The formation and launch of the LIV Tour and the PGA Tour’s response to it has created enough day-to-day drama to keep a soap opera audience entertained.

But the rolling controversy masks the biggest shifts the professional game has ever seen while simultaneously exposing the inherent difference between how fans see professional golf and how professional golf sees itself.

One issue brought into focus since the PGA Tour announced its new ‘Designated Event’ schedule for 2024 is that the Tour and many of its members believe the ‘product’ they are selling is the players and, in particular, the biggest name players.

But as the backlash against the increased number of big money, no cut events shows, many fans and analysts think they’ve got that wrong.

To many of us, the ‘product’ is actually the game itself. Or perhaps some combination of the game and the stars but the game is certainly hugely important in the equation.

"There is a danger in trying to make golf look like all the other sports because they’re more popular or more marketable." - Rod Morri.

There are players among our number, too, with both Eddie Pepperell and Meg Maclaren penning thoughts on the concept of no cut golf and its impact on the competition.

So who has it right? Often in these situations it is helpful to step back and wonder what the game might look like if we were to ‘start again’.

It’s a case that’s been made often about three of the four majors being US based but equally the notion of a circuit made up of independent contractors would be an unlikely outcome if we had a ‘gimme’.

Paul McGinley summarised professional golf’s biggest problem of recent times in his interview with John Huggan on Episode 74 of The Thing About Golf in September last year (Listen HERE).

As the former Ryder Cup captain pointed out, any sponsor coming to the Tour wanting to spend multiple millions of dollars to stage an event but being told the Tour was unable to guarantee the presence of a drawcard player like Rory McIlroy would be dumbfounded.

And so, with the launch of LIV, golf has morphed into essentially a league sport much more in line with other sports.

What LIV does, and the Designated Events will do, is guarantee the presence of the big name players that sponsors and TV partners want and need to drive interest.

And if you were starting professional golf all over again that is much closer to what you would do than the professional game most of us have known since we started watching.

Does that make it right, though? In some ways yes but in many ways no. There is a danger in trying to make golf look like all the other sports because they’re more popular or more marketable.

"What the PGA Tour and LIV are doing is taking the easy answers but there are no guarantees they will be the right answers in the long run."

Golf’s uniqueness is its greatest asset not only at the recreational level but also at the top level.

What the PGA Tour and LIV are doing is taking the easy answers but there are no guarantees they will be the right answers in the long run.

If, as I have suggested ad nauseum, only golfers watch golf then changing what ‘we’ think is the product so dramatically might backfire spectacularly.

Or it might, as people much smarter than me seem to think, attract a whole new audience of non-golfers who will consume the professional game the way they do other sports.

Infuriatingly, only time will tell but in the meantime at least it won’t be dull.