Norman says it with fun and acknowledges that Faldo was removed from the one one who despatched pelters in his route when he was the chief govt tasked with launching the Saudi-funded breakaway league. Now a lot has modified, he says. Not least due to LIV having world rating factors and his successor, Scott O’Neil, having a berth on the highest desk.
“Roll the clock back 4½ years ago, about all the anti-Saudi sentiment, and then you roll the clock to where we are today, where now the Americans and the Saudis are tight with what’s going on in the Middle East,” he says.
“There’s nothing, no negativity. To be involved with it then, and to see where it is today, and the same people then are 180 degrees different today. So you think, OK, what was it all really meant to be? All this hostility towards us. I’m smart enough to know to sit back, see that I was in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, to be able to grow the game of golf. I’m not allowed to tell you everything that happened and what was against us. But one day, when I’m near the end, I might. It will be like the Watergate of golf.”
‘LIV did affect my business’
Norman insists he’s delighted with the way it has labored out since he left the position almost 18 months in the past. “It’s all I wanted, free agency and the players to be treated better,” he says. “Look at the money in the PGA Tour, the private equity and everything and how big the prize funds are. That is down to LIV and nobody can deny it.”
But it did come at a price to Norman and his golf-course design enterprise. Sometimes it’s forgotten that Norman had constructed a multimillion-dollar enterprise and was not precisely begging for a brand new position, by no means thoughts how large the Saudi wage was. “Those early years with LIV did affect my business, especially here in the United States. There was definitely a huge stain put on top of me because of all that propaganda and that hatred and all that stuff that came with it.
“But, conversely, when I went overseas, in Asia and Australia and all those places, I was a hero. I go into places like Japan and Vietnam and I feel like I’m more popular and recognisable today than what I was back in my day of playing.
“As crazy as that sounds, it’s the validation of what the platform we took to the world, which was LIV. We were the ones who created that foundation, that bedrock of stability on a global footprint that allowed the rest of the world outside of America to see exactly the true value of golf, of team golf, of team sport.”
