I am sick of the whining. I turn on the television, I open the papers, and all I hear is another contractor crying about how they didn’t get paid. This week, it’s a Canadian tech company called Mobii Systems Group Ltd., and they are dragging LIV Golf to court because they allegedly haven't seen a dime of the $1 million they are owed for building the circuit’s "Any Shot, Any Time" broadcast feature.
To which I say: good. It is about time somebody in this league office stood up and demanded a little accountability from the people holding the cameras.
You read that right. I am taking the side of the $925 billion sovereign wealth fund over the mid-sized Canadian broadcast vendor. And if you had any respect for the intangibles of this sport, you would too.
We have bred a generation of soft, entitled technology providers who think that just because they signed a legally binding service agreement, delivered a flawless product, and maintained a pristine global broadcast infrastructure for an entire season, they are somehow entitled to a direct deposit. It is a loser's mentality. It is the exact kind of participation-trophy mindset that is ruining the competitive spirit of professional golf.
Let us look at the product in question. Mobii Systems built a feature called "Any Shot, Any Time." The premise is that a fan sitting at home can pull up an app and watch any golfer take any shot on any hole. On paper, to a nerd in a cubicle, that sounds like innovation. But to anyone who actually understands the rhythm of Sunday afternoon golf, it is an abomination.
I remember covering the Masters in 1986. Jack Nicklaus was making his charge. Did we have "Any Shot, Any Time"? No. We had a guy named Sully with a pair of binoculars and a heavy drinking problem screaming into a landline. We had a blimp that occasionally drifted into the airspace of a nearby military base. We had suspense. If a player hit a ball into the azaleas, you didn't get a high-definition 4K zoom of the impact. You had to wait until a marshal walked out of the woods and gave a thumbs up or a thumbs down like a Roman emperor.
That was sports. That was drama. What Mobii Systems has done is strip the romance out of the game, replacing the poetry of the unknown with the cold, sterile reality of data. They want you to see everything. They want you to know the exact apex of every drive and the spin rate of every chip. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of why we watch. We do not watch to be informed. We watch to be entertained. And there is nothing less entertaining than a flawlessly executed digital infrastructure. They fail the eye test.
I was having a cocktail with a senior LIV executive at Mayakoba a few months back. I won't name him, but he understands how to build a roster. He wears a lot of quarter-zips, he controls a budget larger than the GDP of a mid-sized European nation, and he doesn't take guff from anyone who asks for a purchase order. We were talking about the vendor situation, watching the sun set over the Caribbean, and he looked me dead in the eye and said something I will never forget.
"You don't pay a guy just because he caught the ball," he told me, swirling a twenty-year-old scotch. "You pay him when he proves he doesn't need the money."
That is the kind of leadership this sport has been missing. Mobii Systems caught the ball. They did the job. But did they bleed for the franchise? Did they show up early to the broadcast truck and leave late? Or did they just set up their high-definition fiber-optic relays, ensure a 99.9 percent uptime for the global streaming audience, and then have the audacity to email an invoice on the first of the month?
We provided the entire digital infrastructure for their season, fulfilled every single technical requirement in our contract, and now they are simply ignoring our emails.
Listen to that quote. Really listen to it. "We fulfilled every technical requirement." That is the rallying cry of a team playing not to lose. There is no fire in that statement. There is no passion. It is the bureaucratic whining of a company that fundamentally misunderstands what LIV Golf is trying to build.
When you are dealing with a $925 billion sovereign wealth fund, you have to understand that an invoice is not a demand. It is a suggestion. It is a conversation starter. You send the invoice, and the sovereign wealth fund ignores it. That is their way of testing your resolve. That is their way of asking, "How bad do you want to be part of this family?"
Instead of taking the hint and proving their loyalty by offering to do the second season for free, Mobii Systems ran to the courts. They filed a lawsuit. They threw a tantrum because their net-thirty terms weren't respected by an entity that literally buys and sells entire municipal governments for sport.
Let us talk about cap space. The critics will say that LIV Golf has endless money, that the Saudi Public Investment Fund could pay this $1 million bill with the interest it earns in the time it takes to blink. That is mathematically true, but it shows a total ignorance of roster management.
You cannot just hand out a million dollars to every vendor who successfully completes a job. If you pay the broadcast tech guys, suddenly the caterers expect to be paid. Then the guys who set up the hospitality tents want their checks. Before you know it, you have blown your entire operational budget on honoring your contractual obligations, and you don't have enough liquid capital left to offer a 48-year-old Ryder Cup washout a $45 million signing bonus to play exhibition golf in a pair of shorts. It is a slippery slope.
We view an unpaid invoice as a motivational tool, a way to ensure our partners are driven by a love of the game rather than a shallow desire to make payroll.
Exactly. Reardon gets it. He understands that adversity breeds greatness. If Mobii Systems really wanted to be the premier provider of "Any Shot, Any Time" technology, they would look at this missing million dollars not as a theft, but as a challenge.
But they are Canadians. They sit up there in Toronto, drinking their maple syrups, expecting the world to abide by the polite rules of corporate governance. They don't understand the heat of a global breakaway sports league. They think a contract is a shield. Out here in the real world, a contract is just a piece of paper you use to wipe up the spilled champagne after a successful merger.
If I were advising Mobii, I would tell them to drop the lawsuit immediately. I would tell them to issue a public apology to Greg Norman, the Saudi royal family, and the game of golf itself. I would tell them to get back in their broadcast trucks, turn on the monitors, and start working on next year's app for free.
Because if you have to sue to get your million dollars, you never really earned it in the first place. You might have provided the service, but you lost the locker room. And in this business, that is the only metric that matters.