fredvarcoe.com

This is just a personal record that I hope might help some people considering HoLEP. No two operations are the same, so everyone’s experience is different. Mine is probably very different as I’m a Brit living in Japan. At the time of my operation, I was 69. My symptoms weren’t critical but they were obviously headed in the wrong direction…


Day 1 (Monday): Check in at 10:30, get to my room at 11. Nothing much to do all day. Nurse came to check my temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen levels three times as well as taking two blood samples. The surgical nurse appears and explains what will happen and later I’m taken downstairs to a room where the anesthesiologist explains her procedure and checks that I don’t have any allergies. She says she’ll knock me out with ketamine and keep me knocked out with gas, although I was under the impression that the sedative would be intravenous only and oxygen would be administered through a tube down my throat. Anyway, they shoved something down my throat because I had a sore throat afterward. They gave me lunch and dinner and told me I should take a shower at 4 p.m. Lights out was at 9 p.m.

Day 2: Lights on was at 6 p.m. No breakfast, of course, and they gave me some special water to clean my system out. Surgery was scheduled for 11:30 and the wife and daughter came at 10:30, at which time I also had to don anti-blood-clot socks. And we waited. Until 1 p.m. when we were walked to the operating theater in my pajamas. Inside, the very cute nurse told me to take my top off and lie down on the operating table. They hooked me up to various monitoring systems and stuck a needle near my left wrist. As I took one last look at the cute nurse, the anesthesiologist said, “I’m putting in the ketamine.” I looked at the ceiling and then, suddenly, I was still looking at the ceiling. “Do you feel the world going wobbly,” they asked. Maybe a little bit. They thought I was a bit slow, so they asked me again and this time the world was getting a bit blurry.
And then they were telling to wake up as the operation was over. I felt nothing. I asked them what the time was – 2:45 was the answer. Quick. They hauled me on to a bed and took me to a recovery room. Wife and daughter and doctor came in. They asked me if I was OK. I couldn’t answer. My throat was dry and wouldn’t work. I really wanted to ask how it had gone. One of my chief worries was that they wouldn’t have been able to do it for some reason. The doctor held up a tube of pinkish matter and said, “This is what I took out.” It didn’t look very much but he said it was a quick, easy and smooth operation. I couldn’t tell, I could feel nothing. They took me back to my room, although I don’t remember that bit. Wife and daughter hung around for a bit and went home. The nurses said I could drink some water four hours later. And I had an annoying anti-clot massage machine running permanently on my calves. At some stage before the op, I thought I had been told that I would have to lie still and not move at all. That wasn’t the case, which was good because I needed to move in the uncomfortable hospital bed.

Day 3: Nurses monitored me through the night and it dawned on me that I had fluids going into my arm and a large tube going from my dick to a 2.5-liter plastic bag on the IV stand. The massager came off early in the morning, but other than that, no feeling. Suddenly, at 6 o’clock, I started feeling feverish. Nurse checked: 37.9. Had a fever most of the day, rising to 38. I was allowed to eat breakfast and told to drink a lot of water. They took some more blood before a nurse came along to show me how to walk with a bunch of IVs and a tube running out of my dick. And to steady me as I got up for the first time, which was good as I lost my balance immediately. I was still wearing the massive post-operation diaper and still had no feeling, so I had no idea what was happening down there. On the schedule, it said the nurses would clean my scrotum. Disappointingly, I was given a hot towel and told to do it myself. It was pretty shocking. Part of my dick just below the glans had swollen up massively and everything was very, very tender. My dick was glued to my pubic hair with blood, so Nurse A basically ripped my dick away. A nice girl, but has to work on her tenderness. (From long ago, I was under the impression that if you had surgery in that region, a nurse would shave all your hair off. That didn’t happen, but I did give it a little trim before I went in.) The surgical diaper was discarded and I was told to put on pants (boxer shorts) and pajamas with the tube from my dick sticking out the waistband. Not comfortable. My first night at the hospital, I had felt very cold, so the wife brought me a blanket, which made me very hot, but it seemed to have the effect of sweating out most of the fever as I slept for over eight hours straight.

Day 4: I was told to drink at least 2 liters of water a day, so I drank around 6, which meant my plastic bag was filling up with red fluid very fast. It was an unexciting day at the hospital. Wife and daughter visited again, bringing me All Bran as I was sure I’d need help to shit softly at some stage. But I wasn’t planning to have a shit while there were IVs in my arm and a tube up my dick. I really wanted to have control over my body again. The Doc came in early in the morning and said nothing. At 10 p.m., a nurse came in to take the IVs out of my arm, which was nice.

Day 5: D-Day (Dick Day). I was getting tired of having a tube in my dick and have enormous sympathy for those who need a catheter on a long-term or even permanent basis. The Doc came in and said it would be out soon. Had breakfast and Nurse A and Trainee Nurse B came to see me for something and then I realized it was their job to pull the tube out. I had pre-cleaned the area with a wet towel so that Nurse A wouldn’t have another opportunity to rip my dick away from my bloodied pubic hair. Nevertheless, further cleaning was done and Nurse B – a cute but very tentative nurse – was charged with pulling the catheter out, which she found difficult. Nurse A helped and yes, it was painful for a few seconds but then it was done. But my dick was badly swollen, red, raw and very sensitive. Nurse B gave me a pair of pants and my pajama bottoms to put on.
The main aftereffects of surgery are leakage and incontinence, which means urine coming out unannounced and no control over your urination. My dick was free, but it felt awful and it was hard to walk because it was so sensitive to the touch. I was told to drink water and report to the nurse if I had a piss. I had to record the amount (before and after the operation, you have to record your output every time). I wasn’t looking forward to my first post-catheter piss as most people had said it would be painful. But I still had very little feeling in the whole nether region. An hour later, I decided to chance it. I went to the toilet with my cup (paper measuring cup), intending to pee into the cup. I pulled my pants down, reach down for the cup on the waste bin to my right, turned and then realized I was already pissing already, mostly over the floor. I quickly put the cup in place to prevent a disaster and managed to get 180 ml into the cup, which was larger (by 10 ml) than any amount I had pissed before the operation. I called the nurse, she inspected my pee and told me she’d clean the toilet up.
I decided that the underpants and boxer shorts I had brought from home weren’t suitable. I went to the store downstairs and bought a disposable adult diaper (177 yen, just over a dollar). Halfway through lunch, an hour and a half since my first piss, I felt like I needed another one. This time I would be more careful and sit on the toilet. I pulled my pants and diaper down together and moved to get my cup into place, only just in time. I was off and running again without my knowledge. At one point, I decided to try and interrupt the flow, just to see if I had any control. It worked. There was only a little spillage onto the toilet seat but when I looked at the cup, it said 80 ml, which seemed way short. I looked at my diaper and realized it was soaking wet. I went to buy more diapers.
Nearly three hours later, I was ready for another piss. I didn’t have a strong urge to piss but just felt there was enough to make things happen. This one was better, most of it reaching the cup and producing 200 ml. The nurses seemed impressed. Following this, I was allowed my first shower since Monday. I really wanted and needed a shower but was still concerned. I went to the store to get some “friendly” soap but when I got back to my room, I read a translation that said, “Don’t use for cuts or wounds.” But it was child friendly and I avoided using it on the tip of my dick, so it was OK, and having a shower was a big relief. A couple of hours after the shower, it was Piss No. 4. Still didn’t have control over the start but managed to avoid a major mess and filled up the cup to 180 ml, but had to change my diaper. Before going to sleep, I produced another 170 ml in the cup but with a heavy diaper. The nurse said she wanted to weigh the diapers to see how much wee there was.

Day 6: Still unable to control the start of my pissing, my routine now was to take off my shoes, socks and pajamas when I got into the toilet, leaving me with just a diaper. When I removed the diaper I’d quickly put the cup in place and sit on the toilet, holding the cup as it filled up. The main purpose was to avoid making a mess. At 1:45, with the new guy opposite snoring like a Motorhead concert, I produced 170 ml with some going in the diaper.
Two big events followed a few hours later. At 6:20, I had a controlled wee of 230 ml with no mess AND my first shit since before the operation. And it was a smoothie, no pain, no strain. Four hours later, I peed again and hit the 300 ml mark, with no mess, although there could have been as I was holding the cup sitting on the toilet and it had collapsed slightly as I was holding it too tight. It’s only a 400 ml cup and it was reaching the top when I stopped peeing naturally.
I was consuming less water than before, so I thought my output would be less. I guess the operation opened up the pipes. When I had the catheter in, I consumed a lot – around 6 liters a day – as I didn’t have to piss. It just passed through me, hopefully cleaning out the crap in my system, and into the plastic bag. I didn’t want to put pressure on my urinary system by consuming too much water and the internet told me 3-4 litres a day was as much as I should consume post-operation. I also checked on what I shouldn’t consume and caffeine and soda were at the top of the list. Some herbal teas were OK and maybe decaf coffee and tea. I make a combination drink of green tea, ginger and a Chinese tea resembling Earl Grey at home, so I’ll aim to modify that to keep out most of the caffeine. Alcohol will be off the table for some time. After a visit from wife and daughter, who were obviously very keen to hear the full details of yesterday’s trauma (their day off from visiting), the rest of the day saw lesser outputs and continued false starts, but I did manage to add another crap. Thank you, All Bran, for another smooth ride.

Day 7: Time to go home. I’ve only been here since Monday (it’s now Sunday) and I feel institutionalized already. It is a bit like being in prison, although I’m sure prison beds are more comfortable. Before the op and after the catheter was removed, I’ve had to pee into a paper measuring cup and record how much I produce. After giving up my logbook, I can actually have a piss into the actual toilet, which feels weird, especially as I don’t piss on the floor again. Revelation: It’s much easier than pissing into a cup. But then I’m all packed up and ready to go, sorry to leave the wonderful nurses and slightly concerned about not having instant access to medical care should I need it.
I still haven’t decided if having prostate surgery is less scary than having the wife drive me home, but it’s probably healthier than me driving, although her heavy braking is uncomfortable. Of course, soon after getting home, it’s time for a piss and it’s important not to piss all over the floor of the new (white) toilet floor. Luckily, there’s a mat around the toilet although I do manage to overshoot that. Fortunately, my new carton of diapers (worryingly labeled “dispers”) gets in the way and the spray is somewhat limited. I think there was a bit too much pee anticipation coming from my brain.
I’m pleased to be reacquainted with my extensive cake and cookie collection but sad that tea and coffee are not recommended. I hit Amazon to order a bunch of herb teas (chamomile, cranberry), honey and decaf coffee. For refreshment, I make my usual evening tea, as described above, to accompany my post-dinner fruit cake. I’d slept very little the night before, so anticipated a good kip. Lights out at 10, but woke up at 1:30 for a pee, before sleeping until 5:30.

Day 8: Needed another pee when I woke up and have noticed that the pressure and amount seems less than when I was in hospital, possibly because I was drinking 5-6 liters of water a day in hospital. Also, the burning in the urethra is getting stronger. Still wearing diapers as a precaution but manage to avoid decorating the bathroom floor, although I had a minor slip-up in the evening when a few drops hit the toilet seat. The lower output and burning make me think that my urethra is closing up, but my head tells me I’ve only been catheter-free for a couple of days and full restoration is likely to take a couple of months at least. You heal a lot slower when you’re 69. I must say, I have been surprised that my pee is so clear. There is blood dripping into my diaper and I often see blood at the beginning and end of the stream, but my pee is quite clear and I suspect that drinking so much water post-op was a very good idea. But apparently the recommendation after catheter removal is to drink 2 liters of fluid a day, although I did see one post suggesting 3-4 liters was OK. It seems that you don’t want to overload the system but to drink enough to keep it functioning.
I take my car out for a quick shopping trip with my daughter and feel no pressure to pee while I’m out, which is good. I haven’t been wearing trousers, just tracksuit bottoms and my diaper. Think I need to avoid standing urinals. Despite having a good night’s sleep, I take two long and deep naps during the day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I’m a great believer in the restoration power of sleep, so that’s good, but the heavy naps (both about an hour) clearly show that my body is tired. This isn’t my first rodeo (I’ve had a number of surgeries, but none since my late 20s) and I know that your mind often thinks life is back to normal, but your body really isn’t. Think months, not weeks. I had a great shower before dinner and tried to normalize my dick, but it’s still badly swollen under the glans. It actually looks bigger but less swollen, if you get what I mean. Before it looked like a miniature swimming ring had been inflated around my dick, but now it looks more like a fleshy scarf.

