Editor’s Note: Our Local Knowledge podcast is celebrating Golf Digest’s 75th anniversary through a special three-part series, “Revolutions: A re-examined history of modern golf, Golf Digest, and Tiger Woods.” Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There is a story to be told that the modern history of American professional golf, starting around the 1950 founding of Golf Digest, is a story of how the game evolved economically and racially to not only become a big-money endeavor on its own, but to lay the groundwork for a non-white superstar who could send the game rocketing into the global stratosphere. Tiger Woods, who lived up to and exceeded the hype attending his emergence into the professional game, not only brought with him a boom in every aspect of golf, from PGA Tour annual purses (which grew by hundreds of millions of dollars just in his first decade in the game) to recreational participation to TV contracts but became such a celebrity in his own right—trailing only Oprah Winfrey in Forbes Magazine’s top 100 celebrities of 2005—that he couldn’t help but raise golf’s profile alongside him.

More on Golf Digest’s 75th Anniversary Golf Digest Logo How We Got Here: Progress in this game has taken weird turns, and Golf Digest has covered them all

But when you attract that kind of money and interest in a new, global way, you also become intriguing, and to become intriguing means to invite unpredictability. As professional golf lost its staid, all-white reputation, it laid the groundwork for the drama of the last two decades. In Part 3 of our 75th-anniversary podcast, we look at everything that came after Tiger, while acknowledging that the results of the post-Tiger era are in many accidental ways because of Tiger. Without him, to use one prominent recent example, would the Saudis have been interested in professional golf?

2176954800

Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund interacts with Rory McIlroy at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship 2024 at the Old Course at St Andrews.

Richard Heathcote

The story of the last 20 years of professional golf is the story of growth’s consequences, and is highlighted by the emergence of LIV Golf, the PGA Tour’s new rival. In LIV, backed by the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund, the Tour found a particularly difficult enemy—one with endless funding, and one who wasn’t overly concerned with an immediate return on investment. That meant they could settle in for a long fight, poaching Tour players and forcing Ponte Vedra to respond by pouring out the coffers for their players and turning to private equity for a rescue.

Yet amid all the billions of dollars pouring into the game, the trend within the actual sport was alarming—fans were disengaging, ratings were down, and the schism seemed to rob golf of whatever romance it had remaining. The global, hyper-financed nature of the game seemed to be at odds with how consumers actually wanted to enjoy it, and though an actual merger may be close at hand under the new Trump Administration, even that may not solve the problem of engagement.

In the conclusion to this series, we explore everything in the post-Tiger era that has led to this state of crisis, and ask the tough question of whether it was an inevitable consequence of Tiger’s rise, and the decision at the highest levels to pursue growth at all costs. Listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Revolutions: A re-examined history of golf, Golf Digest, and Tiger Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 1: Arnold Palmer, IMG, and the early disruptors Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 2: The Tiger Slam, aka the best golf ever played Local Knowledge Podcast Revolutions Part 3: Life After Tiger Woods, the Great Schism

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com