LIV Golf, the extravagantly funded breakaway circuit, is known for spending lavishly on player contracts, purses and promotions. But it casts itself as a populist’s tour: golf for the masses.
Those apparent contradictions will find common ground this week in the Chicago suburbs, when, for the first time, the big-money league brings its show to a muni.
Bolingbrook Golf Club, where the final leg of LIV’s individual championship gets underway Friday, is a tax-payer owned track in the village of Bolingbrook, a bedroom community of some 73,000 people, roughly 30 miles south of O’Hare International Airport.
“We’ve had some pretty good-size events out here,” Bolingbrook Mayor Mary Alexander-Basta told GOLF.com. “But this will be the biggest.”
How a tournament with a $25 million purse wound up at a little-known municipal layout where green fees max out at $110 (and dip to $65 at twilight) is a reasonable question. The short answer is that LIV was looking for a new venue near the Windy City, and Bolingbrook leaders were keen to give their community an economic boost. But the backstory is slightly more involved.
In both 2022 and 2023, LIV Golf Chicago was held at the same course: Rich Harvest Farms, a private club that has hosted such events as the Western Amateur and the Solheim Cup. By early this year, though, that arrangement had come to an end. Which side initiated the break-up is hard to say. LIV executives have declined to discuss the matter. The closest thing to an explanation came this past spring in a prepared statement from Rich Harvest Farms, which said, in the vague passive voice, that it had “been decided” that the “club’s membership will not have any disruptions to its play this year.”
Whatever the case, the split left LIV executives surveying the Chicago area for other options. Their gaze soon settled on Bolingbrook GC.
Designed by Arthur Hills and Steve Forrest, and opened for play in 2002, Bolingbrook GC is a well-kept course on rolling terrain, but not the type that sends the hearts of architecture nerds aflutter. Nor is it a storied championship test. The highest-level tournament it has held was a 2021 stop on the Forme Tour, a now-defunct developmental circuit that provided a path to the Korn Ferry Tour.
Big golf events, though, depend on infrastructure, too, and Bolingbrook offers that that in spades, including expansive practice grounds; a three-story, 75,000-square-foot clubhouse; and ample acreage for erecting grandstands. The property has proven it can handle large gatherings, as it does every year at Bolingbrook’s Fourth of July celebration, which attracts upward of 9,000 attendees.
Mayor Alexander-Basta says that LIV executives first reached out about the course “in February or March,” and scheduled a site visit shortly after.
“I’d love to say we had them at ‘hello,’” Alexander-Basta says. “But I shouldn’t say that. What I can say is that they liked us.”
This was great news for the mayor, who is not a golfer but has a background in corporate-event planning and who, since taking office, in 2020, has made it her ambition to raise Bolingbrook’s profile.
“People saw us at times as a sleepy neighborhood town,” Alexander-Basta says. “We’ve been trying to revise that.”
Before her first conversations with LIV, Alexander-Basta says that she was unfamiliar with the circuit. But to educate herself, she traveled to LIV Golf Nashville, in June, which drew an estimated 40,000 spectators over three days, making it the best-attended LIV event in the United States to date.
“All that energy and people enjoying themselves hole to hole,” Alexander-Basta says. “My impression was that if I had seen golf earlier in my life the way I saw it at LIV, I would be golfer today.”
According to the mayor, the controversy surrounding LIV and the Saudi money behind it were not a consideration for her or other Bolingbrook officials. Once the contract was finalized with help from attorneys, a proposal was sent to Bolingbrook’s six-member elected board of trustees, who approved the deal unanimously.
“We look at it for what it is,” Alexander-Basta says. “It’s a large golf tournament that draws people to our community to stay in our hotels and visit our restaurants. It has a great economic impact.”
How great, exactly?
Ever since LIV launched, in 2021, the lavish sums it shells out have been the source of widespread speculation. That’s been true of its deal with players and courses alike. In LIV’s first few seasons, rumors swirled that it was offering clubs upward of $2 million for hosting duties, though sources with insights into LIV negotiations say that number has since dropped significantly to somewhere in the $300,000 to $600,000 range.
This is not a subject LIV will discuss. And for now, at least, Alexander-Basta is not inclined to talk about it, either. The mayor says she’d rather wait until after the event, when all revenue and expenses associated with the tournament have been tallied.
“We do have a baseline but we don’t have a final number so I’d like to hold off,” she says. “If we put a number out there now, people will think it is what it is, and I would rather not be on record with that.”
Besides, she notes, there’s another benefit that’s difficult to measure.
“We are going to be on a national platform,” she says. “And that’s hard to quantify.”
Here’s something that isn’t: When the tournament is over, the individual winner will walk off with an extra four million bucks.
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