The most fascinating moments in golf often don’t come on back-nine Sundays. Some of the game’s finest drama happens two days earlier, on Friday afternoons, when players desperate to make the weekend are grinding to make the cut. Every shot matters, every decision carries ramifications for both the tournament and a career. The cut line is cold, merciless and final.
LIV Golf isn’t quite facing a cut line this week, but this will do until an actual one comes along. Now in its fourth year of competition, the Saudi-backed breakaway tour will receive its first true national closeup, on broadcast television at a course owned by the president of the United States. If LIV is going to become anything more than a well-funded payday for a few dozen players, this is its best opportunity for national awareness.
At the same time, LIV is facing increasing headwinds as it attempts to navigate a golf landscape either in connection with, or parallel to, the PGA Tour. The financial impact of creating an entire worldwide tour from scratch, paying the world’s best players hundreds of millions to attract them, is becoming clear, as is the PGA Tour’s wait-’em-out strategy.
LIV’s biggest challenge: getting eyeballs
Every sport with national or global ambitions is only as strong as its broadcast agreement. For most of its existence LIV has stitched together a series of networks, both broadcast and streaming, to carry its tournaments. So far this season, LIV has struggled to draw American viewers due in large part to the late-night/early-morning start times for its international events.
That changes this weekend. LIV plays at Doral in Miami with a favorable broadcast window, and for the first time will debut on Fox — the broadcast channel, not a cable offshoot. That gives LIV a far easier pathway to millions of potential viewers than, say, YouTube’s “everyone has YouTube!” pitch. Plus, LIV Doral will be facing off against one of the PGA Tour’s smaller events. If there’s ever a time for Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka et al to claim casual viewers, it’s this weekend.
Then there’s the matter of President Donald Trump. The polarizing president arrived in Doral on Thursday as the effects of his tariff imposition rippled through the news cycle and sent the stock market plummeting. Trump’s presence will endear LIV to some segment of his base, while at the same time rendering it toxic to the president’s opposition. For a sport that has sought to remain publicly apolitical — no sense offending either party — LIV’s close alignment with Trump brings a set of political and public-relations challenges that the Tour doesn’t face.
