Playing Dirty Q&A: Inside the new book about the PGA Tour-LIV Golf battle and Scottish golf

Golf Digest senior writer Joel Beall’s debut book, "Playing Dirty: Rediscovering Golf's Soul in Scotland in an Age of Sportswashing and Civil War” hits bookshelves this week. The book is an examination on professional golf’s civil war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the collateral damage of that battle and how the game can survive this conflict. Beall sat down with New York Times best-selling author (and friend?) Shane Ryan to discuss the book, the state of professional golf, some of the book’s compelling figures and the process of putting it all together.

Shane: Joel, thanks for taking the time today to chat about your excellent new book. Not only is it a phenomenal read, but a timely one. One of the great parts about Rory's Masters win is that it gave us an actual uplifting storyline in professional golf, because we certainly needed it in what has been a pretty dismal time of greed and strife off the course. You've been on the front lines of covering all this stuff for Digest over the past few years, and it's clear that this book is not only a way for you to take stock of everything that has happened, but to take a journey to find what's great about golf. Tell me about that desire on a personal front—your need to touch base with the soul of the sport, what drove that, and how it led you to Scotland.

Joel: I know it’s against everything in your being to say something nice to me, so I sincerely appreciate the kind words.

Over the past few years a number of folks had reached out about crafting a forensic account of the PGA Tour-LIV battle, but the cold mechanics of this schism left me hollow—partly because I've been entrenched in this reporting for four-plus years, and partly because documenting this conflict has been soul-crushing. What seemed more interesting and valuable was the question of why any of this truly matters, creating something that cuts through time rather than withering with the news cycle. To illustrate how absurd and troubling this civil war has been, I needed to contrast it with golf at its purest. Each chapter views the professional game's conflicts alongside their antidotes in Scotland, illuminating not just problems but revelations about the path forward.

I also want to make clear this isn’t a book about "finding myself" in Scotland—that journey has been masterfully chronicled, most notably in Michael Bamberger's "To the Linksland." Instead, I wanted to focus on the characters and towns and clubs that embody Scottish golf's essence, that protect golf as the people's game. Through this lens I confronted the urgent questions of our sport's trajectory, who truly holds the power to shape its future, and whether the soul of the game can truly be bought.

Shane: I thought you did a really great job balancing those two elements, the heart and soul of the game and the people you found in Scotland against the breakdown of the LIV-Tour debacle. It's almost two books in one, but it meshes really well. Just from a writer's perspective, walk me through your mindset on bringing both stories to the forefront, and how the contrast made both sides stand out even more than they might have on their own.

Joel: Before the cold war erupted in professional golf, I'd always found it infuriating that American golf exists primarily as an aspirational pursuit. Our best courses hide behind exclusive membership barriers—filtering access by both wealth and demographics. The public sector offers little relief, with quality, affordable golf remaining elusive. Public courses rarely foster genuine appreciation for the game's traditions, instead becoming playgrounds where casual participants care more about cruising in carts for three hours than understanding the game. Scotland presented a striking counterpoint—a truly democratic golfing culture. There, players from all socioeconomic backgrounds play, and play together. Club membership costs are accessible (under $800 annually), and a collective reverence for the game permeates every interaction. They just get it. This inclusivity resonates deeply with me; having worked maintenance crews as a kid just to gain access to courses, Scotland's approach represents what golf should be.

Enter LIV Golf—not a legitimate professional league, but a calculated soft power maneuver by a foreign government. They weaponized our sport for political influence, recruiting professional players as well-compensated pawns. Beyond those who jumped ship, numerous figures in the game exploited the disruption to enrich themselves, with no disregard for what their actions were doing to golf as a whole. It would have been easy to launch into righteous condemnation of the entire thing—but such broad-stroke criticism accomplishes little. Instead, I thought surgical precision would be more effective in making lasting points. The Scottish model of democratic, accessible golf provides the perfect window through which to view this conflict. It illuminates just how the LIV-PGA Tour battle has disconnected from golf's core values—a game that once belonged to communities now reduced to corporate leverage and political currency. The greatest tragedy isn't the professional schism itself, but how completely this power struggle has abandoned the principle that golf belongs to everyone. When we measure this conflict against Scotland's tradition, we see not just competing tours, but competing visions for what golf represents in society.

Sadly, my only Loch Ness update is getting lost in the area as I was trying to find Bob MacIntyre’s hometown.

Shane: I mostly agree with your take on American golf, but I want to know where you're seeing three hour rounds played. Regardless, the way you wove those two disparate elements was great. I want to stay in Scotland for a moment before we get back to the more fun part, LIV. Clearly this book was a boondoggle designed to land you a lot of free Scottish golf, so please tell me which courses were your favorite? And without giving key parts of the book away, can you highlight a person or two who sticks out as a great personality? And on that front, did you come away with any broad strokes thoughts on how Scottish people in general are different from Americans?

Joel: I meant three hour nines! And believe it or not (and if my bosses are reading this, they'll firmly be on the "not" side), initially I didn't have much golf planned. The itinerary was built around interviews and visits, but unanimously, every person I interviewed suggested having our discussions over a round of golf. I certainly didn't protest.

For the best courses, I'm torn between North Berwick and Brora. North Berwick is easier to appreciate at first glance—it might be the most purely enjoyable course in the world. But Brora speaks to me in a way that's difficult to articulate (despite dedicating an entire chapter to it). I could happily play just those two courses for the rest of my life. Cruden Bay, Nairn, and Crail follow closely behind. As for unexpected gems, Dunaverty was a complete revelation—some of the most spectacular views in Scotland, an incredibly fun layout, and utterly unique. How it hasn't become a perennial top-10 must-visit destination remains a mystery to me.

