Cameron Smith needs to say ‘no’ to LIV Golf

If newly crowned Open champion Cameron Smith takes Greg Norman’s offer and runs to the LIV Tour, he will be making the mistake of his young career.

It’s no surprise that Norman would pursue fellow Australian Smith hard, and the case Norman can offer can be very tempting.

As the bright new star in the game’s firmament, Smith would be a powerful addition to the LIV lineup, lending credibility to Norman’s contention that he is building a legitimate Tour and not merely a pastime for has-beens and never-will-bes. Which, for the record, it largely is.

Given both Cameron Smith’s nationality and new reputation, it would be almost criminally negligent of Norman not to wave a bunch of cash under Smith’s nose. The Open champion is widely reported to be at least listening with interest.

The problem, for Smith, is the damage accepting Norman’s offer would do both to his growing reputation and more importantly to his standing within the game going forward.

That standing is right now both at its highest potential and most fragile state.

Cameron Smith must consider OWGR ramifications.

The biggest concern, both for Cameron Smith and also for any player who fancies himself at or near the apex of his talent, is his standing in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR).

That goes not only for Smith, but for stars such as Dustin Johnson, Talor Gooch, and Bryson DeChambeau, who are plainly in the middle of their careers.

Put bluntly, there is no reason to believe that the OWGR will sanction LIV Tour events any time soon. And without OWGR recognition, those players’ standing in the ranking will begin to dissipate within just a few months and will disappear entirely within two years.

That’s the established statute of limitations for the OWGR, which bases its rankings on a  two-year rolling performance rubric.

That’s important because OWGR standing is the gold standard metric for entry into all of the game’s Major championships. Indeed, it was one of three entry points qualifying Smith himself for the competition.

The other two were his standing on the final 2021 FedEx Cup points list and his victory at the 2021 Players Championship.

Of course, Cameron Smith’s defection to LIV would undermine his opportunity to compete for FedEx Cup placement going forward, and would also shut down his eligibility to qualify for future Players’ events.

As a former Open champion, Smith would – at least under the existing formula – qualify for entry into future British Opens.

He would also, at least for a time, qualify for future Majors…but the clock would run out on those avenues as well within a couple of years.

If Cameron Smith vamooses to the LIV Tour, his gamble will be that Norman can make good either on his promise to leverage the OWGR into awarding points to LIV Tour events or – alternatively – to win an injunction in some court forcing such an action.

It is of course a fool’s errand to outguess what a court somewhere might rule. But as to winning a decision from OWGR, forget it.

That organization’s established rules require any Tour applying for standing within its point system to do several things the LIV Tour simply does not do. Those include:

• Being in existence for a minimum of two years.
• Running regular events.
• Involving a minimum of 72 players in those events.
• Cutting its field after 36 holes of 72-hole competitions.
• Conducting individual, as opposed to team, competitions.

Norman’s Tour meets none of those established standards, and any promise that it will meet those standards in the future needs to be taken with a wait-and-see attitude.

Indeed, the LIV Tour’s forsaking of the concept of regular events is one of the strongest drawing points cited by PGA Tour defectors such as Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed, who have said they were attracted to LIV by its reduced schedule.

The other attraction of LIV is its compensation model, which is market-based rather than performance-based.

It’s the same compensation model used by most every professional sport aside from golf: negotiate a pay-for-service contract ahead of time and then play the games rather than linking compensation directly to performance.

Cameron Smith, then, has a huge amount on the line.

For a young player such as Smith, the real danger is that his decision will be influenced by his team of ‘advisors,’ who look less at the long-term damage to his standing within the game and more to the potential short-term monetary gain, which can be substantial both for him and also for those who advise him.

That danger is obviously multiplied when the influence of a fellow Australian such as Norman is factored in.

It’s always hard for a successful young player to prioritize the long term. But if Smith wants to be known as an established star rather than a historical footnote in golf, he needs soon to display the maturity to recognize that he is already in a commanding position within the golf world, a position that aligning himself with a rebel tour – even a very well-funded one – would only jeopardize.

That means saying ‘no-thanks’ to LIV.