Day 9: Weird sleep. Went to sleep at 10:50, had a very weird dream, woke up at 11:20. Felt like I needed a wee. Had a wee. Went back to sleep. Had another very weird dream and, strangely, slightly sexual dream. Woke up at 12:40 thinking: Don’t get a hard on. I’d read somewhere that you should think about sex for a month after the operation. But I’m a young guy … you know what I mean. But I’m trying. So, had another wee and went back to sleep until 6:30. I should point out that the reason I wasn’t too concerned about wanting to go to the toilet early in the night was because I’d failed to consume my 2 liters of water by bedtime, so drank a lot just before I slept. Not a good idea. In the hospital, I was just chugging back water with no consequences as the tube from my bladder to my plastic bag did all the hard work. But now I’m in charge of my dick again, I obviously have to manage things myself. I probably didn’t need to finish off the water as I’d drunk three cups of tea during the day and had milk on my breakfast cereal, so I’d probably consumed enough liquid. But I do think it’s wise to even out your liquid consumption over the day. I also read somewhere that you should restrict liquid intake after 6 p.m. to avoid having to get up at night. I have my post-dinner cup of gingery tea around 7 p.m. and usually might take a swig or two of water after that, but I’ll cut out the overcompensation from now on.

Worries: Of course, it’s natural to worry about everything. There’s no guarantee the operation will work. And there’s no guarantee that your immediate post-op condition will indicate how you will be three or six months down the road. I feel that my stream and output has declined sharply from my first days after the catheter was pulled, but surmise that the catheter had produced an expanded urethra that would produce an excessive flow in the short term. I must keep a record.
Urgency: While I was cleaning my teeth after breakfast, I had a slight need to take a pee. But I was cleaning my teeth and didn’t want to interrupt my task. But then I noticed that I wasn’t jumping up and down or holding my dick to stop me weeing as I ALWAYS would pre-op. I was able to finish cleaning my teeth calmly and half an hour later, I still haven’t had a pee, so that’s a good sign.
Burning Man: Burning when you pee seems to affect everybody so that doesn’t worry me too much. However, burning can also indicate an infection in the urethra, so it’s something to monitor. The very tip of my urethra is also itchy, which is annoying, but I suspect it’s because my foreskin is on vacation further down my dick and won’t return to normal until my spare tire has disappeared and it can come home. Urethritis can produce a creamy discharge (been there, done that; the perils of youth), so if you’re getting that, report to the doc immediately.

One thing that was nice when I got home was realizing I didn’t have to take any pills. My intake of pills consisted of tamsulosin in the morning and Viagra alternative tadalafil (also know as Cialis) in the evening, plus a vitamin D pill and three milk thistle pills unrelated to my prostate condition. So, not taking medication was a real bonus. To be honest, I was never quite sure how effective they were, although on the days when I forgot to take them, I did notice a slowing down of the system. But the system was exceedingly slow.

My first doctor after I’d switched from a big Tokyo hospital to a local one did loads of tests every time I saw him, which was every six months: PSA, urine, blood, flowtest, urine retention. I think he liked me being around because he was keen to practice his English, which was quite good. But the point is my flowrate just before he moved hospitals was around 6.5 ml/second, which, he said, was “quite slow.” But I was still functioning relatively normally at this time, so just carried on as normal. Around the time of my operation, I found out that a normal flowrate was around 13.5 ml/second and I had slowed down massively since my 6.5 ml days, so it was clear that I was at a fairly critical stage (I had had a couple of instances where I couldn’t pee). My second doctor at the local hospital only ever did PSA tests, which I thought was odd. But then I had a break of a year for various reasons and a third doctor was in place when I returned for another check and he immediately did the flowtest, but it was flawed as I wasn’t expecting it and had had a piss before I left for the hospital. I left that meeting suggesting that I come back in six months to see how things go. But within a matter of weeks, I realized that my life was being impacted too much by my need to wee and locate toilets on any journey I took. So I went back a few weeks later and agreed to the HoLEP operation.

Flow update: Day 9, 9 a.m. Finally, I needed a pee, so I decided to measure it as I had in hospital. I was under the impression that my volume and flowrate was down. I was wrong. Peeing in a cup gives you a way different impression of your peeing power. In anticipation of my pee, I slightly missed the cup but then I was in full flow, roaring out around 300 ml. Happy. Maybe there’s also a difference peeing standing up and sitting down. But I must point out that I still have very little feeling that I’m peeing, apart from the burning sensation. That said, I think I’m in control. Still wearing diapers and they’re just picking up a little bloody discharge from the urethra. Due to the state of my dick, walking is still an issue, but I managed to take the rubbish out for a 500-meter (yards) roundtrip. After being shut up for a week, just being outside is a thrill.

Food and Drink: Did a little research on the web and didn’t find very much. The most detailed info was on the website of a Turkish hospital that doesn’t even do HoLEP. Anyway, here’s my non-exhaustive list of go-to stuff.

Chicken/ beef/ vegetable broth/ soup
Herb teas: turmeric, ginger, green, chamomile, cranberry, dandelion.
Smoothies: blueberry, blackberry, strawberry, apple
Fruit: banana, pomegranates, grapefruit
Breakfast: All Bran, Granola (oat based), porridge (oatmeal)
Others: Greek yogurt, decaf coffee, salmon, chicken, spinach, kale, eggs, tomatoes, honey, cranberry jam.

All Bran keeps me crapping beautifully all the year around and helps to ensure that you don’t strain or get constipation. In winter, I alternate All Bran, which I regard as a miracle food (cured my constipation when young), with porridge but always eat more All Bran than porridge (and I put All Bran in my porridge).
I had a fairly fixed daily drink routine before surgery: English tea in the morning, café au lait in the afternoon, my tea mix (ginger, green, Earl Grey/ herb mixed together) after dinner. Info on the web says don’t consume caffeine post-surgery, so I’ve given up black tea for a couple of months and the green tea in my mix is limited. I bought decaf coffee so I can continue with my café au lait but I think water-based drinks will be better such as herb teas: turmeric and cinnamon, cranberry and chamomile. Again, I might mix these up a bit for a more agreeable taste although I just tried the turmeric and cinnamon and that was good with a teaspoon of honey.
I’m a big believer in the benefits of honey, especially Manuka honey but actually all good (real) honey. So I just ordered three types of honey from Amazon: German clear honey, New Zealand dark honey and a kind of mix of those two that might be from Myanmar. Off topic a bit, I’m a HUGE fan of propolis (a bee product), which I always use when I have a sore throat; works instead of antibiotics. Get into honey; it’s healthy. I sound like a health food evangelist but I’m not. I’m British, which should explain everything. However, my wife is Korean and has introduced me to the benefits of certain herbs and vegetables. It’s amazing how many medicinal foods there are.
I don’t usually eat much during the day, mainly cakes and cookies (my other medicinal foods) to accompany my coffee and tea. If I get hungry during the 4-5 hours between morning tea and afternoon coffee, I’ll have an egg on toast. The wife usually cooks me dinner and she’s a fantastic (semipro) cook. I do like fried potatoes but have told her to keep my dinner as green as possible. So, alongside veggies (many from our garden), I’ll eat chicken, liver and various kinds of fish: swordfish, shark (really good), salmon and tuna, occasionally eating sashimi versions of the last two.

Day 10: I think we’ll call this “Wee Day.” A pretty dead day, but I wanted to record my urination. I’ve been wondering when I’ll get back to “normal” and then I remembered that I’d forgotten what “normal” was. My dick isn’t normal but I think, maybe, the swelling under the glans is going down and it’s a bit less sensitive. Waking up at 3:30 isn’t entirely normal, but I did sleep early (9:30 p.m.), so around six hours is OK and there was football to watch at 5 o’clock in the morning.
There was a little bit more blood today at the beginning and end of the stream, and it seemed thicker. As of 20:30, I had had nine pees at the following times:

03:30
06:45
08:00
10:45
14:00
17:00
18:15
18:50
20:00.

I’m sure there’ll be one more pee before bed. The timings might seem a bit odd but that’s because I was chugging water at certain times. I even had to get up during dinner after knocking back the last liter of my 2-liter bottle. I also had herb tea in the morning, lots of milk on my All Bran, a McDonald’s café latte around 11:30 and herb tea at 15:00 and 18:30. I’ve bought water in 2-liter bottles so I know how much I take in and make sure I finish one bottle a day. For the 10:45 pee, it was just before a shower, so I thought I would pee into the measuring cup to see how much came out. As I took my diaper off, my anticipation was too great and I leaked a little before completely filling up the 400-ml cup.
The leakage is down to the same old problem. While I can control things OK, I still have no feeling when I’m peeing, so I don’t know when I start and the only feeling I get is some burning. So, while my output maybe somewhere around normal – I generally feel that I can start and stop the stream – the actual process is anything but. Of course, when I drink unusual amounts of water in a short space of time – I tend to binge drink the stuff – it puts pressure on the system, but I still have quite a bit of faith in the system. I’m just waiting for the feeling to come back.
I did manage to get out of the house, taking my daughter to McDonald’s and doing some shopping. I’d like to do more walking but that’s still a bit uncomfortable at the moment. When I got back, the wife started telling me about stuff she wanted to do with our fence and I couldn’t understand it and she implied that I was thick and I got pissed off. I’m not going to be doing any DIY for a couple of months, so I’m not interested in this. I’m three days out of the hospital and I have a swollen dick that bleeds and burns when I pee. Don’t be laying this shit on me at this stage. She’s not known for her empathy and I know from experience that post-op can fray the nerves a bit. Apart from getting healthy, my only target after the operation was to make sure I could attend my daughter’s high school graduation, three weeks after checking out of the hospital. Apart from little bits of work I do at home, there’s nothing else in my life. I’m festering for a reason.

Day 11: Revelation! I thought I’d have nothing to write about today, but I was wrong! Just after midday, I was due for a diaper change as there was quite a bit of bloody discharge (I was only really planning to change once a day) but I figured I’d wait until I had a dump. That came along a short while later and I decided to take a shower. I wanted to wash my dick as I was worried an infection (fungal or bacterial) could emerge under the glans. It’s also an opportunity to try and reform my dick. It was still swollen underneath the glans, but it appeared to have changed. Initially, it had been like a kind of tubular blister wrapped around my dick, but in the last day or so it just looked like flesh, which was a slight improvement. So, in the shower, I gave it a good wash and tried my cute doctor’s “technique” (my cute doctor had pushed down on the tip of my dick with both thumbs in an effort to try and push it back into the foreskin; she failed but we had a fun conversation). Didn’t work at first so I tried just rolling the skin up over the swelling and … Eureka! I did think about returning to its exposed state – again, worrying about infection – but I was too thrilled to have a relatively normal-looking dick to make the change back. So, we’ll give it a run and see how it feels. But it’s another step forward and one less thing to worry about.

Day 12: My dick feels great! Feels like it’s getting back to normal and walking should no longer be a problem. That makes me feel so much better. On the downside, the last two nights I’ve taken a pee before going to bed and then needed another pee one hour later. Pre-HoLEP, I often needed a pee one and a half hours after going to sleep. Two possible causes, I guess. One: I’m retaining fluid in my bladder even after peeing, which is not a good sign. In the hospital, the nurses did a retention check after my first pee after the removal of the catheter. They said I was retaining fluid but it wasn’t a big concern. Anyway. Two: I’m drinking a lot of fluid up until about three hours before I go to bed and Google tells me full expelling of fluids can take up to three hours, so maybe my kidneys are in processing after I go to sleep. Don’t know if this happens to others, but even after a short nap I get an urge to pee (pre-HoLEP and post-HoLEP). I guess I’ll find out when I see my doctor in a couple of weeks (four weeks after the operation).