Regarding personalities, Robert Strang was exactly the type of character, and Carradale the exact type of place, I dreamed of discovering when conceptualizing this book. Both seem almost too perfect to be real—if I'd invented them, readers would dismiss them as fiction. Robert is Carradale's sole employee and something of a local legend, while Carradale itself might be the finest nine-hole course in golf. Just writing this makes me long to return. I'll stop there to avoid spoilers, as it's one of my favorite sections of the book.

Speaking broadly about Scottish people—there were no "turkeys"—not a single difficult personality or jerk among them. Everyone was down-to-earth and welcoming, more interested in genuine conversation than dominating discussions or waiting for their turn to speak. They can certainly drink us under the table. And when it comes to golf, they care nothing about scores. Their priorities are "how fast did you play?" and "did you have fun?" Everything else is just noise.

Shane: I love that. I will be writing the rest of my questions from a plane to Scotland. Tell my wife and kids I love them, and I'm sorry. OK, on to the tour-LIV stuff. I think "surgical precision" is a great term for how you tackled this, and while you definitely give the most insightful critique of LIV that I've read, I think a lot of people, particularly our friends the LIV bots on social media, will be surprised with how critical you are of the tour, and not in a "both sides" way, but in a legitimate, incisive analysis. I'm curious if your opinion on any of this stuff changed while you researched and wrote the book, or if you pretty much knew what you knew going based on the years of reporting you'd already done.

Joel: I had some idea of what I wanted to tackle—it sort of has to be when you are planning out a book for a publisher—but some of my big-scale thoughts were altered during the research process. There were definitely things that I uncovered that would have made for sensational headlines and led to aggregated stories, but I worried those items would have overshadowed the message and mediation each subject was after. So instead, I used those pieces of information to help form the general thought process. And selfihsly, it’s always nice to have a little ammo in your pocket whenever these subjects inevitabily come back complaining; it helps them see I wasn’t after a tabloid story, but a greater truth.

For example, one chapter analyzes how Brora survived financial hardship made worse by the pandemic while staying true to itself, while the PGA Tour survived by essentially selling itself to the very money it told its players not to take. While it’s easy to criticize that decision (and we have!), I’ve yet to hear a sound argument for what Monahan should have done in the first place. Taking the Saudi money in 2018 would have just has problematic then as it is now. I genuinely think Monahan tries to do right by his players and his league, and everyone who works for him speaks to who he is as a good person. Conversely, how that all went about was a mess, and if you try to take a moral stand and abandon it … sometimes you have to wonder what survival means if you had to abandon what you stood for.

Shane: There's just such an absence of uplifting material on that front, and I like that you didn't shy from that truth. Which leads me to my next thought ... of all the people you profiled, I think Michael Forbes was my favorite, and worth the price of admission alone. Do you want to give the brief rundown of who he is, and how unlike so many people in the story of professional golf, he actually stood up to a powerful figure?

Joel: Forbes is a Scottish national hero, a principled man who refused to sell his generational farmland to a golf developer beginning in 2008. The conflict escalated as Forbes alleged the developer employed underhanded tactics to force him off his family property. These included cutting water access to his land and orchestrating visits from police and health officials following anonymous reports claiming animal cruelty. While publicly attempting to humiliate Forbes, the developer privately increased offers for the coveted land. Yet Forbes remained unmoved, standing on principle. Today, more than two decades later, Forbes still resides on his property, while the developer ascended to become President of the United States.

This situation invites closer examination of President Donald Trump, who has emerged as a surprisingly central figure in the golf world's division. To be clear—this represents an apolitical analysis of Trump, viewed strictly through golf and the tour-LIV conflict. Trump's trajectory in this world is fascinating: he transformed from an outcast in the golf establishment (with the tour relocating its Miami event from Doral, the PGA of America withdrawing his PGA Championship, and the R&A refusing to return the Open to Turnberry) to forming an alliance with LIV Golf (as the Saudi Public Investment Fund recognized him as a potential pathway to presidential influence—a calculation that proved accurate). Now, remarkably, the tour seeks Trump's assistance in brokering a deal and navigating Department of Justice approval. Should this agreement materialize, Trump's golf properties will almost certainly return to the tour and major championship rotation. Whether one views this as appropriate depends largely on personal perspective (and perhaps political leaning), though it remains striking that—unlike Forbes—virtually everyone in the golf world ultimately had to accommodate Trump's influence.

Shane: Crazy indeed. Joel, this is your first book, so for our last question I wanted to ask how you found the process, whether it makes you want to do more books or never write anything longer than a post-it note again, and what were your favorite and least favorite parts of the whole deal. Also, I'd like to open it to you to say anything else you think needs saying about "Playing Dirty," and to reiterate my congratulations on a job really well done. I hope everyone reads this, but ideally from the local library, because I don't want you to get very rich and lord it over me.

Joel: Honestly? I loved every second of it. At 38, I've been devouring golf books since I was 6, always dreaming of writing one myself. When the perfect opportunity finally arrived, I was thrilled—and admittedly terrified. It’s an odd time in journalism; you never know if you'll get another chance at this.

So without sounding self-important, whether 100 or 100,000 people buy it, I simply wanted to create something I'd be proud of, something that would have captivated me as a reader. I believe I've done that. The process has enhanced my creativity too; I think one reason we connect as friends is we don’t really beat our chest about our work. But crafting that piece on Rory after his Masters victory, and feeling genuinely satisfied with the result—I don't think it would have been nearly as compelling without the experience of writing this book.

My greatest hope is that readers enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Golf Digest senior writer Joel Beall’s debut book, Playing Dirty: Rediscovering Golf's Soul in Scotland in an Age of Sportswashing and Civil War, is on sale now at BackNinePress and all major bookstores.