LIV: Stars Gone Missing
LIV golf has slowly but surely lured and extracted a proportion of the World’s best golfers away from the U.S.-centric PGA Tour.
It has now gotten to a point where the golf landscape has become well and truly fractured. At the end of 2023, the spectrum seemed to still tilt in the Tours’ favour.
But the addition of European stalwarts Jon Rahm and Tyrell Hatton around the turn of the year seemed the tipping point to equilibrium. Two huge names, two staples of the Tour, gone. And the start of the 2024 season on the PGA tour has reflected that. A lack of big names near the top of the leaderboard.
The stars are misaligned and underperforming. Rahm was perceivable Scottie’s closest rival last year and prevented the Texan from winning back-to-back green jackets.
McIlroy was the best of the rest, but it was a two-horse race at the top. Since the exile of Rahm, Scottie has been in a league of his own, demonstrated last weekend at Bay Hill.
Scottie vs The Rest
Scheffler ran away to a comprehensive victory at the Arnold Palmer Invitational last week, after starting the final round tied for the lead. But a six-under-par 66 on Sunday ensured he pulled away from the rest of the field, most of whom faltered on a tough final day for scoring.
Wyndham Clark was the only exception as he shot 70 to finish second on his own, but he was still five shots behind the unstoppable Scheffler. Scottie’s putting woes have been well-documented by the golf media in the past few months. However, this past week at Bay Hill he finally managed to get the ball in the hole from range.
Could this be the start of an incredible run from Scheffler as we enter major season? Or was it just an anomalous week on the greens? Most would argue the former is more likely to be accurate.
Scottie seems in a complete league on his own even if his putting is field average. Combined with his world-class ball striking, it can produce a runaway week like we witnessed at Bay Hill.
The American defends The Players this week, the tournament he won by five last year. Could we see something similar this year as the 27-year-old looks to cement himself as the world’s best golfer?
Embed from Getty ImagesJay’s Silence on PIF as Conference Looms
June 6th, 2023, was a landmark day in the golf world with the announcement of the PIF and PGA Tour agreement deal. The parameters of the deal remain unknown, and little has been said since the December deadline was missed. There does not seem to be much going on from an outsider’s perspective, and those on the inside have not hinted at much either.
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan has been through it the last couple of years, and his leadership has been questioned intensely. But Monahan gets the opportunity to be scrutinised by the press this week, because of his annual Players news conference.
The Players is the Tour’s main event. It is a tradition that the commissioner holds a conference in the build-up to the first round on Thursday. This year’s conference is likely to be unlike any other before.
There are more questions than answers at this stage. The world is yearning to learn what is going on behind the scenes as LIV continues to co-exist with the Tour in disrupting its prosperity.
Hopefully, Jay will open on Tuesday and give us, even if minimal, insight into the state of the agreement with PIF. But he will surely be ready for any question that comes his way and has a generic response waiting to be read off a script.
Embed from Getty ImagesPlayoff Drama in Hong Kong – But Does Any of it Matter?
To give credit where it is due, LIV has had a visible improvement in its 2024 campaign. There has been some real drama, granted the courses are not always the longest, hardest, or most captivating.
The leaderboard now has some depth. The newest addition of Rahm has bolstered its overall quality as an entertainment product. However, the actual authentic viewership numbers of how many people are watching remains an enigma. Impossible to truly quantify for a comparison.
LIV Golf
Also, the fans in attendance are visually few and far between. A clip made the rounds on social media on the weekend of a LIV official holding up their hands to denote silence, yet there was not a single soul to be seen behind the rope line.
Perhaps it was just the camera angle, and it was hard to get to that point of the golf course. But it does still seem hard to truly grasp how popular LIV is in the golf realm. In fairness, the time zone in Hong Kong was unkind to the American audience and not even the most avid golf fans would wake up at 3 am to watch golf.
The three-way playoff between Paul Casey, overnight Leader Abraham Ancer (who let a five-shot lead slip) and Cameron Smith certainly added a sense of tension in the finale. Ancer managed to come out on top, but the overriding question in a macro sense is, what does a win mean?
Embed from Getty ImagesThere are no OWGR points available as the rankings become less and less relevant. Sure, it is a nice win for Mexican Ancer, and it made for competent viewing. But it is acceptable to assume that most people were largely unaffected by the outcome of the tournament.
And that is potentially LIV’s wider problem. It can be compelling in parts, but it lacks a sense of meaning and consequence.
Image Credit: Deposit Photos