Spillage: I was going to mention diapers. I was going to say that I could be wearing regular underpants as I seem to be controlling my pee, but I decided to stick with the diapers because, 1) I think they would be more comfortable than regular underpants; 2) they are white (most of my underpants are black) so you can see how much discharge is taking place; 3) they are cheap and I’ve still got quite a few; 4) they are absorbent. Anyway, I drank some herbal tea and some water and two and a half hours after getting up, I was definitely in need of a pee. I always sit down to pee, but before I reached the seat, I’d started already. Not a huge disaster but a clear reminder that I’m not in full control. It’s the anticipation that gets you. And the fact that I still don’t have feeling (apart from burning on the underside of my dick) when I pee. It’s exactly one week since the catheter came out.

Day 13: Went for my first long walk: 30 minutes. Now that my dick has reverted to a normal condition (glans no longer exposed), I feel much better. The walk felt good and I want to take a couple of walks a day. Not much to report. Not too much burning when peeing. Most of the time I just feel an irritation in my urethra and I also get a similar feeling in my ass, although unlike others I have no pain there. Peeing is normal. Still waiting on blood clots to come out. One thing I’ve noticed is that when I really need to pee, I have urgency but it’s nothing like my pre-op urgency. Then, I’d be gyrating around trying to hold it in and usually ended up holding my dick to keep things under control. Now, the feeling of urgency is no longer in my dick; it feels like it’s in my bladder. And, I can control it easier. No walking around or holding my dick. I think “control” and I can control. And no premature urination. I’ve been wearing a diaper and tracksuit bottoms since I left hospital, so when I want to pee, I drop the tracksuit and this can trigger the pee command from my brain. Then I drop my diaper and this also triggers the pee command. Before my foreskin returned to normal, I had no feeling when I peed. Having the foreskin back in place gives me some feeling when I pee, which is really important.

Day 14: I spoke too soon. Went for a walk, popped into the supermarket for a pee and had a minor premature stream that took me by surprise. As I’ve said before, the anticipation of having a pee seems to make you pee prematurely sometimes. Got to use mind control. Where’s a Vulcan when you need one? Trying to do two 30-minute walks a day to get the body working and the blood flowing. I think this is really important as for the rest of the day, I’m sat on my ass. Talking of leakage, I do sometimes feel like I’m leaking when walking around. Not much evidence in the diaper, so maybe it’s just stuff in the urethra moving around. I guess I’m due for scabs and blood to pass through any day now. Still get a bit of pink at the start of a stream but the stream itself is usually clear and strong.

Day 15: Two weeks to the day since my HoLEP and I’m feeling good and positive. I know from reading others’ comments that complications are possible further down the line, so remain cautious. Will see my doctor after another two weeks.

By Fred Varcoe


How can golf save itself? The advent of LIV has divided the sport and the sport needs to be undivided. The fact that it has been allowed to remain in a state of chaos is a disgrace and nearly all the participants are guilty to some degree. No surprise there. Most sports organizations are run by self-serving, blinkered idiots. They can’t see the bigger picture and don’t want to give up their slice of power. As a result, they don’t have the answers. Luckily, I do.


Indentured independent contractors
Unlike football, golf doesn’t have a powerful, world governing body like FIFA. It has the R&A in Europe and the USGA in the United States and they generally govern the game of golf and the rules of golf, as well as events like the four majors. There are many tours around the world, including the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour), the Australasian Tour, the Champions Tour, the Sunshine Tour, the Japan Tour, the Asian Tour, the Korean Tour and, of course, the PGA Tour, which also controls the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Americas, both of which are feeder tours for the PGA Tour.

And then along comes LIV, throwing cash around to tempt players to abandon their commitments to the PGA Tour and play on an abbreviated but highly lucrative new tour of three-day tournaments with a closed field.

The PGA Tour cries foul, saying these players are breaching their contracts and have no right to jump ship, even though the PGA Tour calls these players “independent contractors.” The contracts state that these “independent contractors” can’t play anywhere else without permission from the PGA Tour. But restriction of trade is illegal. In the United States, “restraint of trade covers a broad range of activities, including:
– Creating a monopoly;
– Coercing someone to stop doing business;
– Using non-compete clauses or other contract provisions to prevent someone from conducting business;
– Negatively affecting someone’s ability to conduct business freely.”


The PGA Tour wanted to dominate professional golf and was very angry when it found out it couldn’t. On the surface, LIV’s intervention was a vulgar attack on the PGA Tour. But LIV didn’t want to operate in a vacuum and approached the PGA Tour to come to an agreement so that everyone could play golf happily. The PGA Tour refused to talk, and this was a stupid, irrational and self-defeating misstep. LIV didn’t want to destroy the PGA Tour; it wanted to complement it.

But like a jilted husband, the PGA Tour and its lackeys in Europe lashed out, invoking fines and bans for the rebel players, and even penalizing college players.

Talk about a resolution
Clearly, it needs to be resolved. Of course, some people might not want it to be resolved. Tens of players have earned PGA Tour cards because some of the world’s best golfers are playing on the LIV tour. A number have become winners for the same reason. Would Scottie Scheffler be so dominant if Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Bryson De Chambeau were still playing on the PGA Tour? I think not. LIV has created opportunities for many journeyman players on the Korn Ferry and PGA tours, but that’s actually a good thing. People can see just how good a golfer ranked #150 or #200 can be. The elitism of the PGA Tour has damaged the game of golf. OK, LIV is a closed shop, but it has livened up the sport and given it new ideas, ideas that the PGA Tour has been happy to steal.

Lovers of golf do not want to see division and professional golf should provide a stable living for all its practitioners, not just the top 100. The Players Impact Program is an insult to golfers lower down the order. The idea that players who did not jump to LIV should get a bonus is absurd. Everyone on the PGA Tour has already benefited professionally and financially by the absence of some of the world’s best golfers.

So, we need a settlement. That settlement should make professional golfers true “independent contractors” so that they can play anywhere they want (subject to some eligibility rules). The irony is it’s so easy. By banning LIV golfers from PGA Tour events, it was the PGA Tour that suffered.

The further irony is that the LIV golfers did not want to leave their respective tours and in truth there was no reason why they should have. The top golfers always want to play in the top PGA Tour events, as well as the majors and the Ryder Cup. If the PGA Tour had said, “OK, let’s see how we can make this work,” things would have worked out fine.

Having criticized the PGA Tour, LIV also can’t escape criticism. Its ambush of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour and even college golf was crude and largely unnecessary. Better timing could have allowed the players to voluntarily hand in their PGA Tour cards.

No harm done
The truth is LIV was never going to do much damage to the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour basically damaged itself. The PGA Tour said players couldn’t play in tournaments that clash with PGA Tour events without permission. This doesn’t make sense. For a start, most of the top golfers play less than half the events in a year and some PGA Tour tournaments clash with (drum roll) … other PGA Tour tournaments. If the PGA Tour can schedule tournaments against itself, why can’t LIV (and let’s not forget tournaments in other parts of the world, especially the DP World Tour, which is played on far more interesting courses than the PGA Tour)?

Here’s an interesting concept for the PGA Tour: make your golfers true independent contractors and eliminate any restrictions about playing events that clash with PGA Tour events. This, I believe, is what golf fans would like to see.

Freedom is only going to benefit golf. I’m not saying that the PGA Tour shouldn’t make rules or even require a minimum number of tournaments, but it can rationalize its current system. Tennis did that by grading its tournaments and awarding points accordingly. The world tours can come up with a universal grading system (which it kind of has already for world ranking points) and apply it to their tours. (My system is: The points value of a tournament is determined by the world ranking of the top 10 players in that tournament.) The players can then decide their own schedules. I’m pretty sure the PGA Tour will still win out. Three of the majors are still in the U.S., plus the Players Championship. (I would like to see a World Major added to the international golf schedule, classifying it as a major and moving it to different parts of the world every year). It will be in LIV’s interests to make a schedule based around the top events in the PGA Tour schedule, partly to ensure that the top players will play and also to avoid antagonizing the PGA Tour.

Cruel and unusual punishment?
That’s all good, but we still have to deal with LIV, whose ambush of the PGA Tour was underhand. The elephant in the room is punishment. The PGA Tour and the DP World Tour went nuts, banning players outright and imposing ludicrously high fines (many of which LIV has paid). Let’s remember, the PGA Tour wants the top players back, so imposing fines of $100,000 a week is just stupid. If you want the players back, you have to find a reasonable way to do it. So, step 1: fine the players according to their status in the game, which can be determined by how much they’ve taken home in prize money on the relevant tours during their career.

Phil Mickelson will be at the top end of that scale, having won nearly $97 million. Fine him 1 percent of that total. Alternatively, you could come up with a system based on how many tournaments he’s competed in or won, but there’s no reason to make it complicated. A $970,000 fine for Phil makes sense to me.

The second part of re-integration is more difficult: ranking. Phil, a guy who won the PGA Championship four years’ ago, is currently No. 1,159 in the world. My feeling is that the LIV players have to start at a lower level. They can’t just jump back to their previous status. Where applicable, I would allow the top LIV players back into tournaments on sponsor exemptions because then the PGA Tour gets what it wants: the top players. Those lower down the totem pole will have to earn their places back. If they were on the DP World Tour or the Asian Tour, then those tours can decide how to allow them back. Many players have benefited – professionally and financially – from the absence of LIV players from the various tours, so it’s up to those LIV players to fight their way past this new batch of players on merit and earn their place back at the top table. A one-time massive Q school perhaps.

Team talk
If it sounds like I’m talking about the end of LIV, then I’m not. I like LIV. I like the 54-hole, shotgun start format and I think the PGA Tour should hold similar events. But I don’t see LIV as financially sustainable in its current format. One of my earlier ideas to change LIV was to make it a four-day event with the team event based on the fourth day of play. All four days would go to deciding the individual winner but the teams for the fourth day would be decided by the results of the first three days. So, Team 1 would consist of the players who finished first, 13th, 25th and 37th. Team 2 would consist of the players who finished second, 14th, 26th and 38th, and so on.

That works fine and would be exciting except that LIV’s financial goals include making the teams into money-making franchises. Having different players every week wouldn’t fit that model. But the current model – four players to a team – is too restrictive and if a player’s injured, the team’s down to three or using a sub. My idea is that each team consists of a squad of eight to 10 players. Now, remember, this will work out if the players really are “independent contractors,” so that players can switch between tours during the season. Sure, LIV can tie a few down with appearance fees to make sure the teams don’t consist of college players, but my vision is to have eight to 10 top players in a squad but still only have four players representing a team in any given week (although if there’s no clash with other events, having all eight or 10 players play over four days would be really cool).

And that system takes my next idea a step further: the LIV Tour should be a TEAM EVENT ONLY. Fans love team events and LIV has clearly been trying to capitalize on that, but not very successfully. The team element is always secondary to the individual competition. Put it as the focus of LIV and you have a dynamic, fan-friendly event (hopefully with better names than Smash or the Cleeks). Then, the franchise system will work. Fans would love it, broadcasters would love it, sponsors would love it, and money-grubbing agents and businessmen would love it.

The PGA Tour has already agreed, provisionally, to work with LIV and some say it needs LIV’s proposed $1.5 billion dollar donation. In short, professional golf needs to look at itself in the mirror; if it was starting from scratch, how would it be organized? Probably a lot better than it’s being organized at present.

