Nobody cares … except for the person who cared enough to type the words ‘nobody cares'. I bet there's a person typing 'nobody cares' into Facebook right now that hasn't read this yarn.

In fact, let's do a test: if you don’t care and you're about to write 'nobody cares' in Facebook, include this word in your comment: 'paradox'.

Or don’t, I don't care, ho-ho.

We talk, of course, of LIV Golf, which kicks off in Adelaide on Friday for its second annual music festival with a golf tournament attached. Or is it a golf tournament with a music festival? Or both?

It can be both, can't it? Can't we have nice things?

LIV Golf in Adelaide last year was really quite good, as 75,000 fans would attest. They’re tipping 100,000-plus this go-round, which for a golf tournament in Australia that’s not the President’s Cup with Tiger Woods, Shane Warne and Ash Barty inside the ropes, is really very good.

Dustin Johnson's playing golf in your city. You don't care enough to get along for a look? PHOTO: Getty Images

The weather’s looking good. The stars are in town. The Ripper GC team have purchased new shoes for the ceremonial skull. And our man Greg Norman, Big Sharky, is stalking the fairways and lending his larger-than-life star power to the whole shebang.

Too bad nobody cares.

People will care if the Ripper boys win and they all skull beer from their spiffing new Footjoys, all at once, on stage, with firecrackers and smoke and champagne ejaculating on the Great White Shark. People will care then. People will lose their very minds.

You still won't care? You won't care if an Aussie wins?

Really?

Answer this: do you care who wins the Honda Classic, if it's not an Australian? Do you care who wins the Canadian Open? The Texas Open? The Rocket Mortgage, the Barbasol, the dear old John Deere? If it's not an Australian?

Now answer this, top of head, no Google: who won the Texas Open three weeks ago? 

Bryson DeChambeau is playing golf in your city. You like golf but you don't care? PHOTO: Getty Images

Sure, but the Texas Open has legacy and LIV Golf doesn't, right? Walter Hagen won it in 1923. And Ben Hogan won it and Byron Nelson and Sam Snead. And in 2024 it was won by two-legged greyhound Akshay Bhatia, props if you remembered.

It's true LIV Golf doesn't have legacy, but how can it? It's five minutes old. To have legacy you need history. And to have history you have to have existed for more than five minutes.

Let's have this conversation in five years and 10 years and 50 years when 82-year-old Talor Gooch is remembered as Hagen or Snead or Arthur Beetson in Origin 1.  

It’s an exhibition? Maybe. But if LIV Golf's an exhibition, then most if not all professional golf tournaments are exhibitions. National opens, the Players, even the majors. If you put on prize money and charge people to watch, it's an exhibition of golfing skills with a winner at the end.

Local support for the Australians will be vocal at The Grange. If they win it'll be national news. PHOTO: Getty Images

And this before you talk of appearance fees. Is the Australian Open an exhibition because Golf Australia shouted Michael Blok a first-class golf holiday? By our definitiion, yes, it is. But it's pretty cool, too, right? Exhibitions are good.

LIV Golf’s problem – well, it’s not a problem if you’re here at The Grange in Adelaide about to watch world class players hitting ridiculously great golf shots around a course with shades of Melbourne’s Sandbelt while a music festival pumps out tunes and everyone drinks beer from shoes – is that it’s new and different.

And many people don’t like new or different. It can be confusing. People can be used to a structure, a firmament – in golf's case four majors, a PGA Tour, and an Australian ‘Summer of Golf’ that lasts two weeks.

Then LIV Golf came along with its doof-doof music and players in shorts and shotgun starts and 54 holes and limited fields and no cuts, a fever dream devised by a Great White Shark and funded by the petro-dollars of swarthy men with black beards from the Middle East.

You think that wouldn’t frighten a conservative sub-section of dear old golf? You think that wouldn't invite blowback?

It did, and many people wrote mean things.

People have written mean things about LIV Golf front man Greg Norman. PHOTO: LIV Golf.

But then they wrote them about State of Origin when it turned up in 1980. No way they’ll go hard against each other, they’re team-mates. It'll be an exhibition. Then Arthur Beetson’s forearm met Mick Cronin’s jaw, and 44 years later State of Origin is the whale that ate rugby league.

They said it of World Series Cricket when 37 people turned up to VFL Park for a ‘Super Test’ in 1977. By 1980 Kerry Packer opened the gates at the Sydney Cricket Ground, and Richie Benaud's beige jacket made Billy Birmingham the wealthiest piss-taker in Australia.  

They said it of the first Superbowl, the first Olympic Games, the first game of the 152-year-old FA Cup. Each rocked the Casbah, each came at people with a new normal, each copped blowback.

But at least it showed people cared.