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LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman greets fans in the gallery during Day Three of the LIV Golf Invitational in Tucson, Ariz., on March 19.Christian Petersen/Getty Images

The LIV Golf Tour just had a big announcement about its tournament in Singapore in a few weeks. The Chainsmokers will be playing. Not golf. Music. Of a sort.

If you feel the need to schedule a rave in the middle of your live sports event, you’ve got an audience problem.

There is some good news on that front – LIV now has a TV deal. And some bad news – the viewership numbers are within the margin of error. Its broadcaster, Nexstar, described itself as “thrilled” to average 289,000 U.S. viewers for a recent tournament. Typically, more Americans are watching Mama’s Family at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday.

LIV has created a new sort of sporting experience – sports no one wants. It’s not a sports league. It’s the Harlem Globetrotters, without the fun. It’s a travelling comedy show, minus the jokes. It’s ridiculous by design.

This explains the chatter heading into next weekend’s Masters. There is only one way for LIV to justify its colossal expenditure on what it has turned into second-tier talent – by ruining things for everyone else.

“I think for us, internally, there’s a lot of chatter going around about ‘these guys don’t play real golf any more,’” LIV’s sellout poster boy, Cameron Smith, told reporters. “And I think that’s BS, to be honest. And we just want to show people that.”

‘Real golf?’ What’s real about it? Does every fifth ball explode on contact?

Golf is a skill, not a sport. This impression is deepened every time some commentator hectors you about how difficult it is to walk all 18 holes at Augusta National. Yes, it’s pretty hilly. Is that really a problem for a guy who doesn’t carry his own equipment? If there is such a thing as real golf, it’s even more real for the caddies.

But you take Smith’s point (that he makes in a backward way) – the golf he plays now is Tin Cup golf. He and his friends are the world’s highest paid barnstormers. They don’t even play 72 holes at LIV tournaments, presumably because they can’t be sure whatever audience they do attract will hang around that long.

If the goal here was trying to prove who is ‘best’, that fight’s already over. LIV golfers cannot be taken seriously because LIV doesn’t take golf seriously. Its highest aspiration is to play spoiler. Which is why some of the golfers are starting to sound like Hacksaw Jim Duggan doing promo before appearing at the Wichita Harvest Festival.

“I think it’s going to be more fun knowing that they hate us,” LIV’s Joaquin Niemann told Golf.com. “Then go to the majors and beat them.”

‘Hate’? Isn’t that a strong word? You leaving made all the rest of these guys much richer. Your greed just put their great-great-grandkids through college. If anything, they should buy you all watches.

Also, Joaquin Niemann? Seriously? This guy has never finished top 20 in a major. And now he’s out here waving his big club around, talking about how much fun it will be to beat the PGA? I’m assuming he doesn’t mean himself personally. He must mean someone else on Team LIV.

At the best of times, there is a whisper-thin line separating the high drama of pro sports from camp. Golf is crossing it. We’re talking about one element of Susan Sontag’s definition: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks.”

Sontag had examples, all of which are now tragically dated – Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Flash Gordon comics, “stag movies seen without lust,” etc.

Sontag was too much of an aesthete to be sporty, but if she were updating that list, LIV would fit nicely on it. What is more camp than a totally legitimate ‘golf tour’ playing ‘real golf’ against people who ‘hate’ them?

Pro golfers fear only one thing – not being taken seriously. That’s why they wear so much performance fabric.

LIV didn’t set out to highlight that fear, but that’s what it’s done. Now you’ve got the guy who won last year’s Open reminding people that the golf he plays is the super serious, honest-to-God, genuine article. If you have to say it, man, then it’s not true.

This crisis of institutional confidence could be contagious. If I were the majors, I’d want to keep it as far away from my business as possible.

But golf can’t help itself – it wants the Housewives of Augusta atmo LIV will bring. Maybe Rory McIlroy can put Brooks Koepka in a headlock down by Amen Corner or something.

When the inevitable outrage happens, golf can make a tutting noise and wonder who let these rubes in. If a PGA member wins the Masters, order is maintained. If a LIV golfer does it, the barbarians are at the gates. It’s a perpetual content-generation machine.

The gears may turn forever, but is the device sustainable? As LIV sinks further into irrelevance, it’s getting harder to imagine how that would work.

My suspicion is that this experiment with keeping LIV at arm’s length, except for those moments when it’s in a bear hug, won’t last long. LIV is everything about modern golf exaggerated to the grotesque – the commercialism, the avarice, the grubby connection to politics.

The people who play in it can’t explain why they chose to do that. They don’t have any idea beyond the money, and they know it doesn’t sound right if they say, “The money.”

So they are forced to make up this nonsense about showing the PGA who’s who at the Masters. Who’s who at what? This is an individual sport. There are no teams. You’re not anti-heroes. Nobody feels bad for you because you aren’t taken seriously any more. Rather the opposite.

What the majors might spend some time thinking about is the impression left on their customers.

When you peel away the self-importance, professional sports are absurd. Everyone knows that. But you don’t say it. You certainly don’t set out to demonstrate it.

You don’t want people thinking too hard about what this all means (i.e. nothing). If they do, they might find something that is actually real to do in their leisure time.

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