By Fred Varcoe

How can golf save itself? The advent of LIV has divided the sport and the sport needs to be undivided. The fact that it has been allowed to remain in a state of chaos is a disgrace and nearly all the participants are guilty to some degree. No surprise there. Most sports organizations are run by self-serving, blinkered idiots. They can’t see the bigger picture and don’t want to give up their slice of power. As a result, they don’t have the answers.

Who he?

So, how can a semi-retired sports journalist in Japan have the answer? Well, let me tell you a little story.

The 2002 FIFA World Cup was initially a battle between Japan, South Korea and Mexico. Well, actually, that’s not really accurate. The 2002 World Cup was, effectively, promised to Japan by FIFA’s dastardly president Joao Havelange, the Brazilian Vladimir Putin of football. What was the attraction of Japan, a country that had never qualified for the World Cup? Havelange promised the World Cup to Japan at a time when Japan was arguably the most powerful economy in the world. Japan had stacks of money and, as we all know now, FIFA executives love money.

Unfortunately, not everyone loves Japan, especially South Korea. No way was South Korea going to stand by and allow Japan the glory of hosting the World Cup. So, led by South Korean Football Association President Chung Mong-joon – possibly the most unpleasant and unprincipled man in football, an incredibly high bar that he cleared effortlessly – South Korea joined the party, prompting Mexico to leave it. This party was going to be incredibly expensive.

Inspired by historical hate, the two football associations generously entertained FIFA executives (and their wives) as they made their case to host the World Cup. Japan claimed it had the best football league in Asia – the J. League – while South Korea pointed out that it had qualified for the World Cup five times to Japan’s zero. Both countries had enough money to erect any number of massive stadiums, build roads and hotels, cater to thousands of football fans and express their generosity to FIFA’s executives. All FIFA had to do was to pick one out of two.

By this time, 1995, I had been based in Japan for eight years as a sports writer and I also had a Korean girlfriend. So, I visited both camps, assessed their bids and came up with an answer – the only possible answer.

FIFA hadn’t managed to come up with the right answer and were still staring two wrong answers in the face: Japan or South Korea. FIFA sent a team of experts to assess the merits of the two countries’ bids so that the FIFA Executive Committee could pick a winner.

I knew when the FIFA inspection team would arrive in Japan and on what morning they would read their first morning paper (and I assumed it would be The Japan Times, who I worked for). I ran an article on the back page with the headline, “Cohosting is the only answer for the 2002 World Cup.” And I explained why. The inspection committee – as told to me by a FIFA vice-president – took the cohosting idea back to FIFA headquarters in Zurich and a fight began that ended, as we all know, in the first co-hosted World Cup.

Those are my credentials. I have, of course, come up with many other brilliant ways of improving sport, including how to make football better, but we needn’t go there at present, except to point out that FIFA still thinks penalty shootouts are a good way of deciding a World Cup final. I use this to show how utterly out of touch FIFA can be.

The other example I use relates to the odious Chung. He was once touted as a possible president of FIFA for being “a clean pair of hands.” When I read this in my morning newspaper, I literally spit my porridge all over the table. But I digress. However, I have to mention that the current president of the Korean Football Association is a guy by the name of Chung Mong-gyu, part of the extensive Chung family that controls the Hyundai Group. So, related to Chung Mong-joon who was banned from all football activities for six years by FIFA in October 2015. This was reduced to 15 months because, FIFA told me, of Chung’s “lack of any prior record of unethical behavior, his public stance against corruption within FIFA, and the meritorious services he provided to FIFA and football over the years.” Another table covered with porridge and spit. But I digress.

Indentured, independent contractors

Unlike football, golf doesn’t have a powerful, world governing body like FIFA. It has the R&A in Europe and the USGA in the United States and they generally govern the game of golf and the rules of golf, as well as events like the four majors. There are many tours around the world, including the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour), the Australasian Tour, the Champions Tour, the Sunshine Tour, the Japan Tour, the Asian Tour, the Korean Tour and, of course, the PGA Tour, which also controls the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Americas, both of which are feeder tours for the PGA Tour.

And then along comes LIV, throwing cash around to tempt players to abandon their commitments to the PGA Tour and play on an abbreviated but highly lucrative new tour of three-day tournaments with a closed field.

And the insane amounts of cash do their job, pulling in some of the best and most popular players in the world. The PGA Tour cries foul, saying these players are breaching their contracts and have no right to jump ship, even though the PGA Tour calls these players “independent contractors.” I’ve covered this elsewhere, but to recap briefly, if they are independent contractors, surely they are independent from the PGA Tour and free to take their business elsewhere.

But the PGA Tour doesn’t see it like that. The contracts state that these “independent contractors” can’t play anywhere else without permission from the PGA Tour. Sounds like duress and monopoly. Restriction of trade is illegal. In the United States, “restraint of trade covers a broad range of activities, including:

• Creating a monopoly;
• Coercing someone to stop doing business;
• Using non-compete clauses or other contract provisions to prevent someone from conducting business;
• Negatively affecting someone’s ability to conduct business freely.”

I’m not a lawyer, but how does the PGA Tour reconcile this with their designation of golfers as “independent contractors?” Curiously, this hasn’t been tested in court and all lawsuits have been dropped after the PGA Tour and LIV made a provisional business agreement that seems to be lying fallow.

The PGA Tour reacted angrily to LIV and the defecting players, and prompted the DP World Tour to do likewise (although the legal case is still being tested there, so players can still play on the tour). Apart from the majors, the PGA Tour was/ is the pinnacle of golf. That’s where everyone wanted to play, that’s where the competition was best and that’s where the money was … before LIV. But it seems that the PGA Tour wanted to dominate professional golf and was very angry when it found out it couldn’t.

On the surface, LIV’s intervention was a vulgar attack on the PGA Tour. BUT LIV didn’t want to operate in a vacuum and approached the PGA Tour to come to an agreement so that everyone could play golf happily. The PGA Tour refused to talk, and this was a stupid, irrational and self-defeating misstep. LIV didn’t want to destroy the PGA Tour; it wanted to complement it. So the story goes…

But like a jilted husband, the PGA Tour and its lackeys in Europe lashed out, invoking fines and bans for the rebel players. How spiteful were they? Reportedly, players have been fined $100,000 per tournament missed and banned for up to five years. Former PGA Tour winner and now YouTube star Wesley Bryan was suspended by the PGA Tour for appearing in a YouTube event sponsored by LIV, not an actual LIV tournament. Oh, but it gets worse.

As a result of LIV, the PGA Tour has spread its tentacles even further by targeting college players. On May 11, 2022, the PGA Tour announced the following, according to the Golf Channel website:

“For college players hoping to both earn status through PGA Tour University and compete in the LIV Golf Invitational Series, they will now have to pick one or the other. PGA Tour U announced on Wednesday an amendment to its rules of regulations. Effective immediately, players will forfeit their PGA Tour eligibility if they tee it up in a professional tournament that is unranked by the Official World Golf Ranking and not otherwise approved by the PGA Tour. This news comes after last week’s report that LIV Golf had extended membership to the top six players in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, a group that includes several players currently in the PGA Tour U Velocity Global Ranking.”

So, the PGA Tour is trying to destroy golf careers of people who have never been on the PGA Tour.

Resolution No. 9 (and counting)

Clearly, it needs to be resolved. Of course, some people might not want it to be resolved. Tens of players have earned PGA Tour cards because some of the world’s best golfers are playing on the LIV tour. A number have become winners for the same reason. Would Scottie Scheffler be so dominant if Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Bryson De Chambeau were still playing on the PGA Tour? I think not. LIV has created opportunities for many journeyman players on the Korn Ferry and PGA tours and actually that’s a good thing. People can see just how good a golfer ranked #150 or #200 can be. The elitism of the PGA Tour has damaged the game of golf. OK, LIV is a closed shop, but it has livened up the sport and given it new ideas, ideas that the PGA Tour has been happy to steal. I pity those dogmatic haters of LIV who can’t see that a 54-hole tournament with no cut and a shotgun start is always going to be exciting (I’ll pass on the crappy music, thanks).

Lovers of golf do not want to see division and professional golf should provide a stable living for all its practitioners, not just the top 100. The Players Impact Program is an insult to golfers lower down the order. The idea that players who did not jump to LIV should get a bonus is absurd. Everyone has already benefited professionally and financially by the absence of some of the world’s best golfers.

So, we need a settlement. That settlement should make professional golfers true “independent contractors” so that they can play anywhere they want (subject to some eligibility rules). The irony is it’s so easy. By banning LIV golfers from PGA Tour events, it was the PGA Tour that suffered. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

The further irony is that the LIV golfers did not want to leave their respective tours and in truth there was no reason why they should have. The top golfers always want to play in the top PGA Tour events, as well as the majors and the Ryder Cup. But the PGA Tour said no and allowed their spite to field weakened fields with golfers that no one had heard of.  If the PGA Tour had said, “OK, let’s see how we can make this work,” things would have worked out fine.

Having criticized the PGA Tour, LIV also can’t escape criticism. Its ambush of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour and even college golf was crude and largely unnecessary. Better timing could have allowed the players to voluntarily hand in their PGA Tour cards. It wouldn’t have made the PGA Tour much happier, but it would have allowed them to do things by the book (although, to be honest, I’m not exactly sure what the book says). Having Greg Norman as the face (and mouth) of LIV was always going to be confrontational. That was never going to work out. Norman had tried his World Tour concept before and the PGA Tour didn’t like it.

So, both sides had contributed to the bad blood between them and left me thinking, “This is Japan and South Korea all over again.” And the answer is almost the same: coexistence.

The truth is LIV was never going to do much damage to the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour basically damaged itself. The PGA Tour said players couldn’t play in tournaments that clash with PGA Tour events without permission. This doesn’t make sense. For a start, most of the top golfers play less than half the events in a year and some PGA Tour tournaments clash with (drum roll) other PGA Tour tournaments. Make that make sense. For example, the Truist Championship is held the same week as the ONEflight Myrtle Beach Classic in May. If the PGA Tour can schedule tournaments against itself, why can’t LIV (and let’s not forget tournaments in other parts of the world, especially the DP World Tour, which is played on far more interesting courses than the PGA Tour)?

Here’s an interesting concept for the PGA Tour: make your golfers true independent contractors and eliminate any restrictions about playing events that clash with PGA Tour events. This, I believe, is what golf fans would like to see. It’s not what the PGA Tour wants to see because the PGA Tour wants to dominate and control top-level golf. And it was doing that pretty well until LIV came along. The PGA Tour is basically the U.S. PGA Tour. Nice courses, good players, not a problem. But LIV and the DP World Tour have shown that there’s a lot of exciting golf played in many, many different countries on some fantastic courses. And results have shown that complete unknowns can come through and play with the elite. Wesley Bryan, pro golf’s St. Sebastian, recalls how he was a nobody doing trick shots on YouTube one year and a PGA Tour winner and top 50 golfer the next year.

Freedom is only going to benefit golf. I’m not saying that the PGA Tour shouldn’t make rules or even require a minimum number of tournaments, but it can rationalize its current system. Tennis did that by grading its tournaments and awarding points accordingly. The world tours can come up with a universal grading system (which it kind of has already for world ranking points) and apply it to their tours. The players can then decide their own schedules. I’m pretty sure the PGA Tour will still win out. Three of the majors are still in the U.S., plus the Players Championship. (I would like to see a World Major added to the international golf schedule, classifying it as a major and moving it to different parts of the world every year). Hopefully, LIV will qualify for OGWR next year and Jon Rahm won’t be ranked No. 81. It will be in LIV’s interests to make a schedule based around the PGA Tour schedule, partly to ensure that the top players will play and also to avoid antagonizing the PGA Tour.

Punishment and compromise

That’s all good, but we still have to deal with LIV. The establishment of another tour outside the mainstream is nothing new and new events often come up with great new ideas, as you can see in other sports such as cricket, volleyball and not football. LIV has shaken up golf and made it realize that the traditional four-day tournament doesn’t have to define tournament golf. But LIV’s ambush of the PGA Tour was dirty and only achieved by throwing obscene amounts of money at players. In its current format, it’s unsustainable. We’ll get to that.

