Bruce Dowbiggin
Golf Goes Nuclear: LIV Free Or Die Trying
After two years of government-enforced shutdowns the Canadian Open golf championship still couldn’t buy a break. Despite having five of the Top 10 men’s players in the world in the field this past weekend at St. George’s G & CC—and a rip-snorting finish from Rory McIlroy— the Open was overshadowed by a week of turbulent news from the upstart LIV league.
Even McIlroy couldn’t avoid taking a shot at the upstarts, putting in a dig at passing a certain player with his 21st career win on Sunday. That player being Greg Norman, the Snidely Whiplash of golf.
While organizers and host broadcaster CBS struggled to keep the focus on the event in Toronto (take a drink every time they show the CN Tower) the PGA Tour stole the spotlight, levelling the death penalty against the 18 Tour players who chose to play in London for the Saudi-backed startup. They are banned from playing in Tour events till such time as they repent and return to the organization run by the Tour players themselves. Their Ryder Cup points are cancelled, and they are ineligible for the season-ending event.
There were high-profile names featured in the heretics list, many lured by upfront money and the staggering purses put up by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Dustin Johnson reportedly received $125 M. to make the leap, while Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Charl Schwartzel, Louis Oosthuizen, Brendan Grace, Sergio Garcia, Kevin Na, Talor Gooch, Ian Poulter and Graham McDowell were induced to get in on the payouts. (It’s rumoured Rickie Fowler and Patrick Reed will join them.)
Schwartzel earned $4 million for the three-round, 54-hole event. Schwartzel’s four-man team, Stinger GC, also won the team competition by 14 shots over Crushers GC and will split the $3 million prize. Those are numbers that have to catch the attention of all but the top layer of the Tour.
Still, it was hard to fight the perception of a geezer Tour populated by veteran Tour players and Euro “who’s that?” players like Richard Bland.
The reason the initial numbers were small is likely due to the idiotic comments made by Mickelson as the financially troubled star tried to recruit others to the LIV. As we noted in February: “Mickelson waded into the politics of partnering with the Saudis in an interview with author Alan Shipnuck. Admitting his potential partners are “bad motherfuckers” who murdered Adnan Khashoggi, behead gays and have a terrible human rights record, Mickelson then added, “Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
Bad idea, Phil. (He tried to claim he was misquoted, but that flopped.) Within hours, the entire golf establishment was condemning one of their meal tickets… The Saudis flipped, and Mickelson’s corporate sponsors dropped him like a busted four-iron. His legacy took a one-way trip to a dumpster fire.
Mickelson’s only defender was, predictably, Greg Norman, the former golf legend who has been an organizer of the LIV super league. Never known for his tact or timing, the Shark brazened out his longtime feud with the Tour. When PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan announced that anyone who went to the new circuit was banned from PGA Tour events, Norman was defiant. “Surely you jest,” Norman wrote to Monahan. “And surely, your lawyers at the PGA Tour must be holding their breath.
“Simply put, you can’t ban players from playing golf. Players have the right and the freedom to play where we like. I know for a fact that many PGA players were and still are interested in playing for a new league.”
Well, Norman got that right. Should LIV prove viable there will be competition for the 48 spots in the eight events they have planned. The next move in this chess game will be the inevitable lawsuits to determine just how binding the PGA Tour contracts are and how many of the USGA (which is staging this week’s U.S. Open), the R & A (which stages the Open Championship at St. Andrew’s next month) and the PGA (who staged last month’s PGA Championship) will follow the PGA Tour bans.
And what happens to the Ryder Cup and President’s Cup participation of players on the LIV Tour? Will they be excluded? Almost all the PGA Tour defectors quit the organization before the punishments were levelled— hoping that the Majors can’t use sanctions against non-members to prevent them playing in those prestige events.
As for the Canadian Open, what was supposed to showcase RBC’s brand ambassadors like Johnson and McDowell was tainted by the bad blood created by Norman, Mickelson and LIV. Johnson and McDowell were punted by RBC, and the debate has split the Tour players who remain. Elite players such as Rory McElroy, Jon Rahm, Scotty Scheffler, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Colin Morikawa and Cameron Smith— still in the heart of their careers— are holding firm. But others just beneath them have to be wavering in the face of generational wealth in a shorter schedule.
