Legendary coach Butch Harmon has criticized the perceived arrogance of the PGA Tour in its handling of LIV Golf’s emergence.
Harmon gave his opinions on the long-standing fractures at the top of the men’s professional game to Matt Adams on the Golf Channel, where he was asked about the current state of affairs following almost three years of division since the PGA Tour’s big-money rival came on the scene.
He began by saying that, in terms of new talent emerging, the game has never been in a better place, explaining: “We have maybe the best crop of young players we’ve had, maybe ever, and there’s a lot of them, a tremendous amount of them.”
However, according to Harmon, that brings its own issue – a disconnect between TV-watching fans and the frequent success of relatively unestablished players. He added: “The downside to that is when you turn on a TV on Saturday and Sunday and you look at the leaderboard and the novice golf sees these 10 names, he has no idea who any of them are, because it’s not any of the superstars and I think that’s why golf ratings are down.”
Butch Harmon with @MattAdamsFoL this morning on @GolfChannel on the State of Golf right now...."the business side of golf is at the worst it's ever been""the arrogance of the pga tour thinking they were the best game in town""has to change" pic.twitter.com/zXNCV8dBUNJanuary 14, 2025
Harmon then turned his attention to the ongoing fractures at the top of the game, laying the blame at the door of PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan after his failure to negotiate with Saudi Public Investment Fund governor Yasir Al-Yumayyan before the launch of the circuit it finances.
“I think the business side of golf is the worst it’s ever been,” he explained. “All I know is that if, from what I understand, if the commissioner had taken Yasir’s phone call four years ago we wouldn’t be in this place, but I think the arrogance of the PGA Tour, thinking they were the best game in town and the only game in town and nobody was going to come in and do anything about that - well, we’ve seen what happened.”
Harmon, whose son Claude has coached LIV Golf’s Brooks Koepka, also insisted fans just want to see the best players in the world regularly compete against each other.
He said: “All you and I want and all golf fans want is when we turn on the TV on a Sunday we want to see the best players in the world playing against each other. That’s all we want, and we only get that four times a year now at the Majors and for me that has to change."
Previously, it has been reported that the issue over how to reintegrate LIV golfers onto the PGA Tour, given the huge sums of money they took to join it, is a sticking point in current negotiations. Harmon also sees that as a problem. He said: “If they’d have listened four years ago, we might not even be going through this.
“Now there’s a difficulty. How do we bring these guys back? They all took a lot of money. We didn’t take the money. Do we get reimbursed for that? I can’t imagine anybody giving their money back, but there has to be a way to bring everybody together and for God’s sake, let’s hope they figure it out.”