The elephant in the room is punishment. The PGA Tour and the DP World Tour went nuts, banning players outright and imposing ludicrously high fines (many of which LIV has paid). Should the players have been punished? Probably, yes, but that “independent contractor” thing is still rattling around in the background. Let’s remember, the PGA Tour wants the top players back, so imposing fines of $100,000 a week is just stupid. If you want the players back, you have to find a reasonable way to do it. So, step 1: fine the players according to their status in the game, which can be determined by how much they’ve taken home in prize money during their career.

Phil Mickelson will be at the top end of that scale, having won nearly $97 million. Fine him 1 percent of that total. Alternatively, you could come up with a system based on how many tournaments he’s competed in or won, but there’s no reason to make it complicated. A $970,000 fine for Phil makes sense to me.

The second part of re-integration is more difficult: ranking. Phil, a guy who won the PGA Championship four years’ ago, is currently No. 1,159 in the world. My feeling is that the LIV players have to start at a lower level. They can’t just jump back to their previous status. Where applicable, I would allow the top LIV players back into tournaments on sponsor exemptions because then the PGA Tour gets what it wants: the top players. Those lower down the totem pole will have to earn their places back. If they were on the DP World Tour or the Asian Tour, then those tours can decide how to allow them back. Many players have benefited – professionally and financially – from the absence of LIV players from the various tours, so it’s up to those LIV players to fight their way past this new batch of players on merit and earn their place back at the top table. A one-time massive Q school perhaps.

Long live LIV

If it sounds like I’m talking about the end of LIV, then I’m not. I like LIV. I like the 54-hole, shotgun start format and I think the PGA Tour should hold similar events. But I don’t see LIV as financially sustainable in its current format. One of my earlier ideas to change LIV was to make it a four-day event with the team event based on the fourth day of play. All four days would go to deciding the individual winner but the teams for the fourth day would be decided by the results of the first three days. So, Team 1 would consist of the players who finished first, 13^th, 25^th and 37^th. Team 2 would consist of the players who finished second, 14^th, 26^th and 38^th, and so on.

That works fine and would be exciting except that LIV’s financial goals include making the team into money-making franchises. Having different players every week wouldn’t fit that model. But the current model – four players to a team – is too restrictive and if a player’s injured, the team’s down to three or using a sub. My idea is that each team consists of a squad of eight to 10 players. Now, remember, this will work out if the players really are “independent contractors,” so that players can switch between tours during the season. Sure, LIV can tie a few down with appearance fees to make sure the teams don’t consist of college players, but my vision is to have eight to 10 top players in a squad but still only have four players representing a team in any given week (although if there’s no clash with other events, having all eight or 10 players play over four days would be really cool).

And that system takes my next idea a step further: the LIV Tour should be a TEAM EVENT ONLY. Fans love team events and LIV has clearly been trying to capitalize on that, but not very successfully. The team element is always secondary to the individual competition. Put it as the focus of LIV and you have a dynamic, fan-friendly event (hopefully with better names than Smash or the Cleeks). Then, the franchise system will work. Fans would love it, broadcasters would love it, sponsors would love it, and money-grubbing agents and businessmen would love it.

The PGA Tour has already agreed, provisionally, to work with LIV and it could do with LIV’s proposed $1.5 billion dollar donation. I would like to see some of the money in golf going further down the totem pole. Professional golf needs to look at itself in the mirror. If it was starting from scratch, how would it be organized? Probably a lot better than it’s being organized at present.

****

APPENDIX 1

After writing this, I smashed my sources into Google Gemini to see what kind of solution AI would come up with. I’ll leave it here….

****

Based on reports, expectations from players, and demands from major sponsors, the fundamental solution to the conflict between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf involves unity, financial reconciliation, and structural concessions from all parties, especially the three major entities: the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and the PIF/LIV Golf.

Key solution paths and necessary compromises identified in the sources include:

1. Corporate Merger and Financial Integration

The most widely discussed solution involves merging the competing financial interests under one roof, often cited as the only solution by those invested in the game’s future.

• PIF Investment into PGA Tour Enterprises: The Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), which funds LIV, is reportedly close to finalizing a massive investment into the new PGA Tour Enterprises, which was established earlier this year. Reports claim a deal is finalized or nearing completion that could see PIF invest as much as £1.5 billion into the PGA Tour.

• LIV under PGA Tour’s “Umbrella”: This corporate deal would reportedly result in LIV Golf coming under the PGA Tour’s operational “umbrella,” with the PIF taking an equity stake and receiving representation on the PGA Tour Enterprises board.

• Loyalty Compensation: To resolve financial friction with loyal PGA Tour players, the PIF’s investment is claimed to include funds set up to reward players who rejected massive LIV offers. Alternatively, the PGA Tour loyalists could receive equity stakes in PGA Tour Enterprises.

• Concessions: DP World, a major sponsor, is demanding that all parties recognize the necessity for “concessions and conciliations” to achieve the unified outcome that fans and sponsors desire.

2. Player Reintegration and Scheduling Compromises

A major challenge is determining how LIV players return, and how to restructure the global calendar to bring the world’s best players back together consistently.

• Free Movement Between Tours: LIV player Jon Rahm stated that his ideal merger would allow golfers to “play freely between tours” to enjoy specific major tournaments (like the American Express or Torrey Pines) while maintaining DP World Tour membership for fall events.

• Selective Return Based on Merit: PGA Tour player Wyndham Clark suggested that golfers with strong resumes, such as major winners like Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka, have earned the right to return without sanctions, whereas players who lacked that pedigree and left primarily for money should face difficulty returning.

• Avoiding Antitrust Issues: Legal concerns related to antitrust laws mean that LIV Golf will likely need to continue operating in some form after a deal is reached, possibly with a calendar condensed to the autumn to avoid conflicting with major PGA Tour events.

• Specific Access Proposal: Former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley proposed a structural solution where the top 10 LIV golfers are granted access to five PGA Tour Signature Events and The Players Championship. In return, the PGA Tour could field two teams in LIV’s season-ending Team Championship.

• LIV Format Change: LIV Golf has independently begun working toward legitimacy by announcing a shift from its controversial 54-hole format to the traditional 72-hole format starting in the 2026 season. This change is intended to satisfy Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) criteria, which would allow its players to automatically qualify for Majors and remove a major institutional barrier.

3. Structural Changes and Governance

To stabilize the “product” for sponsors, some propose that the PGA Tour adopt elements of the LIV model.

• Mandatory Player Attendance: Paul McGinley argued that the PGA Tour must “evolve away from being a members organization” that treats players as independent contractors free to pick and choose events. He advocates for the PGA Tour administration to take “more in control of the product” by using contracts to obligate top players to play certain events, similar to LIV Golf.

• Global Calendar and DPWT Focus: Sponsors like DP World are demanding a resolution that includes a more integrated tour throughout the year, promoting DP World Tour (DPWT) events and encouraging greater participation from American players outside of the U.S. season. Rory McIlroy has also stated that his vision is for a global calendar.

• DPWT Leverage: The possibility of LIV Golf pursuing a separate deal with the DP World Tour could provide the European circuit with leverage to secure its standing in any future unified golf landscape.

Ambassador Waleed Siam

This is just an upload test, not a political statement.

By Fred Varcoe

Senior Golf Digest writer Joel Beall penned a column the other day trying to put the LIV Golf Series into perspective and he did a pretty good job of it. Here’s some excerpts and comments.
(You can read the full article here.)

****

“It’s too early to validate LIV’s aspirations to ‘reinvigorate’ the sport, particularly given the motives behind them. But the enterprise can’t be dismissed, much as the PGA Tour wishes to do so. Not after LIV’s coup of signing Dustin Johnson and in-their-prime stars like Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed. Not with a number of other players about to follow suit or weighing a similar jump. Not with LIV’s endless mountain of gold that would put Scrooge McDuck to shame. The operation has brought the game to the once-unthinkable precipice of a schism at the professional level.”

LIV’s pot of gold could actually undermine its own ambitions. It’s not a bottomless pot. LIV can only survive if it exists as a credible golf tour (or series of events). It’s not going to be paying $100 million appearance fees 10 or even five years down the line. The tour has to be accepted or it will die.

“LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman has said he does not want a schism; he envisions LIV to be additive to the sport. Norman is also rolling out a field in London this week that, with a few notable exceptions, is composed of has-beens and never-wases.”

It’s a cheap shot to label these golfers as has-beens (and let’s not forget, many of them are/ were PGA Tour players). A lot of these slurs refer to the likes of Lee Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Richard Bland and even Phil Mickelson. Apart from being a clickbait cheap shot, it’s just inaccurate. Lee Westwood was the DP World Tour champion (for the whole season) less than two years ago; Kaymer is a former World No. 1; Garcia won the Masters five years ago and his last PGA Tour title was less than two years ago; Poulter won his last PGA title four years ago and made the Top 40 in each of the majors in 2021; Bland is playing the best golf of his career at 49 and won his first title a year ago, as well as leading the U.S. Open after two rounds last year; and Mickelson was the defending PGA champion when all this kicked off. Maybe they’re not in the Top 10 anymore, but these guys are still relevant — and major attractions — in any tournament they play in. Granted there are some lesser names in LIV, but there’s a reason for that, which is that the PGA Tour is so restrictive. It amounts to 125 elite players and maybe 100 more hangers-on. The sport needs more events around the world to accommodate more golfers. There are a lot of good golfers out there desperate for competition and a decent payday. Why doesn’t the PGA Tour put a cap on prize money and give more golfers more chances to earn a living playing tournament golf? Yes, I can see the flaw in that argument, but the PGA Tour seems to be more inclined to throw money at the bigger players.

Getting to LIV envisioning to be “additive to the sport,” why shouldn’t it? This whole mess could have been solved if the PGA Tour had met with Norman (or, even better, someone from LIV with more brains and less attitude). In fact, the PGA Tour should have said to its golfers: “You can play anywhere, anytime.” Instead, they said, “Play on our Tour or die.” The PGA Tour’s stance makes no sense at all. It can still have points or prize money tallies to produce rankings and eligibility, but then the ball is in the court of the golfers. They would be able to determine when and where they play golf and if they want to try to play in the majors or Ryder Cup. The PGA Tour was never going lose out by giving golfers more freedom. There are plenty of good golfers out there. And the top golfers don’t play every week. For example, in the 2020/21 season, Scottie Scheffler played 25 out of 52 tournaments. So, why can’t the PGA Tour exist with LIV and other tours? Independent contractors are just that: independent. That’s why the PGA Tour will lose the upcoming lawsuits.

“Competing for ungodly sums of money under the misguided notion that it will somehow help a maligned government sportswash its image.”

Let’s throw this argument under the bus. The United States and Europe do not have the moral high ground here. The DP Tour inaugurated a tournament in Saudi Arabia AFTER the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The PGA Tour also has had events in Japan, which has a despicable justice system and the death penalty, and China, which is responsible for so many crimes against humanity it makes Saudi Arabia look like Sweden. The accusation of “sportswashing,” should not be a factor in this debate.

“[LIV] could help the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, cleansing them of those stuck in the purgatory between relevance and the Champions circuit and making way for fledgling stars. But for all that it hasn’t been, LIV has shown just enough of what it could be—and the chaos it could impel—and that’s the problem. There’s the problem of the disruptor in question, the series being funded by the Saudi Arabian government, for it is driving this discussion and its direction seems aimless.”

Good point. What is the purpose of LIV? To liven up golf? Maybe. Norman used to go on about expanding the golf world beyond North America, but he undermines his own argument by having five of the eight tournaments in the United States. Nothing in Korea, Japan, Australia, South Africa, continental Europe? Again, if LIV had sat down with the PGA Tour and drawn up a plan where they didn’t tread on each other’s toes, golf could have gained. But the PGA Tour, according to Norman, refused to even talk to LIV about such things.

