Promising start for LIV Golf Series

This weekend saw the first LIV Golf event take place at Centurion Golf Club in London. With all the discussions about who and who wouldn’t be taking part it was finally left to the Golf to do the talking for a few days. As a golf fan (fair to say I’m much better at watching than playing) I was intrigued to see what this new tour would bring to my experience of watching.

In terms of the coverage: With no TV network picking up the TV rights in the UK we were directed to either the LIV Golf website or their YouTube channel to watch the live action.

• The shotgun format gives the broadcast a big advantage versus the traditional starting format; with all players starting at the same time, it means there is more action to be seen right from the get-go.
• There was a lot more golf shown due to there being no adverts which is great (as a fan, who wants adverts?).
• The permanently on-screen leaderboard (think Formula 1 coverage) is something that has potential (I always find it a little annoying waiting for the leaderboard to appear every few minutes), however it did take up a significant part of the screen
• The ‘don’t blink’ segments were great and made sure we didn't miss any exciting putts or chips.

Where I think it missed the mark a little was with the commentary team which I didn’t find particularly inspiring. Arlo White (NBC’s lead commentator of the Premier League) had the feel of someone who didn’t really know a lot about golf and I didn’t warm to either Jerry Foltz or Dom Boulet. Overall, I think that whilst the coverage was fine and could?offer something a bit different, it didn’t fully live up to the pre-event promise of being something that we’ve never ever seen before.

Onto the action: Going into the event I expected that the standard of golf was likely to be weaker given the strength of the field (only 4 players were in the top 50 in the world prior to the event), but I had high expectations for some of the better-known players (some apparently picking up significant amounts of money just to even take part). Several of the bigger name players struggled which left the door open for others?you may not have expected to feature prominently. Charl Schwartel took full advantage of this and led the tournament from start to finish – in the end winning by one shot from his South African compatriot (and Stinger teammate) Hennie Du Plessis. Branden Grace (another Stinger team member) finished 3rd which meant that the Stinger Team dominated the team event, resulting in Schwartel picking up $4.75 million for three days work. Whilst the amount of prize money awarded can always be argued about in any sport, it wasn’t the amount that the winner took home that didn’t sit right with me, it was more that someone who finished in 33rd position (on 10 over-par) took home around $150k.

?The team event has plenty of potential and if the teams become more consistent across events (meaning fans can get behind their team) then interest will increase. It would also have been interesting to see a little more of the draft process in how they went about selecting each of the teams. I searched for some more information, but it still wasn’t clear how this worked. One thing that the LIV Golf format didn’t overcome was the time taken to finish each round (around 5 hours) – slow play has been a big criticism of elite-level golf over the last few years and if LIV Golf really want to shake things up and grow the fan base then this is surely one aspect that needs to be addressed (shortened playing time was a key driver behind the success of T20 cricket).

Overall, I was impressed enough with what I saw, and with Bryson De Chambeau and Patrick Reed already signed up for the next event in Portland (and more players expected to follow) LIV Golf will be around for a while to come yet. I’m interested to see how the PGA and DP World Tour handle this over the next few months as, if more players move to LIV Golf, the quality of the PGA Tour becomes diluted so maybe a compromise will be reached (perhaps players are allowed to play in X number of LIV Golf events?).

Watch this space…