What is LIV Golf aiming for?

STERLING, Va. — Bryson DeChambeau loosened up on the first tee at Virginia’s Trump National Golf Club and hit one last hard hit before teeing off to start the latest event on the Saudi-funded LIV Golf Tour. A links-style golf course stretched out in front of him, with tents and bleachers nearby and the Potomac River flowing beyond. Above him, members of the Frog-X daredevil skydiving team were windmilling their way toward the ground. Dozens of fans cheered around him as AC/DC’s “Back in Black” rang out from the back of the clubhouse owned by the president of the United States.

At exactly 1:05 p.m., colorful clouds rolled over the course, signaling a shotgun start to the tournament. As they dispersed, DeChambeau ripped the iron off the tee, the hype man yelled, and the day’s play began.

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This is a LIV golf tournament. There is many It’s happening here.

LIV Golf is facing a moment of existential crisis and/or opportunity. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the source of about $1 trillion of LIV’s financial base, announced it would cut off the flow of funds after this season. The move was a shock to players and officials alike, with all involved now scrambling to find a way forward or an exit.

I came to Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., which is actually located in Sterling, Virginia, more than 42 miles from the White House, not to praise LIV or to bury it, but to check out the tone of the entire post-PIF news operation. What I found was a tour that was trying to resonate with American fans while also connecting deeply with its players and dancing carefully with its sponsors.

LIV has not yet defined its post-PIF identity. As long as the tour can come up with the right answer to one important question, the league has a path forward – a smaller, smaller, globe-trotting path, but a path nonetheless – what exactly is LIV Golf trying to become?

the first thing you notice Once you enter the venue for a LIV tournament, the build-out is absolute. large scale. Perched high on a bluff above the Potomac River, you can stand in the backyard of Trump National’s massive steroid-colonial-inspired clubhouse, overlooking the entire golf course. And this week, you can also see the giant hospitality tent, fan zone and bleachers surrounding the 18th hole. A pure speaker system delivers club, rock, and country music to every corner of the expansive property. IMAX-sized video screens dot the course, and LIV signage and iconography is everywhere, even on the towels in the locker rooms.

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The Saudi-era LIV was all about high-profile spending, from the Cadillac Escalade idling outside the clubhouse to the expensive cocktails on the track. If you can create a golf tournament environment out of thin air, you’re halfway to establishing the legitimacy of that tournament, right? This is the corporate version of fake it ’til you make it.

The thing is, as LIV has learned, golf tournaments are about more than just club music, flashy graphics, and bright team logos. Without history and heritage behind it, it’s as empty as a Hollywood set, and no matter how much money you spend, you can’t speedrun through history. Most of us are old enough to remember when the likes of Rahm and DeChambeau played on the PGA Tour, but LIV Golf (insert venue here) doesn’t have the same historical weight as the majors or long-standing regular-season tour events like the Memorial or Arnold Palmer Invitational.

For many people, I mean for most people? all? — However, LIV players believe that breaking with tradition is a feature, not a bug. Earlier this week, Anirban Lahiri declared, “I know at least a dozen players who would rather not play golf than return to the PGA Tour.”

What’s also notable is that no players withdrew from this week’s event, even though the PGA Tour’s current policy for returning players appears to require a one-year absence, as former LIV player Patrick Reed is currently doing. Checking the pulse of LIV players and teams at LIV events is the very definition of a biased sample, but players and team officials here in Virginia seem happy with LIV’s player-centered approach, teams, and equity offerings. (The same goes for salary, but I’ll explain more about that later.)

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“Team golf is great,” Sebastian Munoz said after his round. “I get to have my sons support me and remind me of what a great golfer I am.” “You don’t have to always look at yourself in a bad light and criticize yourself all the time. I feel like this is a nice little reminder.”

Round 1 leader Lucas Herbert elaborated on how the team aspect makes LIV stand out for players. “I’ve seen some feedback online that it might seem fake, but it’s not. It’s really real,” he said. “We really enjoy traveling together, eating dinner together, doing practice rounds together, asking each other for advice. … I’ve become a better player over the last three years, and I know it’s because of my experience on the team side. It’s a conversation we had over dinner. It’s a conversation we had over dinner. It’s a conversation we had on the plane heading to the next event. It’s invaluable.”

The famous eccentric group that makes professional golfersbeing happy enough to praise yourself is one thing. Satisfying the fans, who will now play a larger role in paying LIV’s bills, is another matter.

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LIV has struggled to connect with American fans, with ratings ranging from poor to middling decent. LIV’s true fan success has come in the traditionally underserved golf market. The tour is touting six-figure attendance figures for events in Adelaide (Australia) and South Africa.

Attendance at the Virginia event probably won’t reach that number, but the gallery around DeChambeau was pretty full. The rest of the course was fairly sparse, with plenty of room to spread out, and we didn’t have to wait at any of the concession stands, merchandise tents, or restrooms.

“You can just get up on the ropes,” Gary Preslaff, of Chevy Chase, Md., said as he walked through the first hole with his cousin, Les Levin of New Jersey. The two had been attending golf tournaments for years, Levine had a Shinnecock bag from the U.S. Open, and they both admired the look of the course and the organization of the event.

“It’s a beautiful course and easy to get into,” Levine added. (A cynic might say the logistics are much easier when you’re not dealing with Ryder Cup-level numbers, but let’s put that aside for now.)

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The cousins ​​came up with a recurring theme. Once you get in the gate and walk the course, LIV events can be a fun experience. Someone wisely made LIV’s early music less loud and obnoxious. For now, there are plenty of options for snacking and lounging throughout the course. And while LIV won’t tout this as a selling point, the sparse crowds mean it’s easy to get close to literally any player on the course, even DeChambeau.

