Lincicome: LIV golf is for the greedy, the ungrateful and the inadequate

To the surprise of some, mostly me, the Hybrid Greed Golf Tour, has made it here, reasonably sturdy and irritatingly ominous; that is to say, it has not gone away as I pledged that it would.

There is no penalty for being wrong, but there is some remorse. This ridiculous YouTube carnival is not only fooling reasonable folks - if a golf fan can be identified that way - but gains credence the longer it stays around.

Who is playing, who is winning, who is Talor Gooch? These questions do not burn as much as just smolder like compost, but still here we are.

Before the sparsely curious, upon the cropped meadows of Rich Harvest Farm in Sugar Grove, golfers of mixed repute and minimal celebrity are going about the business of thumbing their noses at former friends who refuse to take the money offered by Saudi Arabia, a cruel and distant place.

Or to paraphrase Sen. Dick Durbin's fine image, "a golf glove trying to cover a bloodstained hand."

Ooooh. Echoes of O.J., or maybe Lady Macbeth - in either case not an endorsement.

Business is often done hereabouts with payoffs and power, so familiarity with the process may seem more tolerable than at other places the LIV tour has heretofore stopped. Still, no reason to cheer on the plucky pioneers collecting so much unwashed cash.

Sure, it would be difficult to turn down $800 million when the only question would be "Is that check or bank transfer?" But easier to do when you already have $800 million as do Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy, guardians of honor, dignity, tradition and the reachable par five.

Together they have come up with some cockamamie idea of tweaking the sacred tour, making it more like LIV, gathering together top players who will stick with them, appearing much like the very thing they are against. That's how nutty this has become, though short pants and shotgun starts do make it nuttier.

Still, anything that does not include Greg Norman should be encouraged.

It is surprising that golf, being the gentlest and most honorable of games, finds itself in the middle of so much rancor, what with lawsuits filed and insults thrown and promises broken.

And all of this being done, not to improve the game either for recreation or for vocation, but to figure out the best way to get someone else's money, whether it be from TV, corporate sponsors or Middle Eastern tyrants.

Jack Nicklaus was asked what he thought of the LIV Tour and his answer was that it was for "guys at the end of their careers (shhh, Phil Mickelson is sleeping) and guys that, you know ..."

Well, we do know. It is for the greedy, the ungrateful and the inadequate. "It's like poker," said Bryson DeChambeau, one of the larger, pun intended, members of LIV. "How long can you keep bluffing?"

Making no sense is all that makes sense, so here is an added bit of DeChambeau gibberish.

Seeing ahead to when this all works out, DeChambeau fantasizes, "It would be fun to have what football is doing, like the AFC and the NFC, and come to the Super Bowl sort of thing."

Golf already has a structure shaped around major tournaments and a playoff ending that it borrowed from NASCAR, with occasional Ryder and Presidents Cups thrown in. LIV players still want to be part of that and rightfully and legally probably should be.

I once worked in a town where the annual tour stop used the Stableford scoring system, the reasoning being it gave the tournament a distinction, apart from other tour events. It made no sense to anybody and much time was used to figure out what all those pluses and minuses meant in real golf.

Not entirely because of the unfamiliar Stableford system, which had a LIV quality about it, but because Tiger Woods refused to play golf at altitude, the tournament died

Same thing will happen here. Some time will be spent trying to figure out what all this means to real golf and then we shall all go back to admitting that the only golf score we really care about is our own

LIV will depart Sunday evening, leaving no traces.