LIV Golf schedule weirdness continues with championship announcement

On Tuesday morning, LIV Golf announced that Bolingbrook Golf Club, a public track roughly 30 miles outside of Chicago, will host its individual championship on Sept. 13-15 — officially locking in one of the league’s two championship sites for the 2024 season.

The news marks a necessary — and telling — development for LIV, which has yet to release scheduling information for its team championship. The league has resisted sharing schedule information about either of its championship tournaments for months, waiting until the last day of April, nearly the halfway point of the 2024 LIV season, to share information about the individual championship venue.

It’s unclear why the league — which announced a full, 14-event schedule back in November — chose not to divulge information about its all-important final two tournaments. In November, a LIV spokesperson confirmed that the league had locked in its final two host cities and would be sharing the announcement about the final two tournaments “soon.” Still, Tuesday’s announcement comes after several players publicly complained about the transient state of LIV’s schedule in the closing months of 2023, criticizing the league for failing to share concrete information about where players would be traveling in ’24.

“We don’t know what course cause we haven’t seen the schedule,” Koepka commented on a LIV Golf Instagram post in November. “The DM with the schedule for next year would be nice.”

The individual championship will mark LIV’s third straight season in the Chicago golf market, an area that the PGA Tour has abandoned in recent years, but this year’s tournament venue will be a first-time host. Bolingbrook is a public track on the outskirts of the city that plays for cheaper than $100 at peak rates. The club is some 30 miles closer to the city than LIV’s previous Chicago tournament host, Rich Harvest Farms, which has hosted LIV Chicago events each of the last two years.

Bolingbrook, operated by Kemper Sports, is a 7,104-yard layout designed by Arthur Hills and Steve Forrest. The course features a “true island green par-3 and 600-yard par-5,” per the course website — and was selected as one of the host sites for the Covid-era Forme Tour, a mini-tour contested in the United States in order to help golfers trapped by travel restrictions during the pandemic. LIV Chicago is believed to be the first large-scale golf event held at the course.

Tickets for the championship event will go on sale soon, the league says. In the meantime, LIV will host its seventh event of its season this weekend in Singapore.