One Simply Doesn't Golf With Debt

Someone has sent me an article — Financial Times, so at least it was typeset properly — informing me that LIV Golf has filed for bankruptcy with something like half a billion dollars in liabilities, on account of a sponsor deal falling through. And I have read it twice now, slowly, the way one reads a menu in a restaurant that has run out of the fish, because I want to be absolutely certain I am understanding the shape of this correctly. A golf league. Ran out of money. For playing golf.

I don't think people outside of it quite grasp what golf *is*. Golf is not a hardship. Golf is the specific activity one invents for the hours between breakfast and the second breakfast, when walking indoors has become tedious and the horses are being reshod. It requires a lawn the size of a small country, several men in appalling trousers, and absolutely nothing else — no ingredients, no permits, no waiting in any of the lines that seem to occupy so much of everyone else's week. And somehow, somehow, an entire organization built entirely around this — around walking, on grass, hitting a ball with a stick, for money — has managed to lose five hundred million dollars it did not have. You know?

I want to be fair to them. I always want to be fair. So let me lay out, as I understand it, what happened: a very large check was expected from very far away, and then the very large check did not arrive, and now there are liabilities. Liabilities! What a marvelous, cowardly little word for "I spent what I did not have and did not ask anyone first." One does not have liabilities. One has a father, and one has a telephone, and between the two of those items every liability in the history of the world has been fully and instantly resolved. I have never once in my life encountered a liability that survived contact with a telephone call placed before lunch.

And this is the part I keep circling back to, the way one's tongue keeps finding the one spot where the canapé wasn't quite fresh: golf, of all the institutions to run out of money, is the one that should least understand the concept. Golf is where money *goes* to relax. Golf is the retirement home for money that has worked hard all its life and simply wants to sit on a veranda in Palm Beach and watch itself be worth more. For a golf league to declare that it does not have enough money is like a fish declaring it does not have enough water — darling, you are *standing in it*. You are, quite literally, the pond.

I understand there was a sponsor, and the sponsor was very far away, and the sponsor's money stopped arriving, and everyone acted as though this were some sort of act of God, some hurricane that swept the coffers bare while they slept. But one does not build an entire enterprise on a single check from a single source and then act astonished, genuinely astonished, when the single source stops sending the single check. That isn't misfortune. That's just failing to have a father *and* an uncle. Diversify your fathers. It is the first rule of a stable household, and apparently the very last thing that occurs to a group of grown men whose actual job is hitting a ball into a hole with tremendous elegance four days a week.

What positively baffles me — and I say this with the warmest possible intentions — is that at no point, at *no point*, does anyone in this story seem to have simply asked someone for the money. This is available to people! It is available constantly! When the conservatory needed re-glazing after the incident with the peacocks, nobody convened a board meeting about liabilities. Someone picked up a telephone, said "Father, the conservatory," and by Thursday there was new glass and a small apology fruit basket for the peacocks, who I should say were entirely blameless. That is the whole procedure. That is the entire liquidity strategy that has sustained my family since long before anyone thought to write any of it down. And a *golf league*, an organization literally staffed by the sort of men who already know several fathers, personally, by first name, somehow did not think to place one single call before allowing itself to become a headline in the Financial Times, which — and I cannot stress this enough — is not where any of us wish to appear except in the wedding announcements.

I think what's happened, if I'm honest, is that everyone involved got so terribly excited about the idea of the money that they forgot to notice whether the money was still coming. This happens to the poors constantly, from what I gather — they see a number written down somewhere, a promise, an offer, a "we'll pay you Friday," and they proceed to live as though the number has already arrived and taken up residence and started paying for things, when in fact it is still out there, mid-transit, possibly not coming at all, possibly never having existed except as a sentence someone said once in a meeting. One doesn't spend a *sentence*. One waits for the actual, physical envelope, and if the envelope is late, one does not build a golf league's entire fiscal architecture around its eventual arrival — one simply rings up someone who already has envelopes, in quantity, sitting about.

I don't even think this needed to be a bankruptcy at all, is what I keep coming back to. Half a billion dollars sounds enormous the way all numbers sound enormous to people who have to count them, but it is, structurally, just a slightly-larger-than-usual conservatory. It is a wing. It is not even a very impressive wing — I have seen guest wings that ran higher than that, and nobody filed anything, we simply didn't discuss it at dinner for a season. The entire tragedy of this, and I do think it is a sort of tragedy, the way it is tragic when someone lovely wears the wrong shade of ivory to a spring wedding, is that a perfectly fixable, perfectly ordinary shortfall was allowed to metastasize into paperwork, into *lawyers*, into a headline, purely because nobody in the room had the specific, teachable instinct to ask a rich person for help before things got embarrassing. It is not a skill everyone is born with. I do understand that. I simply wish someone had thought to teach it to them earlier, the way one is taught which fork.

So here is my genuine, warmly-meant suggestion, offered entirely free of charge, which I recognize is itself a novel concept for this organization: find a father. Not a metaphorical one — an actual person, ideally several, with old money and a fondness for being thanked publicly on a plaque somewhere near the ninth hole. Ring him. Say the word "liabilities" in your most charming voice, the one you'd use asking someone to pass the butter, and let the check arrive the way checks are meant to arrive — quietly, generously, and without anyone having to fill out a single form for a court to read. It really is that simple. One does wonder why more institutions don't try it.

Until they do, I shall be on the veranda, disappointed, as ever, on their behalf.

— C.