The Showdown — a made-for-TV golf match pitting two PGA Tour stars against two LIV stars — enters the golf marketplace with as many questions as answers.
We know only a little about who is running the show. We’re still wondering how the arrangement all works. There seems to be a lot of money behind it, coming from mostly unknown sources. And a small subsection of super-engaged social-media users seems downright euphoric about its existence.
Star power? Turbulent past? Uncertain future? High upside — and high risk? The Showdown is the perfect match for its title sponsor, announced Tuesday in a glitzy press release: Crypto.com.
Yes, the news is true, the match pitting Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler against Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka will be called the Crypto.com Showdown, and winners of the event will be paid out … in Cronos, the official cryptocurrency of Crypto.com.
“Crypto.com’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to cryptocurrency and today’s announcement is our latest effort by introducing the world’s first major golf tournament with a purse in CRO cryptocurrency,” Crypto.com CEO Kris Marzalek said in a release announcing the news. “This is testament to our confidence in the future of the U.S. crypto market and the power of sports to bring fans to the most licensed crypto platform in the world – Crypto.com.”
The news tells us a little bit more about the state of The Showdown, scheduled at Shadow Creek Golf Club in Las Vegas for December 17. The event will not just provide appearance fees for all four golfers involved — rumored to be in the neighborhood of $4 million each — but it will also pay a “multimillion-dollar” prize to the winner in cryptocurrency. When McIlroy and DeChambeau first presented the event, they did so as a gift back to fans beleaguered by golf’s incessant cash craze — but it’s clear the contestants are collecting on multiple fronts. In golf’s era of fabulous wealth, four of the most relevant players alive don’t sign up for a competition for the goodness of the game alone.
The money will come from sponsors like Crypto.com as well as advertising revenue for the broadcast on Turner Sports, which will carry the event in the United States. Trevor Immelman, David Feherty and Charles Barkley are among those expected to be part of the TV crew for the event. That crew has worked on previous broadcasts for The Match, which was a different entity but has also been held on Turner’s family of broadcast networks.
The Match creator Bryan Zuriff and EverWonder Studio are The Showdown’s organizers. Zuriff, a longtime friend of Phil Mickelson’s and the creator of the famed television series Ray Donovan, has resuscitated the made-for-TV match format in a few different iterations over the last decade. EverWonder, led by former CNN chief Jeff Zucker and backed by the private equity firm RedBird Capital, has quietly exerted a growing influence on the sports entertainment world in the last 18 months. As recently as this fall, Redbird backed David Ellison’s $2 billion acquisition of Paramount, owners of CBS Sports, and announced a $3.7 billion war chest for investments in sports, entertainment and financial services.
As for the title sponsor? Crypto.com is enjoying a renaissance of its own in the dwindling months of 2024, the latest upswing in a turbulent half-decade for the existence of cryptocurrency more broadly. After explosive growth during the first crypto wave in 2020 fueled lavish marketing budgets for many of the biggest exchanges, Crypto.com suffered big losses in 2022 when several high-profile cryptocurrency scandals rocked investor confidence. As recently as last year, Crypto.com appeared to be in retreat, announcing it would shutter its U.S.-based institutional operations due to limited demand.
But the U.S. election sent cryptocurrency markets into a tizzy earlier in November, when a second Trump administration signaled openness to decentralized currencies. Crypto.com, which maintained its consumer-facing businesses in the U.S., was a particular beneficiary of the bump. Its Cronos coin skyrocketed to its highest value in more than two years in the days following the election, the biggest swing since the coin lost more than $1 billion overnight during the collapse of the crypto markets in 2022. With its sponsorship of The Showdown, Crypto.com appears to be trying to capitalize on a second era of good times in the cryptocurrency business.
Will it find a sympathetic audience in the golf world, where cryptocurrencies have largely avoided spending in the last several years? It’s hard to say. (Cryptocurrencies have largely targeted their marketing efforts towards younger investors with campaigns in sports like the NBA and NFL.)
But given golf’s current state of turbulence, it’s hard to fathom a more perfect partner for Crypto.com than The Showdown.
