BOLINGBROOK, Ill. — Did you watch all of it? Could you watch all of it? Or did you just watch football?
Jon Rahm was doing something he does really well Sunday night: courting each question in a press conference with care. In the moments after winning LIV Golf’s Individual Championship, the 29-year-old Spaniard went deep on advice, hard-headedness, his LIV journey, driver shafts, even how annoyed he was that Tyrrell Hatton sprayed champagne into Rahm’s nose.
Jeff Koski, Rahm’s agent and general manager of Legion XIII, looked on from the back of the ballroom. He looked happy, and he had every reason to be: He was going to get his star client, now $22 million richer, onto a private jet shortly, headed home to his pregnant wife and his own bed for a few nights. It’s been a long summer for Rahm, but all’s well that ends well.
This was about six hours after Rory McIlroy had done media of his own, six time zones east, after a rousing but crushing finish at the Irish Open at Royal County Down, about 40 miles from where McIlroy grew up. Meanwhile, Patton Kizzire — the leader by a handful of shots at the Procore Championship in Napa — was still a few hours from what would be his first post-win press conference in six years.
The strongest field figuratively? It was in Chicago, where a bunch of major-winners filled the tee sheet. The strongest field literally? It was in Northern California, where a handful of Presidents Cuppers were competing. The best fan experience? That was in Northern Ireland, at one of the best golf courses on the planet. National Opens, home opens — they bring out a connection between golfer and spectator that other events cannot.
So, yeah, the golf was excellent Sunday, and when you add the most meaningful event of the day — the Solheim Cup — to the middle of that schedule, the game was on the telly from sunrise to sunset.
IT’S WEEKENDS LIKE THIS PAST ONE where the unraveling of pro golf is most apparent. Once a single, tightly wound rope, the game last weekend felt looser and weaker than the sum of its parts. Rahm used to love playing the Irish Open. His results there: 1st, T4, 1st. He’s played in the Napa event multiple times, too.
In Illinois, Rahm battled one of the game’s brightest young talents in Joaquin Niemann. In Ireland, McIlroy lost to another of the game’s up-and-comers in Rasmus Hojgaard. What the four of them could have created together is unfortunately left to the imagination. This week, McIlroy is playing the BMW PGA at Wentworth, outside London, where he is building a house walking distance from the headquarters of the DP World Tour. Rahm flew home to Scottsdale for a few days before he’ll tee it up in Dallas at LIV’s team championship. McIlroy loves himself some team golf, just not the LIV kind. Rahm loves himself some DP World Tour, but he owes them a lot of money. This is the state of pro golf these days. Not exactly feel-good stuff.
That McIlroy and his team felt compelled to spin up a PGA Tour-LIV match with Scottie Scheffler, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau — which almost certainly will go off without a hitch but also without involvement from the Tour or LIV — tells you something. The exhibition originally was slated for The Stanwich Club in Connecticut, a recently renovated, 60-year-old gem and among the best courses in the Northeast. But Stanwich cannot host a golf match in mid-December, which, between the warring tours’ manic schedules, is the feasible date they’ve landed on. Instead, it will be played in Las Vegas, the de facto host site for made-for-TV events in pursuit of the hype that MMA and boxing fights enjoy in Sin City. As reported last week by Sports Business Journal, the event is seeking an $8 to $10 million title sponsorship for a single round of golf on an undecided course on an undecided date. Rest assured, though, its name is decided: The Showdown.
McIlroy says The Showdown will give fans something they want — the best players from either side playing together more often — while also promoting the forthcoming season. The event may achieve both of those goals, but in this moment, without a solidified investment figure from the Saudi PIF, it also may serve as a reminder that LIV Golf’s best players are all contracted for at least another year. Merger or not, the rival league has a multi-year runway.
Until then, we have the FedEx Cup fall working through a sponsorship money issue of its own. The Tour is awarding more prize money during its fall season this year than last, but that is to be expected with one additional tournament on the schedule. Instead, the real story of fall purses is a bit more bleak. As Doug Ferguson of the AP reported last week, the majority of those tournaments (five of seven) have seen their purse sizes decrease in 2024, a stunning flip of the trend that almost all pro sports have seen for decades: that the money always goes up. Always. Just not on the PGA Tour this fall!
Taken on their own, these newsy nuggets are not so startling, but in the aggregate, it’s hard to not look at the current state of pro golf as anything but a sport-wide conundrum, and one that not only is refusing to solve itself but also is actually getting a bit worse.
On the outskirts of Chicago this week, LIV Golf announced a domestic record of 15,000-plus fans in attendance on Saturday. It is indisputably great that a top-tier pro-golf event visits the biggest market in the American Midwest on an annual basis. And many would argue it’s also indisputably great that LIV is seeing growth. “It’s the perseverance of the LIV product and what all us players, 54 of us, including staff behind closed doors, have worked hard to do,” Bryson DeChambeau said Sunday night. “This is just the beginning.”
But one also can make an obvious argument that LIV’s attendance numbers are not what they could be. When the BMW Championship visited Olympia Fields, in Chicago, more than 120,000 spectators showed up over the course of the week — with more than 30,000 on the weekend days — meaning average daily attendance out-ranked LIV’s best day in the United States…ever. Fans turn out to see players, to watch an event with meaning and/or to experience high-level competition at a special property. LIV Chicago had plenty of world-class players, and there was plenty of meaning to the golf (or at least cash on the line), but the host course left plenty to be desired, even if Paul Casey did earnestly note that on Bolingbrook Golf Club‘s firm-and-fast layout, it “felt like a Chicago major had broken out.”
Bolingbrook, a municipal course that will enjoy the publicity and money that come with hosting a LIV event, landed the tournament in part because it was capable of getting organized in fairly short order. LIV’s work-in-progress nature demands this flexibility of its host sites; the tour is piecing together its schedule on the fly, confirming host sites months in advance rather than signing multi-year contracts. Ultimately, this approach puts a ceiling on the number of people who walk through the gates, and the number of people who tune in. We won’t know how many viewers watched LIV’s Chicago event because LIV, which has struggled to attract viewers en masse, doesn’t report genuine TV ratings. The PGA Tour, meanwhile, has been confronting its own ratings swoon; 2024 will go down as one of the most disappointing golf-on-TV years in recent memory.
Which brings us back to last weekend, where the patches of pro golf’s quilt lined up in a mostly orderly way for TV-viewing purposes. The Irish Open was on in the morning on the East Coast, passing the baton to the Solheim Cup in the early afternoon, which led some fans into the back nine of LIV’s individual championship followed by a Procore nightcap.
This coming weekend will be provide fewer options. With the PGA Tour off, fans will choose the DP World Tour’s biggest event (BMW PGA), LIV’s biggest event (team championship in Texas) or the LPGA’s Kroger Queen City event in Ohio. Will you be inclined to watch one more than the other?
Or will you just watch the football?
