Lynch: Bless his heart! Greg Norman demands thanks for $5 billion bonfire of his vanity

A man with a messiah complex will always hoist himself upon the cross when faced with abject failure, so there are no surprises in published excerpts of Greg Norman’s non mea culpa interview with Australian Golf Digest, which showcased his familiar brand of self-serving drivel that could have been scripted in advance by any toddler with ChatGPT access.

“It was hard. It was very draining on me. I was working 100-hour weeks,” he moaned about his tenure as CEO of LIV Golf, just in case anyone assumed torching billions of dollars is a part-time job.

The interview shows Norman warming to his favorite topic – himself, and wrongs perpetrated against him: “What hurt me the most was the lack of understanding of why people would judge me and give the abuse they did. That was the thing that bothered me the most, because I’m the type of guy who will happily sit down and talk about things. And if I’m wrong, I’ll admit I’m wrong. But don’t judge me. Don’t judge what LIV was truly all about.”

Leaving aside the moral burlesque of an apparatchik for the Saudi Arabian government complaining about abuse (social media doesn’t cut quite like a bone saw), for many of its critics LIV was and is about sportswashing the record of its financier. For others though, it has only ever been a dispute about money, principally who was getting it versus who should have been. That’s the only lens a moral cipher like Norman is capable of applying, which is why he views the warped landscape LIV begat as something he ought to be congratulated for.

“Once the Strategic Sports Group came in [to partner with the PGA Tour], and once the other private equity money started rolling in, that was the catalyst for everybody to calm down a little bit, in my opinion,” he said. “They started to see that what LIV did – bring private equity into the game of golf for the first time in 53 years – was a positive.”

Norman’s presumption – that private equity’s entry into golf is indisputably a force for good – is based on his having only one metric that matters: how much he and other male professionals are compensated. The long-term impact of outside investors on the PGA Tour product and on governing bodies that have obligations beyond prize purses is decidedly murkier. Only one vehicle in the sport has been wholly reliant on private investment dollars, the one piloted by Norman, and it’s a complete wreck.

LIV’s financials have again been laid bare in a report that detailed filings by the U.K.-based LIV Golf, Ltd, which runs the league’s activities outside the U.S. In 2024, it lost $590 million, bringing total losses for the entity to $1.4 billion in three years. That figure does not include losses incurred by LIV’s operations in the U.S. – home to half of its events and most of its high-cost hangers-on – or money set alight in 2025. Conservative estimates suggest the league has burned through well over $5 billion since 2022, and still shows no meaningful revenue or audience traction.

“Mission accomplished,” Norman declared to his interviewer.

It’s like watching the embers of the Hindenburg tumble to earth while its designer loudly demands praise for having gotten it airborne and striking a match.

With a fourth, fruitless season behind it, LIV Golf is doing what it does this time every year: figuring out what players can be signed from the ranks of little-known rookies or the chronically injured; foraging for stops on its ’26 schedule, which often means poaching venues from the DP World Tour in an effort to bully that circuit into a partnership; fanning rumors about imminent announcements that either never materialize or don’t have any positive impact on its business; and negotiating with soon-to-expire talent it needs to keep on board to maintain the illusion of doubling down when it is merely buying time. All against a backdrop of staggering losses that are only accelerating.

The sole face-saving hope that exists for LIV is a deal with the PGA Tour, which appears unlikely, or flipping the European circuit out of its strategic alliance with Ponte Vedra. The pressure must be mounting on LIV’s only benefactor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan. Even he must answer for expenditures that increasingly appear like lunacy. But in the fevered world of (past and present) LIV executives and their sycophantic scroungers, believing is seeing. Reality is what one wishes it to be.

That’s why Norman took a moment in his interview to note how some (but not all) players “came up to me and just thanked me for what I did for them, for being the tip of the spear, for taking it all on.”

“So that to me was part of the job – I had to do it, right?” he preened like a prizefighter. “And if you’re going to make meaningful change, running through a brick wall without getting bloody, that’s not going to happen.”

Bless his heart. He’s actually convinced himself that he ran through a brick wall, rather than just into one.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lynch: Greg Norman demands thanks for $5 billion bonfire of his vanity