Liv Golf has spent hundreds of millions to attract big names like Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia and Jon Rahm. The question is now whether this investment will pay this weekend when the rupture tour is televised for the first time on Fox. (Photo of Montana Pritchard / Liv Golf via AP)
(Associated Press)
The most fascinating moments in golfy often do not come on Sunday of nine years. Some of the best dramas in the game take place two days earlier, Friday afternoon, when desperate players to do the weekend were crushing to make the cup. Each shot counts, each decision leads to ramifications for the tournament and a career. The cut line is cold, ruthless and final.
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Liv Golf is not quite faced with a cup line this week, but it will do the trick until a real arrives. Now in its fourth year of competition, the escape tour supported by Saoudie will receive its first real national close up, on television broadcast during a course belonging to the President of the United States. If Liv will become something other than a well funded salary for a few dozen players, it is its best opportunity for national awareness.
At the same time, Liv faces growing opposite winds while he tries to sail in a golf landscape in connection with the PGA Tour or parallel. The financial impact of the creation of an entire world tour from zero, paying the best players in the world of hundreds of millions to attract them, becomes clear, as is the waiting strategy of the PGA Tour.
Liv's biggest challenge: get eye globes
Each sport with national or global ambitions is as strong as its dissemination agreement. For most of its existence, LIV has sewn a series of networks, broadcast and streaming, to carry its tournaments. So far this season, LIV has had a hard time attracting American viewers largely at the start of the end of the evening / early in the morning for its international events.
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It changes this weekend. Liv plays at Doral in Miami with a favorable broadcast window, and for the first time, it will make its debut on Fox – the broadcasting chain, not a cable ramification. This gives Liv a much easier way to millions of potential viewers than, let's say, “everyone has YouTube!” not. In addition, Liv Doral will face one of the small events of the PGA Tour. If there is a time for Jon Rahm, Bryson Dechambeau, Brooks Koepka and Al to claim occasional viewers, it's this weekend.
Then there is the question of President Donald Trump. The polarizing president arrived in Doral on Thursday while the effects of his price imposed to cross the news cycle and sent the fall in the stock market. The presence of Trump will attach Liv to a segment of his base, while making him toxic to the president's opposition. For a sport that sought to remain publicly apolitical – without sensations offensive one or the other of the parties – the narrow alignment of LIV with Trump brings a set of political and public challenges with which the tour is not confronted.
President Donald Trump and his son, Eric Trump, lead to a golf cart after arriving on Marine One during the Liv golf tournament to be held in his national Trump Doral Golf Club this weekend. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
(Joe Raedle via Getty Images)
Internal dissent, external pressure
The key sale argument of Liv has always been his players – the talent of a marquee, he poached the PGA Tour, including Rahm, Dechambeau, Koepka and Phil Mickelson. These stars were attracted with nine -digit check vouchers several years ago and are now playing on contracts with an expiration date. When Koepka was interviewed recently about the possibility of staying on Liv or returning to the PGA Tour, It was as un committed as it could beA strange tactic for the captain of a team with direct interest in Liv's long -term success.
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Asked directly this week on Liv's state, Koepka replied: “I think we all hoped that it would have been a little further, and it is not a secret.” He then softened the edge a little: “No matter where you are, you always hope that everything goes further. But they make progress, and that seems to go in the right direction.”
Earlier this week, The Guardian reported The SAUDI Public Investment Fund, the donor of the LIVE, approached the tour with an offer: an investment of $ 1.5 billion, conditioned on the continuous existence of Liv and the installation of the Governor of PIF, Yasir al-Rumayyan, on the political council of the tour. According to the Guardian, the tour has rejected this offer squarely, leaving the short -term possibility of an agreement a lot in limbo.
Last month, before the players' championship, the jay monahan tour note noted that “we think there is room to integrate important aspects of Liv golf in the PGA Tour platform” – a positioning that seemed to indicate the tour believes that it now has the upper hand and can dictate the terms of all alignment between the two visits. If that means the end of Liv golf, in the eyes of the tour, too bad.
In business, as in golf, winning a lot of evils. This weekend marks the best opportunity of LIV in his short story of winning a victory against the PGA Tour and to settle as a viable golf entity, rather than a very expensive curiosity. The best players – many of which on Liv's alignment – have passed when the issues are the highest. We are about to discover how Liv himself manages the moment.
