PITTSBURGH — At its midpoint, the sporting summer of 2022 hasn't had a lot to recommend in terms of major news, unless you want to take a hard look at golf and college football, which, um, I do not.
Still, it's hard to avoid the caterwauling from the parties that truly care about such things because when a couple of sports that claim to be steeped in tradition suddenly set about cannibalizing themselves for a few dollars more, umbrage shall be taken, outrages unleashed, settlements unsettled and hypocracies hypothesized.
Fortunately, in real terms, it's all fairly hilarious.
If UCLA and USC, two ancient Pacific Coast Conference football powerhouses, suddenly want to play in one of the other mathematically challenged conferences — in this case, the Big Ten — half a continent away, it's mostly of concern only to those who still assign some kind of romantic value to the grand traditions of the college game.
But, as we've known now for some time, nothing defenestrates college football tradition faster than the prospect of x additional millions of dollars, which is the sole and utter impetus for the Trojans and Bruins to head east and join the Buckeyes and Hawkeyes, et al.
If Florida and Florida State could make a few extra million by joining the Mountain West, their swamp-tested traditions and histories would get discarded without compunction, like fluttering fast food wrappings along the highways that climb into Utah.
Basically, college football has long since shown it cares nothing for its own "hallowed" traditions. If college football tradition is so grand and such a bedrock to the core fan experience that Pitt and Penn State can't even be bothered to play either other, why do I care about either of them? Not exactly a spoiler alert: I don't.
If there's a sports entity out there that supposedly takes its traditions more seriously than college football, it is, of course, golf.
This week's tournament, the 150th British Open, was contested at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, Scotland.
I don't have to tell you they're very serious about this. They're royal. They're ancient. They are approximately one unstated implication from the plausible notion St. Andrew himself once got up and down to save par on 17. And, not surprisingly, they don't take kindly to this summer's rupture in the economic politics roiling the game's future.
After first disinviting the legendary Greg Norman from attending the week's events because of his leadership role in the upstart LIV Golf series, the brainstorm of the people charged with solving the problem that Saudi Arabia has more money than it knows what to do with, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club went on to explain itself via chief executive Martin Slumbers.
"I believe the (LIV Golf) model we've seen at Centurion and Pumpkin Ridge is not in the best long-term interests of the sport as a whole and is entirely driven by money," Slumbers said as the tournament was about to begin. "We believe it undermines the merit-based culture and the spirit of open competition that makes golf so special. I would also say that, in my opinion, the continued commentary that this about growing the game is just not credible and, if anything, is harming the perception of our sport, which we are working so hard to improve."
Mr. Slumbers might be 100% correct on all of that, but not even the CEO of one of golf's four grand slam events or the PGA itself can stand in the way of players who want to sign $100 million bonuses to play LIV Golf events that promise a $25 million top prize. (The British Open's is $14 million.) That LIV events are 54-hole affairs that feature, among other assaults on the game's traditions, blaring music from Katy Perry.
You heard me.
Some of the game's biggest names have embraced the LIV events for the money, others because they might feel like they can no longer compete, for reasons related to age or injury, with the young stars on the PGA Tour. But 24 of them played in the Open, and they let most of the criticism wash off them in the manner of Phil Mickelson.
"I couldn't be happier," Mickelson had said without a hint of irony on the topic. "I think (the LIV events) have been really good. The experience of those events from a player standpoint is a 10. You can't get it any better. Look, it's not my job to explain or help you understand. It's just, I couldn't be happier."
It's not my job to explain to Phil this whole thing happened pretty much because — even though he was making a bajillion dollars knocking around within golf's traditional structures — he was suddenly happier at the prospect of a bajillion plus. If there were an entity out there with more money to waste than the Saudi royal family and that entity came calling on Phil Mickelson with an offer of a bajillion plus plus, I think he'll find that, in fact, he could be happier after all.
That's the nature of money (or is it of people?), or so it would appear. If one thing is certain this summer, it's that when money meets tradition, money wins every time.
For proof, see Acrisure Stadium.
