An outbreak of reason

 The U.S. Open began this morning where Francis Ouimet essentially gave birth to American golf 109 years ago -- The Country Club in Brookline, Mass. -- and that must have been a great relief to a bunch of crabby guys in logo caps and moisture-wicking polo shirts.

Finally, no more questions about the LIV!

Which put the LIV golfers out of sorts earlier this week, because they didn't want to hear questions like, I don't know, why are you taking money from people who bonesaw journalists and slaughter women and children? Especially when the PGA Tour you're supposedly trying to reform by doing so has already made you richer than God?

Gotta say, the LIV guys didn't react well to that. They bitched and moaned about it, mostly, saying the questions should be about the U.S. Open, and how dare you media people detract from the Open by asking us questions for which we have no decent answers?

Of course, they were only be asked those questions because it was the first opportunity most of the media there had had a chance to ask them. Let's face it, the LIV guys have been pretty adept at ducking the bulk of American media. So they really had no one but themselves to blame for all the LIV questions.

However ...

However, there was one golfer who stood out among the whiners. His name was Jon Rahm.

Rahm's one of the non-defectors, and when asked questions about the LIV, what he said was that while he saw the appeal,  he didn't think 54 holes with no cut and a shotgun start was real tournament golf. Although he didn't use the word, the implication was that the LIV was just a series of high-stakes exhibitions in which even the guy who finishes last cashes in big.

Which is what it is, basically.

Oh, yeah. And about that cashing in big part?

"Would our lifestyle change if I got $400 million?" Rahm asked rhetorically. "No. It would not change one bit. Truth be told, I could retire right now with what I made (on the PGA Tour), and I'd live a very happy life and not play golf again."

Outbreaks of reason like this are rare things, and this one is especially valuable because it gets at the heart of the LIV matter. Which is, how high can you stack the dough before it basically becomes Monopoly money? Isn't there a point where more is just more of the same?

I mean, golfers like Phil Mickelson or Dustin Johnson, they're already set for life. Hell, their kids are set for life. So why take the Saudis' blood money, and all the grief that attends it? 

Yeah, it's an obscene amount of cash, but after awhile it's just pieces of paper with pictures of presidents and the like. Now, maybe, as a friend of mine suggested, it's easy to say you wouldn't take it until it was actually there for the taking. And maybe that's true.

But I'd like to think if I'd already made, say, $200 million on the PGA Tour, I'd say, "Yeah, it's a lot of money. But I've GOT a lot of money. So, nah."

'Course, that's just me. Oh, and Jon Rahm.

Not bad company to keep.