“Perhaps the issue begins with the vehicle itself. There is a fundamental fault with the competition that LIV Golf is creating, and for a second put aside the problematic strings to this venture and focus on that competition. At its heart, golf is appreciated for being the purest rendition of meritocracy, where spots aren’t given and you only make what you earn. LIV Golf is the antithesis of this spirit. It offers signing bonuses and no-cut guaranteed paydays to players most fans would not pay to see. Aside from the general curiosity surrounding its Thursday debut and a better-than-expected production, the LIV Golf presentation had no appeal. There was nothing on the line, no reason for these guys to be playing aside from the chance to line their pockets no matter how they finish. It is a glorified exhibition.”

Good point. LIV should be taking its stars to places where they aren’t normally seen. And if the two sides had sat down and had a polite conversation, points (perhaps on a lesser scale) could have been awarded to LIV events that counted in the U.S. or Europe. LIV is a golf tournament, a competition, so it has credibility. Give it some respect and embrace it and that might benefit the game.

“Here are bigger purses, bigger bonus pools, bigger FedEx Cup bonanzas coming to the tour, but they don’t have the resources to engage in an arms race, and legacy won’t be enough.”

Do we know what’s going to happen with the FedEx Cup, the Ryder Cup and the majors? Will the big names be dumped? Ryder Cup captains have captain’s choices, while major winners have extended eligibility. Sit down, talk it out….

“This moment should force a hard look in the mirror to those at PGA Tour headquarters. The reason rogue leagues were fun thought exercises is because the tour has fallen into stasis. The product has become oversaturated with too many events and at times it seems allergic to creativity.”

Scheffler played 25 out of 52 tournaments last season and Dustin Johnson played 21, so why the need to punish those playing elsewhere? More events mean more opportunities for all golfers.

“Which is why, ultimately, a potential schism inflicts the most pain on fans. This has become a sideshow with the worst type of actors, and as bad as the play has been, where it could lead is worse. Now fans’ attention will be divided between an entity that doesn’t know what it’s doing and doesn’t offer much in the way of competition yet does boast some marquee names, against the traditional power with true competition and true consequences that could lose the very stars needed to pull people in. Forget additive; that is the very definition of subtraction. It is a diluted product.”

The PGA Tour’s reaction was knee-jerk, although somewhat understandable or at least predictable. They HAD to sit down with Greg Norman or, better still, a rational LIV executive. Or even a Saudi Public Investment Fund official with the first question being, “What do you want?” They just needed to have a conversation….

By Fred Varcoe

As a former resident of Saudi Arabia (1980-1985) and a big golf fan, news of the Saudi Golf League really grabbed my attention. Except there is no Saudi Golf League. The knee-jerk Western media insist on calling the LIV Golf Invitational Series that because it is being financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which the West believes is blood money controlled solely by murderers.

In fact, it was set up by King Faisal – who some say was the most benevolent of Saudi monarchs – 50 years ago to aid projects within the Kingdom. In the last decade, it has expanded its influence in the international sphere and is now headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the son of the current monarch, King Salman. Its most high-profile recent investment was the purchase of Newcastle United football club in England.

The Crown Prince has been condemned by many in the West who hold him responsible for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Those responsible for the murder had ties to the Crown Prince, so the West believes he has blood on his hands and anything he touches – such as investment funds – is tainted by this blood.

Once the connection is made, it’s hard to unmake, at least when it comes to Saudi Arabia. When it’s Israel, murders are done in self-defense.

On May 11, Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank killed Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while she was covering raids by the occupying Israeli army. She was wearing a “press” vest and was not in a conflict zone. Her fellow journalists at the scene believe she was targeted and the Israeli military reportedly continued firing at the group of journalists she was with even after Abu Akleh and her colleague had been hit. To add insult to injury, Israeli police then attacked mourners at her funeral.

So, will the West try and stop investment from Israeli institutions? What will be the consequences for Israel? Well, we all know the answer to that. Israel operates with impunity in the Occupied Territories and beyond. Unlike Saudi Arabia, it will be free to sponsor any golf tournament it wants to without consequences or criticism. There were the usual pro-forma condemnations from the West and calls for an investigation, which, of course, will whitewash the whole affair. In truth, the killing has already been forgotten. But the LIV Golf Invitational Series is still blackballed for being a “Saudi” event. This is unbelievable hypocrisy.

Whiter than white?

Do you think the PGA Tour’s sponsors are whiter than white? Let’s look at some of them:

AFLAC: Irony of ironies, AFLAC was accused of misclassifying employees as “independent contractors” and was said to have “exploited workers, manipulated its accounting, and deceived shareholders and customers” by a number of former employees.
ASTELLAS: In 2016, Astellas UK was suspended from the U.K.’s pharmaceutical trade body as a result of “shocking” institutional failures, lies and “deception on a grand scale” in what was described as one of the worst cases ever considered by industry regulators. In 2019, the company in the U.S. agreed to pay $100 million over allegations that they violated the False Claims Act.
AVIS: In 2021, Avis Budget Group agreed to pay $10.1 million to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act.
BRIDGESTONE: Bridgestone subsidiary Firestone produced defective tires that resulted in up to 192 deaths in the United States and paid Ford $240 million in compensation and had to settle many other lawsuits.
CITI: In 2018, Citibank reached a settlement to pay $100 million in the Libor scandal. It was also in bed with the Japanese mafia and lost their private banking license because of their mob connections.
COCA-COLA: Where to start? Wikipedia has a whole page on “Criticism of Coca-Cola,” ranging from carrying on business with Russia during the war in Ukraine, carrying on business with apartheid South Africa, racial discrimination (for which they had to pay $192.5 million) and allegations their partners were involved with murdering union reps.
FEDEX: FedEx previously partnered with the National Rifle Association, only breaking things off after coming under pressure from activists (i.e., when it hurt their bottom line).
MASTERCARD: According to Wikipedia, in 1996, “about 4 million merchants sued Mastercard in federal court for making them accept debit cards if they wanted to accept credit cards and dramatically increasing credit card swipe fees. This case was settled with a multibillion-dollar payment in 2003. This was the largest antitrust award in history.”
METLIFE: MetLife only recently decided to cut ties with Assault Weapon Investments, Controversial Weapon Investments and Tobacco Investments. It was fined $3.2 million in 2012 for “loan service and disclosure practices” and $10 million in 2019 for “internal control failures.”
MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC: CEO Takeshi Sugiyama resigned in 2021 after it transpired the company had been falsifying data for air conditioners and brake compressors for trains for over 35 years. It was also guilty of selling substandard rubber products. It also tried to subvert an inquiry into other malpractices, leading to the disciplining of 12 executives in December 2021.
PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERS: PWC has a long list of dodgy practices, including a $229 million settlement over a multibillion-dollar accounting fraud with Tyco International, being paid to set up a tax avoidance scheme and gender discrimination. In January 2018, it was banned in India and fined $2.1 million over its involvement in a fraud case and was accused of conflict of interest in Angola.
SHELL OIL: Shell has been involved in Saudi Arabia for over 70 years and currently works with Al Jomaih and Shell Lubricating Oil Company in Saudi Arabia. Friends of the Earth says that Shell has a “long history of contempt for people and planet,” is “jointly responsible for murders in Nigeria,” “avoids taxes” and is “involved in bribing a former petroleum minister to achieve an offshore oil field.”
STRYKER: Who are they? Well, Stryker provides the “Official Joint Replacement Products of the PGA Tour and Champions Tour,” despite having to pay out $1.5 billion for defective hip implants and a further $80 million for unauthorized devices used in knee surgery.
MORGAN STANLEY: Even a condensed list of violations and dubious practices by Morgan Stanley would require a small book. Check out the Corporate Research Project page on Morgan Stanley. Highlights include racial and gender discrimination, a $2.6 billion settlement for selling “toxic securities” in 2015, $1.25 billion for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac charges, and millions of dollars in other penalties for transgressions such as fraud and misleading practices.
The PGA also has FIVE “Official Betting Operators” (not including Phil Mickelson, who is alleged to have lost $40 million gambling). All legal, of course, but certainly not designed to improve people’s lives.
UPS is not a PGA Tour sponsor, but has recently divorced itself from two top golfers – Lee Westwood and Louis Oosthuizen – because of their connection to LIV. While they could claim it’s a commercial decision, it’s clear that they’re also trying to stay away from being associated with “blood money.” Like other golf sponsors, UPS finds it difficult to stay away from controversy. It lost a class-action lawsuit for racial discrimination in the late 1990s, had to pull an ad making false claims in 2009, had to pay $40 million “to end a federal criminal probe connected to deliveries it made for illicit online pharmacies,” had to pay “more than $25 million to settle charges it submitted false claims to the federal government” and had to pay $5.3 million to settle False Claims Act allegations earlier this year. Wait, there’s more….
In 2019, according to The Washington Post, “a group of United Parcel Service employees allegedly helped to import and traffic massive amounts of drugs and counterfeit vaping oils from Mexico, part of a scheme that exploited a vulnerability in the company’s distribution system, according to police. The lucrative operation at times involved moving thousands of pounds of marijuana and narcotics each week from narco-traffickers into the United States to destinations across the country, using standard cardboard boxes that were carefully routed through the private mail carrier’s trucking and delivery systems.”
According to a CNN report in 2019, a “white female [UPS] driver refused to deliver a package to a predominantly black neighborhood she referred to as ‘Nigger City’ and ‘NiggerVille’.”

This is not an in-depth dig into companies that sponsor the PGA Tour and golfers; it’s a quick flip through the internet.

Saudisney

And where does Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment fund put the rest of its money? Well, $43 billion is invested in the United States. So, if you go to Disneyland, ride an Uber, bank at Bank of America, use Facebook, play a Nintendo game or fly on a Boeing plane, you are taking advantage of Saudi “blood money.”

How about golf in Saudi Arabia? The DP World Tour established the Saudi International in 2019 – the year after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi – and a number of top golfers have taken Saudi money by playing in tournaments there.

Saudi Arabia’s policy of executing criminals and terrorists also came under scrutiny, especially after 81 people were executed in a single day in March 2022. Full details of the crimes weren’t available, but it was revealed that many were for terrorism, murder or conspiracy to murder. The PGA is based in the United States, which executes criminals. It also has events in Japan, which executes criminals (including 13 in a single month in July 2018). And in China, which arbitrarily executes so many people Amnesty International has lost count. It certainly outstrips Saudi Arabia.

The usual memes about people in Saudi Arabia being executed for being gay were dragged out, but these have to be taken with a pinch of salt. Although my time in Saudi Arabia was many years ago, the country I lived in for five years bore no resemblance to the country portrayed in the British media, which at the time were astonishingly racist in their depictions of Arabs. There was a gay clique in the building I lived in and it seemed to be party central for that crowd. None of them were executed.

What about other “crimes?” A number of foreigners where I worked were arrested for drinking alcohol, but they weren’t locked up in a hole for years on end; they were just deported. A lot of them had drinking problems before they went to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis knew people produced and drank alcohol; they just wanted to keep it under control. Once when I went to buy a car, the young guy I was dealing with thought I might walk away from the deal. He told me his father wanted to meet me. He took me to his father’s office and left me. His father opened a draw in his desk and pulled out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. Deal sealed. (I was also arrested twice in Saudi Arabia but forgiven for my transgressions and allowed to stay in the country.)

Independence day

There’s also hypocrisy in the PGA Tour (and DP Tour) terming golfers “independent contractors,” yet severely restricting their trade by demanding permission to play in any non-PGA Tour event without permission. Yes, the golfers did agree to this, but did they have much choice? This stinks of monopoly and restriction of trade is illegal.

In the U.S., “restraint of trade covers a broad range of activities, including:
Creating a monopoly
Coercing someone to stop doing business
Forcing someone to change their business so it isn’t as competitive
Using non-compete clauses or other contract provisions to prevent someone from conducting business
Negatively affecting someone’s ability to conduct business freely.”

