Brooks Koepka and his caddie look on at a floodlit green during The Showdown.
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On paper, it looks great that LIV Golf will begin its 2025 season in the dark. Literally, teeing off round 1 at 6:15 p.m., after darkness falls and they crank on the floodlights in Saudi Arabia. It looks good on paper because it’ll look good for their bottom line. More people will have FOX on their television at 11 a.m. Eastern than 11 a.m. Saudi time. This is a business decision.
In reality, it might feel great, too. We’re slowly getting used to seeing golf played at all hours of the day. We’re slowly realizing that golf under the lights isn’t as revolting to the senses for us watching at home. But despite how sensible this decision seems, it paints a bit of a Rorschach test about the game’s future. What can look great this week may mean something far different down the road. How you perceive it says more about you than anything else.
That LIV is making a business decision is not a bad thing, but the reason why — the all-important American TV audience — is foreboding.
In order for the multi-million dollar production cost (which LIV is paying for) to be offset by a broadcasting rights fee, you need a predictable, baseline audience that FOX can sell to advertisers. The good news for LIV is about six times as many people watch FOX as LIV’s previous rights holder, The CW. And I don’t blame them. FOX is FOX, where Tom Brady talks and Gus Johnson calls basketball games. Say “The CW” quickly enough and it sounds like a body of water.
When it does land in America, year over year ratings will be construed as apples-to-apples measurements of LIV’s success, all while the PGA Tour looks to bounce back from a rough 2024 campaign in the ratings department. But for LIV to ever really punch above its weight class — it has struggled to catch on with viewers — it will need to be in primetime on the East Coast. Which means your tournament should be hosted on the West Coast, a helluva long way from Saudi Arabia. To alter the tee time schedule in Saudi is a blatant admission that pros can tee off extra late in the Middle East and extra early in the Far East, if we are so bold enough to bring top golfers there.
And isn’t that the crux of the pro game these days? How much of it needs to revolve around the United States, and how much of it can be brought elsewhere?
To its credit, LIV is the venture by which we’re answering that question. Sort of. It has committed to bringing top-level pro golfers to eastern Asia and Australia — some of its players are even competing in India next week — initiatives that concern players interested in growing golf’s global imprint, and bore others who don’t want to go abroad. (Even the phrase go abroad feels too optimistic for some of the game’s top talent. A more fitting one is leave home.)
It was just last year that I chatted with Rory McIlroy about this, our feet standing on the green, green grass of Emirates Golf Club in the Middle East. A former member of the PGA Tour policy board, McIlroy is well-versed on the value of the American eyeball, and the American dollars shed by American sponsors.
“There’s a reason why we all migrate to America,” he told me. “That’s where the biggest tournaments are. There’s a convenience part of it that is really, really appealing. That’s why a lot of us have bases there. But I think the PGA Tour, in terms of America, has reached its capacity and its max. Which is great. They do $2.3 billion in revenue a year. They do really, really well. But I think they’ve maybe hit their limit in America.”
Now, will Tour brass — especially McIlroy’s Tour peers (and really just the ones on its policy board) — ever agree that golf’s greatest tour may reach a ceiling in America? Likely no. But when asked last week if there is some positive potential McIlroy could see on the horizon, he reasserted that idea.
“With everything that’s happened in the game over the past two or three years,” he began, “I think what I maybe could envision is that the domination of the American side of things might come back a little bit in terms of — not that the game has never been global — but you know, sort of trying to build on the opportunities globally. So I think where we are, I think we are in a good position to try to grow that part of it.”
Conveniently, McIlroy uttered those words as a report was released linking him to a yet-to-be-announced event in India, to be played in October as part of the DP World Tour schedule. As great as it would be to see the game’s most global star take that trip to New Delhi, if he teed off at noon local time, basically no one in America will see it. And the pubs in the United Kingdom won’t be opened in time to have it on their screens.
All of which makes LIV’s floodlit pursuit worthwhile. They are hoping to prove that the shape of golf tournaments — namely when they begin and end — can be manipulated. And why not? The PGA Tour bowed down to the sun god late last year, altering its annual membership qualification simply because of daylight hours in America. Leagues should be innovating and pushing against the boundaries of something as uniform as the sun rising and setting.
But what does it mean for the on-site experience? For both fans and players. When floodlights shine down on a putting surface, one’s ability to actually see a ball land from 150 yards away is largely eliminated. We learned that watching Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka play at The Showdown. We also learned that the temperature drops at night! Not a novel concept, no, but one that LIV players will find in Riyadh next week. Were the tournament to have started Wednesday, the feels-like temperature while they finished their rounds would have dipped into the 40s Fahrenheit. As Will Knights from the Fried Egg reminded us, hard, fixed lighting causes shadows that wouldn’t exist in daytime, and impacts most players’ ability to read greens. At some point, nighttime golf starts to feel different than daytime golf, and not just visually. When the changes start to feel physical, have they gone too far?
Or … is that exactly where the game needs to go? I suppose we’ll start to answer that question next week, in Riyadh.
Sean Zak is a writer at GOLF Magazine and just published his first book, which follows his travels in Scotland during the most pivotal summer in the game’s history.
