RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Every good story needs a villain, so I welcome LIV golfers to the Masters

There is a video of Brooks Koepka that has been floating around for a week.

He’s a big hockey fan, Koepka, and the Florida Panthers are his team, so he watched their NHL game against the New York Rangers. Here, phone footage picks up one of the greatest golfers of the era as he calls out Aaron Ekblad, a Panthers player, from his hospitality box.

Koepka later confirmed he was “hydrated,” which could explain him shouting at the defender “you friggin’ traffic cone” while waving a real one in his direction.

It was a dig at Ekblad’s apparent lack of mobility, you see, and Koepka was unimpressed, so he held the cone in front of his crotch before further clarifying his feelings: “Ekblad, you suck.”

The video has been viewed more than a million times, meaning it may be Koepka’s most notable impact on public consciousness since he announced last year that he was leaving to become a sissy for the Saudi brand.

Brooks Koepka has been largely invisible for the past year after joining the LIV golf tour

The same goes for some of the sport’s big names, including Cameron Smith (pictured).

A confession at this point: I really like Koepka, who has walked a tough road on both sides of his time as golf’s deadliest big game hunter. In that sweet spot of four big wins in eight starts and before his injuries, he was a colossus.

But even as a big name in his sport, he’s been largely invisible over the past year. Ditto for Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Cameron Smith and all the giants of this LIV group, barring occasions to romanticize a traffic cone or toss a tea to Rory McIlroy.

We hear a lot about them and regularly discuss what they caused and what dirty purposes they and Greg Norman serve for their paymasters. But we don’t see that much. We listen to them, but we don’t look at their chips and putts. We’re intrigued by their context, but how many of us are interested in their sporting content? They’ve made themselves a lot richer and a lot less relevant as athletes.

But next week at the Masters will be very different. Even with so much else happening – the fight between McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Jon Rahm is riveting, as is the return of Tiger Woods – there is an inevitable curiosity about the reintegration of 18 LIV golfers into traditional golf society.

This gathering holds the potential for Augusta’s most unseemly riot since Clayton Baker, a patron, attempted to snag Bunkersand in 2012. He ended up in a prison cell.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this dynamic and the hatred that exists especially between tank commanders and also among some players, notably McIlroy.

Overall, this is among the most toxic series in the history of the sport, and yet I keep digressing to a few odd questions: Does the old order of golf have to adopt LIV? And does LIV have to accept the old order?

Riath Al-Samarrai welcomes the return of LIV golfers for the upcoming Masters

The likes of Rory McIlroy will benefit from playing in a field where 18 top golfers are back in contention

Or to put it another way, can either of them thrive on their own for now? The thought struck me strongly as I watched the Koepka video, and it’s evident that LIV is a company currently stunted in the shadows.

But those earlier questions also surfaced when I was at the Players Championship in March. It’s the fifth major, we’ve heard that for a long time, and ranked as the strongest field in golf. It is also the flagship of the PGA Tour. And yet it felt empty and flat because it was missing something.

The quality of Smith, the defending champion and world No. 5, was all of a piece. Ditto a transcending figure like Johnson and the knowledge that this was no longer the strongest field.

But it also lacked the flavor you get from the heels. That’s what they call the bad guy in wrestling, and Golf lost his best heels to LIV. Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Reed, Koepka and Mickelson are good heels.

That’s not to say a tournament without them is bad, because if you admit that, you’d be admitting that you don’t like golf at all. But it’s no frills to like a dose of soap opera in your sport, even golf, and it makes me think of another tournament I attended this year: the Dubai Desert Classic.

It was a nice meeting, well organized, but it’s not a fifth major. It’s early in the DP World Tour season, but there was McIlroy and, most importantly, the master of heels, Reed.

We know what happened next, and that’s the point: McIlroy snubbed Reed, Reed threw a t-shirt at McIlroy, things were said, and based on a rough estimate of how much global coverage the storm generated, it’s reasonable to assume That the Desert Classic captured the imagination more than the Players Championship.

Those paragraphs were all over the place, which supports the theory that a good story is hard to tell without a villain.

The LIV golfers can also provide excellent villains that could make for a great tournament

Of course, over time, another pair of heels will go into the older circuit’s bar, replenishing what was lost. But in the present, there is no shame in enjoying the sideshows that could be performed at the Masters, while also recognizing the integrity of the competition does indeed depend on the presence of LIV golfers. The same goes for all majors – if they are to be considered the best tournaments, they need the best golfers.

In the absence of LIV, would a Rory McIlroy win in 20 years’ time mean abandoning a weakened field, thereby completing the Grand Slam? Unlikely. But would he have beaten the best? He would know the answer to that, so it matters more when the rebels are there.

None of this changes what we think of LIV. For my money, it’s a company whose mere existence can be summed up as an attempt to cleanse a journalist’s blood of Saudi Arabia’s reputation. A company that took a sport with localized squabbles and minor grievances and fragmented it beyond recognition.

The precariousness of their existence is currently the subject of almost constant rumours. I’m told Norman has been seriously marginalized, her audience is tiny, the last batch of recruits has been uninspiring and the PGA Tour’s countermeasures mean Saudi Arabia would have to spend crazy money (nine figures) on top of being too crazy to get anyone to get others from the top 20.

What’s more, if they don’t solve their political problems and secure world ranking points, their visibility in these majors will dwindle by the year, and how long will it be before the Saudis brandish the sword?

The LIV Tour needs momentum and speed and nothing would achieve that like a win in Augusta. Without anything big and soon their lack of mobility becomes more and more glaring.

IOC President Thomas Bach has criticized Britain for wanting to uphold the ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes

People will be waving traffic cones before long, so they’re taking their time alongside those who left them to stay relevant. The double-edged bonesaw is that the jilted will benefit almost as much from their presence.

Buffoon Bach will never listen

Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, says it is “regrettable” that Britain and other nations want to uphold the ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes.

Others might say it’s unfortunate that he hosted Vladimir Putin at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, three weeks before he set hell on fire in Ukraine. They could say it like they said it then, but the buffoon wasn’t listening.

Tottenham lost both their manager and their top football manager in the space of a week. Even in the context of Spurs, it’s quite a spectacular breakdown.