I’m not a lawyer, but how does the PGA Tour reconcile this with their designation of golfers as “independent contractors?”

Let’s face it, the PGA Tour is just one competition, effectively in one country. Why is it so scared of the LIV events? The obvious reason is that it might lessen the value of its own tour, but that’s highly unlikely. We already have three of the four majors in the U.S., as well as strong tours in Europe, Japan, Canada, Asia, etc., and they co-exist with the PGA Tour. And there are even times when the PGA Tour competes with itself, holding two events at the same time, so surely there’s room for alternative events. On top of that, not all the top players play every week, so if they’re not playing in a PGA event, why should they need permission to play elsewhere?

The truth is the PGA Tour is scared of competition. Three years ago, it increased the number of tournaments golfers must play every year for them to be able to keep feeding off the golden goose. As a result of LIV, it has gone even further by targeting college players. On May 11, the PGA Tour announced the following, according to the Golf Channel website:

“For college players hoping to both earn status through PGA Tour University and compete in the LIV Golf Invitational Series, they will now have to pick one or the other. PGA Tour U announced on Wednesday an amendment to its rules of regulations. Effective immediately, players will forfeit their PGA Tour eligibility if they tee it up in a professional tournament that is unranked by the Official World Golf Ranking and not otherwise approved by the PGA Tour. This news comes after last week’s report that LIV Golf had extended membership to the top six players in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, a group that includes several players currently in the PGA Tour U Velocity Global Ranking.”

A different experience

The LIV events are offering a different experience and what can only be described as silly money, even sillier than the PGA’s massive purses. In fact, the top PGA golfers earn so much money they really don’t need to look elsewhere. But to earn that money, they have to play a 72-hole stroke-play tournament and make the cut. LIV is proposing, no-cut, 48-member, three-round tournaments. It’s a different format (there’s also a team element to add spice to the results). The sad part of this is that the PGA, one of the most conservative organizations in sport, believes it has the perfect product and can’t even see a need for change. Sometimes, sports organizations need a good kick to get them moving. Cricket famously changed when outsider Kerry Packer tried to buy it. Cricket still has its five-day tests, but the rest of the game has been transformed with different formats and leagues around the world. Volleyball is another sport that has reinvented itself over the years with radically different rules and new tournaments. Golf, like football, seems to wallow in its own self-importance. It’s a great sport, but that doesn’t mean it can’t change and in recent weeks, a number of top golfers have said that there’s “room for improvement” in golf.

Greg Norman, LIV’s front man, has been trying to change the PGA-centric view of the sport for years. LIV is not his first attempt at shaking up the sport. Whether or not he’s got his tactics right remains to be seen. Perhaps going head-on against the PGA wasn’t the best move. Buying the Asian Tour could have given him more legitimacy (of course, I don’t know if it wants to be bought but it agreed to sanction the LIV events after a $300 million investment) and less conflict, and he could have grown his product from there. Swooping down from above with a billion dollars to spend was a bit crass and his “we’ve all made mistakes” quote concerning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi should have stayed in his overactive mouth.

However, it doesn’t mean that Saudi Arabia has to concede the moral high ground to America, its snooty golf tour or its pampered, hypocritical golfers. I’m sure they feel morally just when they fill their environmentally unfriendly cars and jets with gas from Saudi Arabia and play games on their Made-in-China electrical goods.

The LIV Series is just another series of golf tournaments. If golfers sponsored by racist and criminal companies think they have the moral high ground, fine; they can stay where they are. But if you want to live your life on hyper-ethical grounds, you’d better clean up your act to vegan levels. “Blood money” hides in the strangest places.

By Fred Varcoe

We were due to set off from Jeddah in the morning but the incoming aircraft failed to arrive. And it kept on failing to arrive. Weather was a problem, apparently. It eventually arrived late in the afternoon and took off in darkness after we had waited for around 10 hours.
The Boeing 720 was hardly new and I was surprised when the pilot said they would be flying at an altitude of 41,000 feet! Weather, apparently.
As we crossed the Red Sea and approached Ethiopia, we could see the weather: massive cumulus nimbus clouds rising even higher than the plane’s 41,000 feet.
And all filled with spectacular lightning. The pilot worked his way around the clouds and managed to get us down in Addis without incident.
Getting out of Addis a week later was even stranger.
For a start, check-in time for the flight was 04:30, not good because the overnight curfew at the time didn’t finish until 05:00. On the plus side, we’d rented a Volkswagen Beetle, which just about managed to get us to the airport in a truly biblical rainstorm.
Exit procedures were normal, except all foreigners were thoroughly searched for contraband or money. Unfortunately, I hadn’t changed one of the $100 notes I had before leaving and the man found it and, naturally, took it.
Then we had to wait to board our plane. It took some time, but after a long delay we were on board. Then we were hurtling down the runway.
Then we stopped suddenly and went back to the gate. Something was wrong with the plane.
We disembarked and waited. Another plane was flying in, we were told, and we could go on that one. It flew in and we waited. It had hit birds on the way in, so we couldn’t use it, we were told. A few hours later, it suddenly filled up with passengers and took off for somewhere else.
No problem, we were told, there was a Boeing 720 in the workshop we could use. We’d probably been at the airport for about seven hours at this point and it wasn’t exactly a well-appointed airport. But we managed to get on the plane, nervously, and were pleasantly surprised when it actually took off.
Our destination was the small newly independent country of Djibouti on the Red Sea, but we were scheduled to stopover in Dire Dawa, a desert town in the middle of nowhere.
The pilot landed well, some passengers got off and we waited. Then, we waited some more. The doors were open and it was quite hot.
Then they took the stairs away. Hooray! We’re going somewh…. no we’re not.
“We can’t start the plane,” the captain told us. “And they can’t fix it here, so they’re flying in a mechanic from Addis.”
They gave us a bag of nuts and a Pepsi. It was hot. Dire Dawa’s a desert town.
We were probably on the plane for three or four hours, but the mechanic flew in with his jump leads and started the plane.
The stairs came back. Passengers.
Suddenly a rampaging troop of little old Dire Dawa ladies surged onto the plane, all holding massive bunches of leafy twigs. It was chaos. One sat next to me and smiled, wondering what the belt thing was on her seat. She had no idea how to do it up, so I did it for her. She held on to one of her massive bunches of twigs; the other two were in the overhead locker. The inside of the plane looked like a tree nursery.
It was qat, the narcotic twig that blokes in that region chew on all day to get stoned. It fetched a high price in Djibouti, a former French colony with Western prices.

We got no more Pepsi as the plane had turned into an arborium. Everywhere you looked there were twigs. My little old lady probably asked me if I wanted to buy any qat, but I found it hard trying to converse with a tree.
The plane started to descend. Tension spread throughout the cabin, not because we didn’t know if the plane would survive the landing, but mainly because the little old ladies were gearing up for qat fever. As soon as the wheels touched the tarmac, they were up out of their seats, grabbing their twigs and demanding the door be opened. The Ethiopian cabin crew never stood a chance. The doors flew open and the little old ladies rushed down the steps toward the terminal. Getting through immigration and customs was almost impossible as the ladies negotiated their way through with qat. When we finally opened the doors to the outside world, we entered into chaos as hundreds of Djiboutians negotiated prices with their little old lady dealers, who offloaded their stuff and jumped back on the plane to Dire Dawa.
We managed to get a taxi into town, only to find that five of the six hotels there were full. The sixth – the Hotel de France, if my memory is correct – was probably empty for a reason: no working air conditioners and no running water.

The next day, it was 50 C…..

By Fred Varcoe

When bones were discovered during construction on the new Olympic stadium in Tokyo, people said the Games could be cursed. It’s been a tough journey to 2021 and the cursed Olympics continue to suffer problems even as the 2020 Games start in 2021.

It’s not even Tokyo’s first cursed Olympics. There were also the 1940 Games that never happened. At the Nazi-led Berlin Olympics in 1936, the IOC in their wisdom decided to award the next Games to another militaristic, expansionist host: Tokyo. As with 2020, part of the selling point of the Japanese was to showcase Tokyo’s recovery from a devastating earthquake – the 1923 quake that levelled half the city. But, similar to 2020, the real reason was vanity and self-serving. Japan wanted to be accepted as a “first world” nation.

To this end, it figured it had to “reach out” to its neighboring countries, by attacking and colonizing them, starting with Korea. Japan’s much coveted men’s marathon gold medal in 1936 was won by a colonized Korean — Sohn Kee-chung — reluctantly representing his oppressors. In 1937, Japan initiated a war with China and this proved costly, literally. The government decided it couldn’t afford to wage war and host the Olympics, so it went with the choice it thought it would do better in – war – and informed the IOC that it no longer wanted to host the 1940 Olympic Games – but would be interested at a later date when it had finished subjugating East Asia. The Games were handed to Helsinki but were eventually cancelled due to the war in Europe.

 

Getting the 1964 Olympics so soon after waging an inhumane war against the world was, perhaps, another odd decision by the IOC, but it satisfied the organization’s remit to spread the Games around the world and enabled Japan to believe it was, or could be, a first-tier nation. Japan embarked on a massive modernization program, hoping to impress the world. In the end, Japan hosted a splendid and successful Games and achieved its goals. For the 2020 Games of 2021, the best Tokyo can hope for is survival.

While there was an inevitable wave of excitement after Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Games, a bumbling, incoherent government led by a bumbling, incoherent prime minister and a dithering, out-of-touch Games Organizing Committee led by a dithering, out-of-touch ex-prime minister led to a series of incomprehensible and almost comical decisions.

Arguably, the most egregious decision was made by then-Prime Minister and Olympic cheerleader Shinzo Abe when he scrapped the design of the new Olympic Stadium. Tokyo had chosen to go with a stunning design by world-famous and award-winning architect Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-born British woman, to replace the 1964 Olympic Stadium, which was well past its sell-by date. Hadid’s design would have seen a beautiful, 21st-century stadium emerge in its place. It was the kind of stadium that Olympics are made for and it was perfect for Blade Runner Tokyo. Her design hit all the right buttons: spectacular, original, big, on budget. Well, on budget until it went out to tender to Japan’s extravagant construction companies. The costs ballooned, the media started to complain and Prime Minister Abe, sensing political capital, pulled the plug on the Hadid stadium. The job was handed to established Japanese architect Kengo Kuma – one of many who had complained about Hadid’s design – whose concept was so utilitarian, it has been likened to an oversized toilet.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Tokyo’s bid was based on a number of falsehoods. The first, famously spoken by Abe, was that the problems surrounding the Fukushima nuclear plant were under control and that the Tokyo Olympics would be the “Recovery and Reconstruction Games,” with a special emphasis on Fukushima. He knew the problems surrounding the devastated nuclear plant were ongoing and unresolved, and the residents of the prefecture were still suffering, with thousands living in temporary housing. The cleanup of the nuclear plant will take at least 50 years. In April this year the government approved the dumping of over a million tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. Fukushima Prefecture got to host the first events of the 2020 Games, two days before the Opening Ceremony. As a sop to its years of suffering, it hosted a few baseball and softball matches at one of the most remote baseball stadiums in the country, in fact so remote there was a bear scare on the opening day.

The second major falsehood was that the climate in Tokyo in late July and August would be “moderate.” July, August and September are the hottest months of the year in Japan. And it’s very hot. In 2019, the temperature in Tokyo reached close to 41 celsius on July 23. In the six days before that, according to The Mainichi newspaper, 94 people died and tens of thousands had to be treated in hospital for heat-related problems. Such were the concerns of the organizers last year, they opted to move the marathon races – one of the premier events for Japanese sports fans – to Sapporo in Hokkaido, where they are hoping it will be cooler. But last year, Hokkaido, usually the coolest place in Japan, set a record temperature in May of 39.5 C, more than two degrees higher than the previous record. The 1964 Games took place in October for the simple reason that it is cooler then.