The key question is how much top-end golf does the market need or want? The LIV has no live broadcast partner as yet (the London event was shown online), and all the major U.S. networks save FOX have a piece of the PGA Tour contract. Even with the bottomless wealth of the Saudis there must come a time when their LIV investment should be leveraged.
The only prediction that can safely be made is that this will get uglier, much uglier, before it resolves itself.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
The Trump Storm: Canada’s Elites Are Unprepared For What Comes Next
“I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.” Katherine Maher (NPR CEO)
If Ms. Maher finds the new Donald Trump autocracy uncomfortable, fact-wise, she should apply to replace magenta-haired Catherine Tait as CEO and president of CBC. Ratings? Deficits? A pish-posh distraction. She’d fit right in.
In the wake of the Nov. 5 election, Justin Trudeau’s diehards draw strength from a leader who also eschews reality. He rejects financial accounts in favour of an accounting of the heart. In his attempt at “finding consensus and getting important things done” Canada’s 23rd PM continues to assure Canadians that he will resist the dread Trump agenda by employing not policy but his tantric approach to governance. One where he is the yogi and Canada is the one getting penetrated.
With an unassailable mandate for at least two years Trump has momentum. As seen by the dramatic Trump cabinet appointees, this divine mission will be sorely tested as The Donald loads up his tariff wagon and demands that the freeloader on America’s back pay its share to NATO. And prepare to accept a northward flood of undesirable immigrants.
Trump’s new border czar Thomas Homan has clearly identified Canada’s border weakness. Fear not, says Mr. minus-38 percent approval in polling. Our hearts are pure and our motives unquestioned. Sure. You go with that. (Ontario premier Doug Ford isn’t waiting for Trudeau to smell the Trumpian coffee. He’s warning Mexico about its trade deficiencies, threatening to kick them out of the free trade deal.)
Like America’s ruling class before the 2024 election, Canada’s brahmins are blithely unaware they are being fitted for a rope in 2025. Confident they know best, they issue columns that declare that the public sometimes gets it wrong in elections (ignoring the culpability for Joe Biden). They faint in the face of Elon Musk making X into a dominant political force. They assume the public is still listening.
The result down south couldn’t possibly be replicated here, because Canada has a ruling class of the first order. And a media paid to repeat that claim. That’s what Americans thought, says Mark Steyn. “The first problem with America’s ruling class: they don’t live where you live; they don’t even want to visit where you live; they have no desire to set foot where you live. And, in consequence, they know nothing.”
The same can be said for Canada’s know-it-alls. They don’t live where you live. They don’t want to live in Brandon or Cornerbrook. They have no desire to set foot in Sturgeon Falls or Fort St. John. The only real places they see are out the car window as they speed away to their cottage in the Laurentians or Muskoka. Ergo, they know nothing worth knowing.
But they know who you are. They clean your homes. They serve you in restaurants. They drive your Ubers. They laugh at your vanities. But the Laurentian elites remain unaware. As a consequence they can say, like Space Cadet No. 1 Melanie Joly, “our border is extremely effective and extremely well guarded” when the U.S. ambassador to Canada warns that the millions of anticipated deportees need to get out of America. Has Joly seen the Portal crossing into Saskatchewan? The St. Stephen-Calais crossing in NB? Fortress Canada couldn’t repel a determined surge of 50 illegals, let alone 500 or 5000, fleeing deportation in the U.S.
And still the balm of Liberal confidence buoys Canada’s upper middle class. They happily ingest the most ludicrous unctions from their government about Trump. Even as their CNN and MSNBC voices are discredited they believe. As we wrote recently, over 50 percent of Americans saw through Kamala Harris and the DEMs coup narratives as complete bushwah. Probably 90 percent of Canadians, however, still lap up these narratives of competent governance.
Their biggest fear remains that the populist revolt against authority in the U.S. might threaten Canada’s faculty lounge cabinet. As we wrote the Chinese spying allegations are typical of the decaying media’s water carrying for the elites. “No one drawing a Liberal support cheque worries aloud that Trudeau knows the truth contained in this files, that it’s injurious to him and the NDP, that Canadians need to know the names of MPs and senators taking bribes, why a police request sat on a minister’s desk for 54 days unopened.
