It is back to business for DP World Tour, formerly the European PGA Tour, as they embark on a run of four tournaments in the Middle East. This, of course, is the circuit’s second start after the opening trio of 72-hole events in South Africa ahead of the new calendar year was reduced to a lone 36-hole affair. All because of COVID-19.
If everything goes to plan this time around, Tyrrell Hatton, the defending champion, will tee off in the company of such as Collin Morikawa, Tommy Fleetwood, Shane Lowry, Lee Westwood and Henrik Stenson at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at Yas Links on 20 January. Next up is the Dubai Desert Classic, an event which has been on the go for so long that it is almost part of the region’s history. Indeed, when the first of the Desert Classics was held in 1989, there was little more to be seen at the end of the London to Dubai flight than an airport, a golf course, and a handful of millionaires’ yachts bobbing alongside the dhows on Dubai Creek. Certainly, there were none of the glittering office blocks and seven-star hotels on which today’s players can take aim.
Both of the season’s openers belong in the Rolex Series and, with the strength of their respective fields, will offer plenty in the way of Official World Golf Ranking points.
The Commercial Bank Qatar Masters, another delightfully raw event when it began in 1998, comes fourth in the lineup, while there is an entirely new event – the Ras al Khaimah Championship – tucked in at No. 3. This, alas, is the week when politics kick in.
To borrow from what Gary Player had to say when the Ladies’ European Tour was about to disappear off the face of the earth in 2017, all the tours – men’s and women’s – should be working hand in hand rather than merely looking after themselves.
To explain, the Ras al Khaimah clashes with the Saudi International, an event which had flourished under the wing of the European Tour for three years but switched camps at the turn of the season to become an Asian Tour event. Word has it that the Europeans did not evince much interest in hanging on to it, perhaps because they were busy putting the final touches to their strategic alliance with the Americans.
As it transpired, the Saudi International turned out to be one of 10 events on the Asian Tour when the announcement appeared that the tour was to be funded for the coming decade by Saudi/LIV Golf, or the Saudi royals.
Though the $200 million sum involved was hardly enough in itself to worry the PGA and DP World Tours, this latest development contributed to what the European hierarchy have called a “them-and-us” or “friends-to-rivals” situation.
Plenty of others, meantime, believe that the PGA and DP World Tours should be happy for the Asians who, though their tour is seen to have more potential on the player front than any other, did not have a single tournament on their books in 2021.
To borrow from what Gary Player had to say when the Ladies’ European Tour was about to disappear off the face of the earth in 2017, all the tours – men’s and women’s – should be working hand in hand rather than merely looking after themselves.
The top players, meantime, have mostly been doing a bit of that since they were asked by the PGA Tour and DP World Tour to refrain from asking for releases to play in the Saudi International. The players – Sergio García, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau to name just a few of many – were up in arms and finished on the winning side of that argument.
They may have advanced the usual cliches about wanting to “grow the game” and “play alongside the best in the world,” but to be brutally honest, it was about a king’s ransom of world ranking points and cash. In the case of the latter, the top names had no intention of foregoing a level of appearance money which is every bit as appealing as you would expect from a country whose ruling family see golf and tourism as the way ahead and boast a fortune of $1 trillion. One of the players concerned has let slip that $1 million to $2 million in appearance money per individual is a conservative estimate.
McDowell, who is clearly a little less comfortable than some of the beneficiaries, had this to say in a recent interview with Ireland’s Brian Keogh: “I’m a golfer not a politician. I understand the arguments on both sides. I’m trying to make a living for my family but there’s politics around it. It’s difficult, what’s right and what’s wrong. Where should your morals kick in?”
Rory McIlroy, though he believes that the players, as independent contractors, are entitled to play where they want, will not be chasing the Saudi money.
For some rather more acceptable rivalry than that involving the tours, there is no question that the Middle Eastern countries are all desperate to turn out champions of their own. Their amateurs are nowadays competing in the Asia Pacific Amateur, and moving on from there to play in their own Middle Eastern Mena Professional Tour.
It’s obviously not going to happen all at once, but how long until someone from their part of the world wins a major, no less surely than women are nowadays playing at the most famous of our all-male clubs. “The old order changeth.”