The actual bid and the budget were, unsurprisingly, wholly inaccurate. The initial estimate of costs was $7.5 billion. Last year’s postponement cost at least $3 billion and the official estimates now predict costs of $16 billion. Unofficially, the Games are likely to cost much more than that, possibly even double according to some estimates. Early on, Tokyo sought to cut costs by changing the bid outline and using existing or cheaper venues while obstinately refusing to trim the sports program. After initially considering an existing venue, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike agreed to build a new venue for volleyball, which is just around the corner from the new aquatics center. Other sports will use existing venues, some outside of Tokyo.

Due to COVID-19, spectators have been ruled out. A number of surveys in Japan have indicated that 60-80 percent of Japanese wanted the Games canceled or postponed, largely due to ongoing concerns over COVID-19. While Japan has suffered far less in the pandemic than other countries, this is seen by its citizens as more by luck than judgement. No one knows why the infection rate appears to be low in Japan, but with the Olympics approaching, that rate has risen sharply, putting pressure on a health system that isn’t designed to cope with a pandemic. Tokyo has been under a state of emergency for much of 2021, while in other parts of Japan, people were dying at home because of a lack of hospital beds. One hospital in western Tokyo put up posters demanding that the Games be canceled and these sentiments have grown stronger by the day. Japanese people are afraid the Olympics could turn into a super-spreader event and make a bad situation uncontrollable. To make matters worse, Japan’s vaccination program has been a disaster, with only 17 percent of the population getting fully vaccinated by July 7, compared to 48 percent in the United States and 52 percent in the United Kingdom.

The government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has been under constant fire for seemingly putting the Olympics ahead of the welfare of Japan’s people. Whether true or not, the perception remains that the government were going to hold the Games at any cost. It didn’t help that the main liaison between the government and the Games had to resign. Former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori stepped down as president of the Tokyo Organizing Committee in February after making inappropriate remarks about women. Mori may have been idiotic but he was a smooth conduit for the Organizing Committee to reach the ears of government. His replacement, seven-time Olympian and current lawmaker Seiko Hashimoto, does at least have Olympic credentials and one of her first moves was to add 12 women to the Executive Board.

But Mori wasn’t the only victim of bad judgement. Hiroshi Sasaki, the executive creative director for all four 2020 ceremonies, was also forced out after floating the idea of dressing up a well-known, plus-size entertainer as a pig and calling her “Olympig.” The Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Committee fired Kobayashi Kentaro as show director of the 2020 Opening and Closing Ceremonies two days before the Opening Ceremony for a joke about the Holocaust that he made 23 years ago. An early casualty in the Olympic process was the proposed logo for the Tokyo Games. Kenjiro Sano’s design turned out to be almost identical to that of the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium, so out went Sano and “his” design. Automaker Toyota announced it would not air TV commercials related to the Games in Japan. And in a follow-up to the stadium controversy, architect Kengo Kuma was accused of stealing the best bits from Zaha Hadid’s design, but the finished stadium was dull enough for people to realize that it was actually quite different.

Even nature wouldn’t cooperate with the Games. In August 2019, a Paralympic triathlon test event was canceled due to E. coli bacteria in the water, which was also close to the maximum allowable temperature. Triathletes who had managed to swim through Tokyo’s murky waters complained that it smelled like a toilet. Scientists and coaches suggested that the events should be relocated, but the Organizing Committee said measures would be taken to alleviate the problems before the Olympics.

While almost any major sporting event has problems – Rio, for example, had plenty – Tokyo has managed to shoot itself in the foot so often, it’s barely able to walk. Poor leadership and poor decisions have left the organizers with red faces on too many occasions. If the Tokyo Olympics are “cursed,” it’s been a self-inflicted curse.

 

By Fred Varcoe 

The Olympic Games were meant to highlight what a fabulous place Japan is, how its economy is not really shit, how the streets are clean, the people friendly and life is just a fantasy.

Well, the reality is most of that is just a fantasy.

Just 100 meters from the new, unspectacular Olympic Stadium, a Frenchman is staging a hunger strike. Vincent Fichot’s wife stole their children and he hasn’t seen them for three years.

While Japan loves to promote its cuteness and fluffiness, the reality of life in Japan is that it has serious flaws, most notably in its judicial system. Carlos Ghosn fled not because he thought he might be found guilty of what was a minor crime, but because the judicial system sets out to pre-judge and pre-punish those who cross the invisible line of social wrong. If you are the nail that sticks up, you will be smacked down into submission.

To say the rulings on family matters are odd would be an insult to odd. They are inhumane.

Japan does not subscribe to the notion that divorced parents can jointly raise their kids. In most cases, one parent gets to keep the kids, the other is told to fuck off forever.

When former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s wife was pregnant with their third child, the slimeball politician decided to get a divorce. Usually, the mother gets to keep the kids, but as Koizumi is a slimeball politician, his sons were delivered to him. Then, slimeball that he is, he tried to grab son No. 3 as soon as it came out of the womb. This time, he was unsuccessful, so he cut off son No. 3 and has refused to meet him ever since.

As a married man, I can imagine the need for some parents to divorce, but as a father, I can’t ever imagine divorcing my child.

Vincent Fichot is not alone. Some 150,000 children are divorced from a parent every year in Japan. Australian Scott McIntyre was jailed for 45 days just for going to his in-laws’ apartment as he searched for his kids.

Fichot has sought help from French President Emanuel Macron, the EU and the United Nations. All have condemned Japan for its heartlessness. Japan’s response: “We don’t care.” The Justice Minister even refuses to acknowledge the issue.

When Japanese citizens were kidnapped by North Korea, it was a massive issue. How ironic that it was Father-of-the-Year and de facto child kidnapper Junichiro Koizumi who helped get some of Japan’s citizens returned. When two Americans helped free Carlos Ghosn from its penal hostage justice, Japan threw a tantrum and demanded Ghosn was returned. When that failed, it demanded the people who freed Ghosn be effectively kidnapped to Japan to face its unjust justice system.

When children are kidnapped against the law, Japan turns a blind eye to justice.

When I was young, comic books depicted Japanese soldiers as the most evil people on the planet. In Japan, old soldiers never die; my guess is they join the Justice Ministry.

 

 

 

By Fred Varcoe


Wouldn’t it be nice to sympathize with Naomi Osaka? At least then I’d be on a bandwagon with thousands of others. People unrelated to tennis or journalism are falling over themselves to give her a figurative hug – and a free pass for everything she says.

Let’s take law professor Scott Douglas Gerber writing possibly one of the worst sports opinion pieces ever in USA Today: “It is profoundly disturbing that Naomi Osaka felt compelled to withdraw from the French Open, one of tennis’ four Grand Slam tournaments. It is also illegal to make her feel like she needed to withdraw. Osaka had informed tournament officials that news conferences adversely impacted her mental health, and that she would be willing to be fined for not participating in them during the tournament. … Shockingly, the president of the French Tennis Federation did not agree to Osaka’s reasonable request for an accommodation.”

Let’s get one thing very clear here: The only person who says Naomi Osaka has mental health issues is Naomi Osaka herself. Not one shred of evidence has been made public that she is suffering from ongoing mental health issues. Osaka says she has suffered long “bouts of depression” since winning her first major three years ago, but they haven’t stopped her from winning three other majors since then, including the last two. I guess she usually times her bouts of depression well. This time, apparently, not so well.

Well, what is the nature of her depression? Gerber cites French law for the disabled as the reason for the organizers of the French Open breaking the law. Is Osaka a disabled person, unable to function normally? Was she disabled as she won her first-round match at Roland Garros? Did her disability prevent her from attending the press conference? Well, we don’t know because no one knows what her disability is or how bad it is. She’s probably attended a few hundred press conferences to date, so it’s strange how she’s managed to get through them during her bouts of depression.

The worry here is that she isn’t suffering from depression. I’ve know several women with severe clinical depression. Some self-harm; one was sectioned and doped up so much, she didn’t know who I was when she came out of hospital. They usually take drugs to maintain some kind of mental equilibrium. Is Osaka taking drugs for her depression?

The problem here is people have just taken Osaka’s word as gospel. She has “depression”; she has “mental health” problems. She’s disabled. She may be depressed in the more common usage of the word. Do you know anybody who’s never been depressed? And “mental health” is such a catch-all phrase. Everybody has mental health issues; it’s part of daily living. If Osaka is confusing having a bad day with mental disabilities, she is doing seriously ill people a disservice.

She blames journalists and press conferences for her anxiety. I find this very hard to believe. I have been a tennis journalist and attended hundreds of press conferences with the top players in the world. They are generally very benign affairs and usually tennis players are treated with kid gloves. As a rule, the tennis stars give us the routine answers to routine questions and everybody goes home happy. Miserable bastards like Jim Courier would say next to nothing and get out as quickly as possible. Martina Navratilova scared the pants off most journalists as she would crucify anyone who asked a dumb question.

And this gets to another point: The players are generally protected in these press conferences. The WTA are very protective of the players and players of the stature – or insecurity – of Osaka would almost always have a manager lurking in the background to make sure their client was OK. So I don’t see where Osaka’s problems are coming from. Yes, there are dumb journalists and there are dumb questions, but as Navratilova showed, the player is, or should be, in control of the press conference, not the journalists. Don’t like a question? Ram it down the throat of the journalist. No journalist wants to be shown up as an idiot. Or don’t answer or deflect questions you don’t like. You have to wonder who is advising Osaka. She’s represented by IMG, the biggest and most powerful sports agency in the world. Her dad and her sister often hold her hand at tournaments around the world. The WTA offers advice to all players on how to deal with the media. It’s not rocket science.

It’s also strange that Osaka consciously courted the media to promote Black Lives Matter at the U.S. Open, wearing face masks bearing the names of people killed by police officers in the United States. TIME magazine reported it like this: “After winning the U.S. Open’s singles tournament on Saturday, Osaka said the masks were her way of using her platform to protest this injustice and advocate that black lives matter. Asked by a reporter after the tournament what message she wanted to send, Osaka responded: ‘Well, what was the message that you got was more the question. I feel like the point is to make people start talking. I’m not sure what I would be able to do if I was in their position but I feel like I’m a vessel at this point, in order to spread awareness,’ ” So, she was saying that should be using the media for this and presumably she wasn’t anxious about doing it; she wanted to use her (media) platform. It’s also ironic that she used (social) media in Paris to announce that she didn’t want to engage with the media.

And getting back to Gerber and other Osaka apologists, she didn’t make a “reasonable request for an accommodation” regarding press conferences. She just complained about her media duties and said she wouldn’t agree to them. Effectively, she was challenging them. Not surprisingly, they challenged back. Presumably, they hadn’t been advised of Osaka’s mental health issues, so why should they believe her? She pulled back after their threat by saying: “I really want to work with the Tour to discuss ways we can make things better for the players, press and fans.” Well, OK, that does sound like IMG doing its job. If it’s Osaka talking, it sounds like bullshit. The WTA has an eight-person Players’ Council to take on grievances from the players and as a four-time major champion and the highest-paid female athlete in the world, if Osaka had taken her grievances to the Council, they would have listened.

I could be accused of making assumptions, but not as bad as those who blithely take Osaka’s side. If she has mental problems, she should be getting advice, help and treatment from friends, family, her extensive support staff and medical professionals. She shouldn’t be heaping pressure on herself by playing tennis. She’s taking a break and that makes sense. But she dug a deep hole for herself by making her claims on social media. The issues have to be raised and debated in public. Some sympathizers are saying athletes don’t need the media because they can say what they want to say on Instagram or Twitter. Well, Osaka tried that and it blew up in her face. The reason the traditional media exists is to ask questions that social media posts don’t answer and to debate issues in public. Osaka’s Paris blowup has raised more questions and that means us journalists want more answers, not less. Time for a press conference, Naomi….