It’s Poilievre/ Trump who’s untrustworthy. It’s a strategy that the Libs and NDP pray Poilievre will fall for. Pierre’s sin is he doesn’t believe the public should depend on government for everything. That’s heresy in Canada’s Family Compact, and so the Trump comparisons”.
This was how the U.S. Left acted till Nov. 5. Now, the pendulum there is swinging against the administrative state apologists in the U.S. Earlier this month, Boeing’s newly installed CEO, Kelly Ortberg, quietly dismantled the DEI department and accepted the resignation of the office’s vice president. Canada thinks it can still resist this correction with kind hearts and coronets.
A typical example of denial was on Toronto radio this week on which a food shelter advocate and the host discussed the sky-rocketing demand for food hampers in the GTA. They postulated various ideas why this is so. No doubts they were sincere. But in the entire seven-minute segment no one suggested that the Liberals’ mass importation of millions into the city the past five years might have had some impact on these services.
You get the government you deserve. And, as a consequence, you get media you deserve. People like Maher who echo Trudeau’s reverence for China’s ability to get things done outside the democratic sphere. And climate loons who excuse China’s unregulated belching stacks as being under control due to Western examples of carbon pricing and higher taxes.
Perhaps when Trudeau is finally pensioned off by Poilievre we will see some of his still-in-denial women folks, enraged by Little Trump’s victory, adopt the protest tactics of 4B, a South Korean feminist movement in which women swear off dating, mating with, and marrying men. Then we will see if anyone notices that they’ve left the grid. Here’s betting we don’t.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Trump Effect: No One Gretz Off Easy Backing The Donald
It hasn’t been the greatest month for Wayne Gretzky. One one hand he has a Putin pal, Alex Ovechkin, systematically stalking his record for the most regular-season goals in an NHL career. After a slow start The Great Eight is now tracking Wayne like Carey Price tracking a mule deer (more on that later). When this is over he could have only 60 NHL records left!
On the other hand, his secret about supporting Donald Trump got out in the wake of Orange Man Bad re-possessing the White House. Yes, Gretz is a MAGA man, right down to the hat. While his son-in-law, LIV golfer Dustin Johnson, tees it up regularly with The Donald (they’re neighbours in the Palm Beaches) most of the hockey sweats were unaware that No. 99 votes for Trump. (In Wayne’s defence he votes GOP in the Hollywood congressional district which is like using a hair blower to melt the Columba Ice Field.)
Then, after Trump’s stunning (to some) win on Tuesday, pictures emerged on the Great One with his family at Mar A Lago celebrating the win. Janet Gretzky cooed, “Congratulations Mr. President Donald J Trump ♥️🤍💙🇺🇸 You did it, You deserved it, you earned every bit of it. The world is a better place to have you as our Leader. Proud to be an American. Thank you for being such a great friend . May God keep watching over you ♥️🙏🏻♥️ Love our family to yours !”
The secret (to some) was out. Then hero of the Great White North, which has elected Justin Trudeau three times, melted down. Like this. “People should burn all their old hockey jersey and cards of this guy. A shame”. And those were the nice ones.
University of Alberta professor Robert Summers @RJSCity: “He’s been a pretty unlikable guy for a long time, this just further solidifies it. He was an amazing hockey player.” @ktownkeith: “Gretzky is disgusting and pathetic. I will celebrate when Ovechkin breaks his record. Also FYI, Mario was the best hockey player ever, not Whine Gretzky.”
Dave MacIntyre @dave_macattack: “Wayne Gretzky being at Cheeto’s inauguration party is disappointing in ways I can’t properly express in a tweet. And no, I don’t care that hockey culture is conservative. Being fiercely opposed to a fascist dictator should be the absolute floor for anyone with a conscience….He ain’t the GOAT for me anymore.”
“Not sure this guy is the Canadian icon and encapsulation of Canadian values that many think he is. The first red flag was his very partisan support for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives starting in the mid-2000s. No thanks, Wayne!”
