LIV Golf, put simply, is supposed to be ‘golf, but louder’. It doesn’t want to be old golf, it wants to be new golf with 54 holes, shotgun starts and a team element. It wants to engage us from every angle, get us sucked in for four or so hours and, as they keep saying, make a lot of noise.
Think F1 with players being jetted around the globe, treated like rock stars with champagne flying about the place, a winner’s podium, funky scoreboards, live music and, brace yourselves, golfers playing golf in shorts.
There is even talk of pulling together a documentary series along the lines of F1’s incredible ‘Drive to Survive’ to showcase the most ground-breaking tour in the history of the game. Golf isn’t the most radical of sports but this is off the charts.
Next year LIV Golf will comprise of 14 events, running from February to September and not conflicting with the Majors, Ryder Cup or elevated PGA Tour tournaments. This week we learnt of three new venues which takes us up to seven and this is where the wind, if you are a fan of the concept, starts to come out of the LIV sails.
The F1 calendar, if we’re still sticking with this analogy, will feature a bumper schedule for 2023 with a record 23 races with only the US and Italy staging multiple races.
On a tour which has been bankrolled by billions of dollars, that has been going less than a year which means it has pretty much a blank canvas to plot its schedule, we will now see Cam Smith, Dustin Johnson et al head to The Gallery Golf Club in Tucson, Tulsa’s Cedar Ridge Country Club and The Greenbrier in West Virginia. For many golf fans around the world these names will mean next to nothing.
The tour that promised to grow the game around the same world will centre around the United States for much of 2023. There are also stops in Mexico, Spain, Australia and England but the bulk, with more dates soon to be added, will likely head to North America with a collection of Donald Trump’s courses filling out much of the schedule.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
If you were to start professional golf all over again then you would probably not want three of the men’s majors to take place in the same country, however big or wealthy that it is. You would want to spread the love a little. You’d look at which major (The Open) is generally/loosely regarded as the best major and you’d think what it does right. And soon enough you’d come to one very simple conclusion that the course is key. While all the…
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