Maybe that’s why a significant percentage of the fans I spoke to this week were attending their first golf tournament. The weather was great, the costs were reasonable, and the players we saw at Augusta National and the U.S. Open. right there …What’s not to love?

Travis Napier, of Doswell, Virginia, was walking with his wife, Connie, and came to the tournament because he is a fan of “Bryson and the Trumps.” Mary Hodger of Dumfries, Virginia, was happy to give her daughter the chance to walk around the golf course “without having to be obligated to play a full 18 holes.” It’s worth remembering that not everyone who walks through the gates of a golf course is thinking about the LIV and PGA Tour feud. Some people just want to enjoy a little golf on a sunny day. And if they pronounce it “LIV” to rhyme with “alive,” as one fan did on Friday…well, that’s easy enough to fix.

Trump National, located in the northeast corner of Washington, DC. Between the 14th and 15th holes, a giant American flag flies atop a towering flag pole. A plaque at the base of the flagpole commemorates the Civil War battle “Rivers of Blood” where “many great American soldiers, both North and South, lost their lives.” Signed by President Trump and with the vast expanse of the Potomac behind it, it is a powerful monument. It would have been even better if the combat actually happened. Civil War historians agree that no battle actually took place within 10 miles of this location.

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Declaring legitimacy is faster than waiting for it to be given, and that’s exactly what LIV did in the early days. LIV Golf masqueraded as a legitimate competitor to the PGA Tour, but what began as a Saudi vanity project turned out to be a big-capital opportunity to revamp Saudi Arabia’s image through the sport. Some people still refuse to forget. On both mornings, a small number of protesters stood outside the gates of the TNGC, and photos of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post reporter who was murdered with the consent of the Saudi ruling regime, lined the stretch of road leading to the golf club. As long as Saudi funding supported LIV, many, from protesters to prominent media figures, refused to take it seriously as a golf tour.

On the other hand, what about now? How will LIV transition to a simple golf tour once the Saudi funding runs out?

Ironically, given the timing of PIF’s departure, LIV is closer to full legitimacy as a tour than ever before. After years of crying out to be taken seriously, LIV has finally made significant progress, earning points in the Official World Golf Rankings and being thanked by Augusta National by name during the Green Jacket Ceremony earlier this year. Additionally, they have two of the best players in the world, both of whom have the potential to win major championships.

LIV’s public relations and operations staff are committed to embracing the traditions and techniques of a regular golf tournament. They prepared tournament fact sheets about course setup, statistics, and agronomy (Trump National’s fairways are 0.4-inch bentgrass, and the rough is a mix of fescue and bluegrass, but you already knew that.) The tee sheet includes shotgun starting positions for every player, from stars like Rahm and DeChambeau to names like Anthony Kim and Sergio Garcia, to golf’s version of Let’s Remember Some Guy (Paul). Casey, Charles Howell III, Graham McDowell).

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But go back to that opening tee shot and the colors and screams surrounding it. While the spectacle is an integral part of the LIV experience, it also completely undermines the tour’s legitimacy claim. With all due respect to the kids at the Range Goats Petting Zoo, there’s a reason you don’t see those kinds of attractions at PGA Tour events: dunk tanks and DJs.

A lot of this push-pull is in the tour’s DNA. In addition to being too arrogant, LIV’s original organizers seem to have fundamentally misunderstood that there is a big difference between the kind of golf we want to play (laid-back, casual, with Bluetooth speakers in our carts) and the kind of golf we want to watch. We expect a certain standard of etiquette at professional golf events that we do not expect of ourselves.

Today, Savannah Banana is a pioneer in fan-first sports entertainment. It’s definitely fun, but it’s also a far cry from real baseball. LIV Golf still doesn’t come close to Bananas on the Jazz Hands scale despite some raunchy dance videos on social media, but then again, there’s a reason you don’t hear Guns N’ Roses or see fireworks at other tour tournaments.

Simply put, LIV is currently too much of a spectacle to be a serious golf tour, and too compromising and controversial to be a welcoming venue for all. If it is to grow into a global F1-level phenomenon, LIV will need to choose a lane.

at the end of Thursday’s round — A day at LIV golf often lasts a neat four-and-a-half hours — Tyrrell Hutton came to the LIV Media Center for a post-round interview. At Trump National, media and LIV officials were working in the club’s cavernous indoor tennis center, and Hatton fielded questions while overlooking portraits of Serena Williams and Andre Agassi in a mullet.

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“It’s a big room, but not too many people,” Hutton said with a smile. “Budget cuts?”

He was joking, but the blade was coming. It is impossible for LIV to continue functioning at this level of spending. The league has already burned through $5 billion to $8 billion in Saudi funding in its first four years.

It’s more complicated than this, but in essence, LIV is the equivalent of a college student who just graduated and is no longer on his parents’ paycheck, who moves from his parents’ house to a small apartment, and from home-cooked meals to ramen noodles. Adjustment required.

And if LIV is truly entering the ramen era, smaller wallets, smaller footprints, and lower-profile tournament venues could be coming, unless sponsors can claw back the significant headroom left by PIF’s departure. LIV could disappear within six months, it could survive by signing contracts with various legacy tours, or it could survive the upcoming shakeout in the golf industry and find itself in a better position in image terms than it currently is.

Every round of the LIV tournament begins with fireworks. But for LIV itself, the real fireworks are about to begin.