Globe & Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, who was on an 0-50 heater during the election weighed in. @acoyne: “I have no problem with Gretzky being a conservative. I do have a problem with him hanging with Trump. Who, for starters, is not a conservative.”
There were some who defended him. My pal Ted Bird chirped back. @manofbird: “The pissants complaining about Wayne Gretzky attending Trump’s victory party are the same people who would’ve snitched on their own kids for playing road hockey during COVID.”
But it’s safe to say that as Canada prepares to defenestrate Trudeau in the next federal election, Gretz will not be invited to Rideau Hall for beaver tails with Justin. It’s likely he’ll experience the Bobby Orr blackout, becoming a non-person in Canada for getting too close to Trump.
In Orr’s case it was his published endorsement of Trump’s losing 2020 campaign that led to the shade being drawn over the greatest defenceman (IMO player) ever. “He’s the kind of teammate I want”.
Much like the Gretzky tsunami of condemnation, Orr took it in the cup, especially in liberal New England where he made his bones. “Not that Bobby Orr will care, but his endorsement of Donald Trump is one of the most disappointing things I’ve ever read in my life. I guess all I can say is that he seems to have a weak spot for conmen/future convicted criminals.”
In Canada it was no better for Orr. Here was Vancouver columnist Daniel Wagner: “In other words, Orr faces no harm from a Trump administration and is likely insulated from the harm that others have experienced. That doesn’t excuse his endorsement, but goes a long way towards explaining it.” In the Hockey News Ken Campbell tied Orr to the Jan. 6 riots. “Bobby Orr Was Part of the Problem. Now He Can Be Part of the Solution”.
In our column of Nov. 8, 2020, we pointed the wee hypocrisy of the liberal-left press box. “Just weeks after giving LeBron James’ political activism a tongue bath, the Globe & Mail sent in the goons for Orr. “Neither Bobby Orr nor any other athletes should be leading the political conversation” thundered Cathal Kelly.
Sure. Leave it to us. Other Canadian sports media called Trump a “monster”, a “racist” and “a totalitarian”. You could heat most of the GTA with the steam emitted by their indignation at Orr having the temerity to speak out. Others swore to sell off their precious Orr memorabilia as if Orr had been accused of throwing a Stanley Cup Final.”
A bitter Orr has taken a low profile since as even some in his hometown of Parry Sound wants nothing to do with him. “Poor Parry Sound,” tweeted Mary Lou George on Oct. 31, 2020. “What a disgrace #BobbyOrr has turned out to be. Guess he believes bragging about assaulting women really is just locker room talk since he wants Trump on his team. Sad.”
Longtime fans in Parry Sound dumped on him. “I just assumed that he was a good guy. Honestly it was heartbreaking for me to learn this about him. It just shattered my impression – I guess it was an illusion – it just shattered it… It kind of now, makes me rethink a lot of my hockey heroes … it’s just disappointing.”
The message is that in progressive Canada it doesn’t pay for even the greatest hockey heroes to diverge from their Trudeaupian orthodoxy. As Canadiens star goalie Carey Price learned when he dared to disagree with Trudeau’s plans to seize guns.
“I love my family, I love my country, and I care for my neighbour,” Price wrote in a published post. “I am not a criminal or a threat to society. What @justinpjtrudeau is trying to do is unjust… Thank you for listening to my opinion.”
We commiserated with him in our column at the time. “Good luck with that, Carey. Coming in the week when Quebec commemorates the 2014 École Polytechnique massacre, the political message backfired. Quebec’s media exploded against the man who was so recently their hero. Price tried to clarify his stand.
“My views are my own, and I do believe in them,” he tweeted. “The only reason I bring up this issue is because it is what’s being brought up now and not out of disrespect to anyone.” That brought the Habs belatedly to protect him. “Carey was not aware of the unfortunate timing on his statement. The Montreal Canadiens wish to express their sincere apology to any and all who have been offended or upset by the discourse that has arisen over this matter in recent days.”
But the message is clear. Whether you’re Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr or Carey Price, Canada’s Woke chorus will not abide insubordination to their cause. That includes much of the media. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men , they can’t handle the truth. So shut up and pass the puck.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
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