Pub test could rule Cameron Smith out of bounds

A golfer walks into a bar … and fails the pub test.

It’s a pity, because a month ago a pub was a place that Cameron Smith could walk into for the rest of his life and never pay for a drink. Now, with unconfirmed but unrefuted reports that he is to join the 54-hole golf league headed by the notorious Sheikh Sharkie, Smith might not even get past the bouncer.

Smith’s denials that he will run away with the circus after the end-of-season PGA tour play-offs are currently failing the pub test. I don’t know when this pub test began to rule Australian affairs, but it has become a tyranny of folk wisdom. Greg Norman’s summation of Saudi atrocities as a case of ‘we all make mistakes’? Failed the pub test. The NRL’s threat to take the grand final to Brisbane? Nice tactic, but fails the same test in the same pub. John Barilaro’s appointment to New York? Might not have been illegal, nor even technically corrupt, but like his ambition to become CEO of the NRL, it didn’t pass muster in a single pub, either urban or regional.

Once something is proclaimed to have failed the pub test, we nod along as sagely as Laura Tingle. The uncomfortable thing about the pub test is that it gets none of the same scrutiny as the issues on which it adjudicates. Which pub is this mythical place anyway, yours or mine? Does everyone in every pub always agree? How often does anything ‘pass the pub test’? Do Australians even go to pubs any more, or should we be calling it the ‘VIP Lounge test’? And if something fails the pub test now, is it still going to fail in a couple of months’ time?

Back to Smith, a national hero whom the pub test has marked down … for now. The pub test, habitually blinded by outrage and moral judgement, has not yet turned its discerning mind to the more important question of where this golf split will most likely end up.

Professional golf as we know it can’t survive a permanent split. While Smith would be the first of the current top 10 to go, it’s simply untrue to say that Sheikh Sharkie’s tour is God’s waiting room for has-beens and never-wases.

The signing of Cameron Smith would add a fresh degree of legitimacy to LIV Golf, but it’s not exactly the veterans’ tour it is often painted as.Credit:Getty

Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and Louis Oosthuizen have won nine majors between them in the past decade or so, are still genuine threats and will probably win more. Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia, Bubba Watson, Charl Schwartzel, Henrik Stenson, Martin Kaymer and Graham McDowell might not add to their combined 14 majors, but they are personalities who have added texture to both the weekly and big events for years. Mickelson won the PGA Championship last year at 50, which redefined what a has-been is. No longer can the Shark tour be derided for its lack of star power.

The absence of those big names has already diluted the PGA Tour. Personally, I can watch Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa and Jordan Spieth until last drinks, but the pub I’m watching them in is boutique. If Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama bites the Saudi lure, he will take with him a third of world golf’s audience. It is only a matter of time before the PGA Tour will have to begin talking compromise.

Not that this portends any kind of ‘victory’, moral or otherwise, for the Shark and his Sheikhs. Their claims of reinvigorating golf with a 54-hole format, shotgun starts and team scoring are fatuous. T

he Studio 54 tour will gradually gain acceptance and attention, as all past professional breakaways have done over time, but none ever gained the legitimacy that professionals crave and this won’t either. It is simply a cash grab by the players, no different from billions of dollars’ worth of deals Australia and other high-minded countries do with the Saudi devil. As Kim Hughes says, and once did, they are merely gig economy workers taking a job.

Credit:Illustration: Simon Letch

The Shark’s claims of doing this to ‘grow golf’ will fail every conceivable pub test, unless the players get together and pool their sign-on fees to grow the game themselves. Or do something really good with their fabulous riches such as funding medical research or ending world hunger. Please don’t any of them build a spaceship; now that they’re zillionaires, they’ve got to be better than Jeff Bezos.

The shallowness of the exercise is underscored by the lack of explanation of the ‘cause’ it is championing. It bears no resemblance to the World Series Cricket or professional tennis breakaways, which were gambits for compensation to justly reflect the income those performers brought to their sports. The golfers mutter darkly about the control the PGA holds over them, its America-first focus, restrictions of trade and the insufficient provision of courtesy cars and off-course snacks, and Norman himself has a historic grudge against the tour.

But then, Norman was once described as a guy who, when he walks into a zoo, will within five minutes be telling them they’re feeding the elephants the wrong kind of peanut. That’s just Norman.

He and his rebels are without a cause that can be easily communicated to anyone outside the private jet they fly around in. Instead of having a real just cause, the jet seems, with people like Reed, Johnson, Koepka, DeChambeau and Garcia aboard, like a flight of the disgruntled, all gathered in one plane to mutter darkly together. Among that bunch, you wouldn’t want to try claiming the window seat with the most legroom.

Smith breaks the mould, and if he joins the breakaway tour it gains not only competitive credibility with the world No.2, aged 28 and still to reach his prime, but also a strong likeability quotient. In the pub, there are increasing murmurs of ‘Well, wouldn’t you take that kind of money? And don’t our cars run on Saudi oil?’

Australian golf spectators, who have been done no great favours by the American PGA tour, would love to see Smith and Sharkie’s crew on our shores. As the outrage wears off, instead of being consigned to the dustbin of history, the rebel players will be essential to a reunified and reformed world tour. The pub may not like it, but history suggests that that is how it will play out.

Whoever wins, there will be one sure loser, and that is the Saudis, fools who were easily parted from their money. They won’t notice the millions they have pissed away, but at some point, even in that solipsistic world that exists in Riyadh and London, someone will realise that they have not ‘sportswashed’ their reputation but only drawn global attention to their crimes and abuses.

Even when the golf breakaway gains enough leverage to win compromises from the PGA, the Saudis themselves gain nothing. That’s the puzzling thing about it all. There are understandable and even defensible motivations for every actor in this drama except for the rich dopes writing the cheques. It is the world’s most futile vanity project. Smith and the rest will eventually be forgiven and pass the pub test again, but their Sheikhs will never be welcome in any pub, anywhere. Shame they don’t drink.

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