it could be Koepka’s most pronounced impact on public consciousness since announcing last year that it would become a Saudi-branded wipe.

A confession at this point: I quite like Koepka, who has come down a rocky road on both sides of his time as golf’s deadliest big game hunter. At that point he was sweet of four major wins in eight starts, and before his injuries, he was a colossus.

But even as a big name in his sport, he’s been largely invisible for the past year. The same goes for Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Cameron Smith and all the giants in that LIV group, except for the times when one might romancing a traffic cone or tee off Rory McIlroy.

We hear a lot about them, and regularly discuss what they caused and the sordid purposes they and Greg Norman serve their payers. But we don’t see that much. We listen to them, but we don’t watch their chips and putts. We are intrigued by its context, but how many of us care about its sports content? They got a lot richer and a lot less relevant as athletes.

But this coming week at the Masters will be very different. Even with so much else going on (the battle between McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Jon Rahm is compelling, as is the return of Tiger Woods), there’s an inevitable curiosity about the reintegration of 18 LIV golfers into traditional golf society.

This union has the potential for Augusta’s most unseemly rampage since Clayton Baker, a skipper, tried to scoop up some bunker sand in 2012. He ended up in a jail cell.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about those dynamics and the hatred that exists, predominantly among tank commanders and also among some players, particularly McIlroy.

Taken in its entirety, this has been one of the most toxic fights in sports history, and yet I am repeatedly sidetracked into a couple of strange questions: Does the old order of golf need to embrace LIV? And LIV needs to adopt the old order?

Or said in a slightly different way, can any of them thrive on their own for now? The thought came to me forcefully while watching that Koepka video, and it’s obvious that LIV is a company withering in the shadows right now.

But those earlier questions also came up when I was at the Players Championship in March. It’s the fifth largest, we’ve heard it for a long time, and by ranking it’s the strongest course in golf. It is also the flagship event of the PGA Tour. And yet he felt bereft and flat, because something was missing.

The quality of Smith, the defending champion and world number 5, was all one piece. The same goes for a transcendent figure like Johnson and the knowledge that this was no longer the strongest field possible.

But it also lacked the flavor you get from heels. That’s what they call the villain in wrestling, and golf lost its main cues to LIV. Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Reed, Koepka and Mickelson are a fine pair of heels.

Which is not to say that a tournament without them is bad, because to admit it would be to admit that you don’t like golf at all. But it’s not a twist that you like a dose of soap opera in your sport, even within golf, and that makes me think of a different tournament than the one I attended this year: the Dubai Desert Classic.

That was a nice meeting, well organized, but it’s not a major fifth. It’s early in the DP World Tour season, but I had McIlroy and, more importantly, I had the master of heels, Reed.

We know what happened next and that’s the point: McIlroy snubbed Reed, Reed teeed off McIlroy, things were said, and based on a rough estimate of how much global coverage the storm generated, it’s reasonable to assume that the Desert Classic caught the imagination. more than the Players Championship.

Those heels stepped on everything, which speaks to the theory that a good story is hard to tell without a bad guy.

Of course, in time, another pair of heels will enter the bar of the oldest circuit and replace what was lost. But at present there’s no shame in enjoying the sideshow that could take place at the Masters, while also recognizing that the integrity of the competition really depends on LIV golfers being there. The same goes for all the greats: if you consider them the best tournaments, they need the best golfers.

In the absence of LIV, would a Rory McIlroy win, thus completing the grand slam, carry a 20-year disclaimer that it was a weakened field? Unlikely. But would he have beaten the best? He would know the answer to that, so it matters more when the rebels are there.

None of which changes what we might think of LIV. For my money, it’s a company whose very existence can be summed up as an attempt to clean up the blood of a reputable journalist from Saudi Arabia. A company that took a sport with localized disputes and small grievances and fragmented it beyond recognition.

The precariousness of its existence is currently the subject of almost constant rumors. I’m told Norman has been seriously sidelined, his audience is small, the latest raft of recruits was uninspiring and PGA Tour countermeasures mean Saudi Arabia would have to spend crazy (nine figures) plus crazy money to get someone else. . of the top 20.

More is the point, if they don’t fix their political problems and secure world ranking points, their visibility in these big leagues will dwindle every year, and how long until the Saudis wield the sword?

The LIV tour needs momentum and speed, and nothing would do that like a win at Augusta. Without something big and soon, your lack of mobility will become increasingly apparent.

People will be waving traffic cones in no time, so they need their time alongside those who dropped out to stay relevant. The double-edged saw is that the jilted will benefit almost as much from his presence.

Jester Bach will never listen

Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, says it is “deplorable” that Britain and other nations want to maintain a ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes.

Others might say it’s deplorable that he hosted Vladimir Putin at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, three weeks before he unleashed hell on Ukraine. They could say it, as they did then, but the jester would not listen.

Tottenham lost both their manager and their most important football executive in the space of a week. Even in the context of Spurs, it’s a pretty spectacular collapse.