LIV celebrates success — Aussie style
Norman boasts Adelaide triumph; McIlroy shares a milestone; NBC coverage adrift
Aussie fans turned out in droves at The Grange to cheer on Cam Smith and LIV Golf (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)
Vindication? Shark bites critics
Greg Norman was understandably giddy. The LIV Golf commissioner and World Golf Hall of Fame member was caught up in the adulation of those in his homeland on Sunday as another LIV Golf Adelaide event brought out the masses, who celebrated golf for the past several days as if they had never been out of the house to witness any kind of sporting event.
It is a testament to the Aussie sporting culture, and a reminder that golf fans Down Under have long felt jilted as their iconic tournaments such as the Australian Open and the Australian PGA have lost prominence in the overall game.
Bringing major champions such as Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau to a part of the world where they might not otherwise play is the biggest LIV Golf selling point. It doesn’t matter the format — even though Norman will nonetheless trumpet the team component. Australian fans have a reputation for turning up, and turn up they did.
Australian Golf Digest reported 35,000 spectators at The Grange Club for the final round. Photos and video all show a massive crowd of support, unlike any other LIV Golf event. The league announced more than 94,000 spectators for the week. It was an impressive display and something for LIV Golf to lean into.
“This week has far exceeded my vision for what was ahead,” Cam Smith said of competing (and winning as a team) in his homeland. “I think I always knew internally that Australia would really embrace LIV with the culture, with the music, with the entertainment, everything that goes on around it. I always felt like this was the place where it was going to make it big, and how it’s been the last couple of years has been just insane.
“Last year I said, I’m biased, this is the best tournament I’ve ever played. I think this year it’s done it again.”
And for the first time, LIV got something it was looking for — a team playoff. Because Smith’s all-Aussie Rippers team of Marc Leishman, Matt Jones and Lucas Herbert was tied after 54 holes with the all-South African Stingers team of Louis Oosthuizen, Dean Burmester, Brandon Grace and Charl Schwartzel, a sudden-death playoff was necessary to determine the team winner.
The format called for two players from each team to compete with the total scores counting. The Aussies escaped trouble on the first playoff hole and won on the second extra hole, to the delirious delight of the home crowd which cheered like it was football game. At one point, Burmester was met with wild celebration when he left a ball in a bunker.
Norman couldn’t help himself.
“Vindication is not the right word,” Norman told Australian Golf Digest. “It’s the ignorance of others who simply didn’t understand what we were trying to do. I actually feel sorry for them because they now see the true value of LIV Golf and want to be a part of it.”
AGD writer Brad Clifton described Norman as “having been subjected to vile abuse on social media’’ and “watching mainstream media outlets trying to discredit his work.’’
Well, there’s a lot to unpack there.
First, Norman has long been annoyed with the PGA Tour, going back to his playing days when he had to seek conflicting event releases to play in his homeland. As a marketable star who could play around the world, Norman — like others — was typically granted three such releases without a problem.
But beyond that, the PGA Tour extracted other commitments from him. At the time, the tour had no “home tour’’ stipulation like it does now, so Norman needed releases to play in such places as the UK or the UAE as well as events in the Australian summer. In return, he might be required to add PGA Tour events to his 15-event minimum, ones he might not otherwise have wanted to add. And this always rankled him.
If you know the backstory, Norman once tried to start a World Tour with the backing of Fox Sports. It failed when then PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem told players they couldn’t do both. Sound familiar? When Arnold Palmer stepped in, the idea was effectively over. Norman didn’t have the kind of money back then that the Public Investment Fund now has to lure the top talent away. And he seethed.
Fast forward three decades to LIV Golf. And there was the Shark basking in the glory on Sunday.
Greg Norman: “This makes it all worthwhile.” (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)
“The support Australia gave me during my own playing career for decades was something I have never forgotten,’’ Norman said. “It’s why I brought LIV Golf back home — I did it for them. The people have well and truly spoken. Both individual and team golf is alive and well in Australia and they deserve it. I knew they would support this event.
“I’m feeling extremely proud right now. With what we’ve (LIV Golf) gone through over the past 16 months, both as a league and what I’ve copped personally … the hatred … this makes it all worthwhile.”
Does it? The game still remains divided, and LIV remains scorned in many places. There’s plenty of blame to go around, however, and the PGA Tour is not without scrutiny.
The PGA Tour suddenly came rushing forward to throw cash at players after LIV Golf started enriching them first when perhaps a better outlay for the stars of the game might have headed off such a bitter fight. Player Impact Program millions, signature events, enhanced FedEx Cup structure and now a player equity program worth nearly a billion dollars.
Perhaps all of that might have mattered, say, five years ago?
To Norman’s understandable pride of the Aussie turnout, it’s also important to note that no other such LIV event has attracted anywhere near that outpouring of support. It’s true that international venues such as this week’s in Singapore and previous events in Spain, England and Hong Kong have been welcomed in those markets, LIV still remains an outlier.
Put it this way: if each one of those 94,000 spectators paid $200 apiece to attend ($18,800,000), it still would have come short of paying the $25 million purse. LIV Golf got considerable funding from the South Australia government, but given TV production costs, no lucrative TV rights deal and all the other costs, it still lost money. And LIV loses cash in droves at other places.
For now, that doesn’t matter. The PIF can easily withstand the losses as it seeks to gain a foothold in the game and continues to work on some sort of agreement with the PGA Tour that seems elusive.
The team aspect, which has been widely panned, showed itself to be quite entertaining when two teams went head to head — which is not the typical LIV format with in its weekly individual tournaments. Perhaps there is something to be learned from that as well.
Shane Lowry helps lift Rory McIlroy to another milestone. (Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
McIlroy teams up for No. 25
With a little help from his Irish friend Shane Lowry, Rory McIlroy hit another PGA Tour milestone on Sunday.
McIlroy and Lowry teamed up to win the Zurich Classic of New Orleans in a playoff over Chad Ramey and Martin Trainer. The victory counts as McIlroy’s first victory of the year on the PGA Tour and the 25th of his career. The PGA Tour considers such victories official, and before you cry foul, it is important to note that team tournaments were a far more integral part of the tour schedule in previous eras.
For instance, five of Sam Snead’s 82 PGA Tour victories (tied with Tiger Woods for the most official tour wins) came with a partner. Jack Nicklaus had two of his 73 victories with a partner — both with Arnold Palmer.
McIlroy relished the partnership and accomplishment (as the Irish duo’s singing attests). https://twitter.com/PGATOUR/status/1784737800547381498
“To win any PGA Tour event is very cool, but to do it with one of your closest friends, we’ve known each other for a long, long time, probably like over 20 years, so to think about where we met and where we’ve come from, to be on this stage and do this together, really, really cool journey that we’ve been a part of,” McIlroy said. “And yeah, just awesome to be able to do it alongside this guy.”
McIlroy has moved into some heady company. He tied Johnny Miller, Tommy Armour and Macdonald Smith for 23rd on the all-time victory list, one behind Henry Picard.
Woods is the only active tour player ahead of McIlroy. Also, only Phil Mickelson (45 wins), Tom Watson (39) and Vijay Singh (34) were other players he would have competed against.
McIlroy moved ahead of Gary Player and Dustin Johnson and if he gets to 30 wins, he’ll move ahead of Lee Trevino.
Lowry, meanwhile, got a meaningful lift from his first victory since last year’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. The win gets him into the remaining signature events this season. The 400 FedEx Cup points they each collected also moved both of them comfortably into the top 30 for the first time this season.
“We both felt like we needed to come in here and maybe have a very strong week because we wanted to get our summer going, and we’ve got a lot of big golf coming up soon,” said Lowry. “Would be nice to get that jump up the FedEx Cup that we both wanted.
“I knew I needed to make up some FedEx Cup points, and this gets me in those (signature events), and it means I can plan my schedule now. With family stuff and my wife and kids going back to Ireland in the summer, it means I really don’t have to stay over here and grind it out too long. I can do more what I feel like I wanted to do. It’s freed me up a lot this summer. Hopefully we can both kick on now. We’ve got three majors left. Hopefully we can get one each, or maybe two and one.”
PGA Tour fleet covers production at every mainland tour event. (Courtesy PGA Tour)
Who’ll man the cheap seat at NBC in Pinehurst?
The U.S. Open is a little more than a month away, and NBC-TV apparently does not have a lead analyst to sit in the broadcast booth alongside Dan Hicks.
The network has been besieged with complaints as it has cut costs and used a revolving door of analysts after unceremoniously dumping Paul Azinger at the end of last year.
Dave Shedloski wrote in Golf Digest last week that NBC “does not appear ready for one of its premier golf events, the 124th U.S. Open in June at Pinehurst.” As one staffer told Golf Digest: “Pretty soon, we’re just going to do artists renditions of coverage as opposed to showing actual shots with a camera.’’
Ouch.
This is the same network that decided to produce its coverage of one of golf’s biggest events — the Ryder Cup in Rome — from its studios in Connecticut.
The cost-cutting is even more curious considering NBC doesn’t even have to foot the bill for all the production equipment anymore. The PGA Tour fleet of custom-built broadcast trucks was originally deployed in January at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. Aside from the tour event in Mexico, every tour event this season whether it’s been broadcast on CBS or NBC has been delivered using the same set of production trucks, cameras, mics — everything except the talent.
In its TV agreements announced in March 2020, the tour agreed to take over the production in the TV compounds at its mainland events in the U.S. and Canada. Previously, NBC and CBS used all of their own trucks and equipment on site at each tour event they handled.
And all of that equipment – from the production trucks, catering and porta-potties in the TV compound to the miles of fiber cables, microphones and cameras across the course – is owned by the PGA Tour as part of its most recent broadcast rights agreement with the primary networks that cover the tour.
Both NBC and CBS, however, remain entirely in charge of the creative and how they present the show each week.
“What they do is they bring their people, whether it be the ones telling the stories, or the camera operators – they bring all their talents,” said Luis Goicouria, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of media. “It’s important for CBS and NBC that they’re still the creative vision right around our broadcast. … Really what we’re doing here is we’re providing them the equipment and the technology to get to make their creative vision happen. So they’re still telling their own story.”
Despite that being all NBC has to worry about, the network is hurtling towards presenting its first major championship of the season without a clear idea of who the talent will be that delivers the story.
The story makes it pretty clear that NBC is cheaping out and scaling back everywhere it can. Having gotten rid of veteran voices Azinger, Roger Matbie and Gary Koch and lost other talent to the caddie ranks (Jim “Bones” Mackay) and senior playing circuit (David Duval and Justin Leonard), NBC has been running through a rotation of auditioning voices each week to fill the lead analyst seat opposite Hicks. Kevin Kisner, Luke Donald, Brandel Chamblee, Paul McGinley, Smylie Kaufman and Notah Begay have all taken turns.
Guess we’ll see who gets the seat in Pinehurst.