The dilemma Down Under
LIV's success in Australia illustrates a strong undercurrent of resentment toward PGA Tour
As LIV Golf returns this weekend to its wildly popular party event in Adelaide, South Australia, the Daily Drive takes a look at what fuels the success of the tournament in a global market not well-served by the PGA Tour.
The Watering Hole went wild with Chase Koepka’s ace last year. (Mark Brake/Getty Images)
LIV Golf resumes its season this week at its most popular venue, the place where the phrase “Golf, But Louder’’ truly has meaning — Adelaide, South Australia. There’s been no LIV tournament across three seasons quite as electric as the one that debuted in Australia last year, and it promises to be bigger and better this week.
One reason for its unqualified success is the devotion of Aussie sports fans, who support their own athletes as strongly as any country in the world. LIV Golf Adelaide at the Grove Golf Club will be overrun with delirious spectators who can’t wait to watch favorite son Cameron Smith — the 2022 Open champion — as well as the other Aussies that make up the team called Ripper GC (Marc Leishman, Matt Jones and Lucas Herbert).
This year’s event which begins Friday in Australia (and can be viewed via the CW app on Thursday night at 9:45 EDT in the United States as well as Friday night and Saturday) will again have a return of the Watering Hole as well as caddie races and all kinds of other fan-friendly aspects that makes the party atmosphere similar to the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open in Scottsdale, Arizona.
But there’s another underlying current to its popularity Down Under. It’s not universal, but it certainly has played a role in LIV’s success in Australia that has been accompanied by a good bit of venom toward the PGA Tour, especially on social media.
There’s a narrative that the PGA Tour ruined Australian golf.
While it’s far more complicated than that, when the PGA Tour went to a wraparound schedule a decade ago — since abandoned in 2024 — the general feeling was it robbed Aussies of seeing the best of the best travel to the Southern Hemisphere in the Australian summer, especially for historic events such as the Australian Open and the Australian PGA.
The early fall schedule kept international players in America longer (including Australians on the PGA Tour), thus hurting worldwide golf. Or so the theory goes.
Golf-starved Aussie fans flocked in droves to Adelaide. (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)
“It certainly didn’t help,’’ said Mike Clayton, an Australian who played the European Tour and Australian circuits for years before becoming a course designer. “Before that, all of our better players would wrap up their card for the following season. There wasn’t the pressure to get off to a good start. Most of them came home.
“Jason (Day) never came home, but guys like (Aaron) Baddeley and Greg Chalmers and Cam Davis … a lot of the whose who play over there (in America) couldn’t and didn’t come back because they needed to get off to a good start (by playing the PGA Tour in the fall). You wanted to make sure you had a job for the following year and you don’t want to show up in Hawaii in the middle of January and you’re nowhere on the money list.’’
Clayton, who won six times on the PGA Tour of Australasia (in addition to a European Tour win), remembers a different time, when it was easier for players to move around the world, given lulls in the various schedules.
Jack Nicklaus used to refer to the Australian Open as the “fifth major’’ and it routinely would get the likes of Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and later Seve Ballesteros to compete in the national open, along with other Australian events.
Those hall of famers had endorsement incentives to do so, Clayton acknowledged, but it gave the Australian tour a boost in a way that is not seen today. There would often be as many as 15 events on the schedule which began in the Australian summer and ran into February.
“Europe went longer, too,’’ Clayton said. “Back in the ’80s, we’d come home from Europe in September, that’s when our tour started. So Europe (the DP World Tour which has a wrap-around schedule now) didn’t help, either.’’
If you’ve been paying attention since golf’s civil wars began with the creation of LIV, a good bit of the noise is coming from outside of the United States. The emotions range from complete disdain for the PGA Tour to simple disappointment. The belief is that the PGA Tour soared at the expense of the rest of the world.
While that is a simplistic view, it does happen to partly explain the almost giddy reaction in some circles to the PGA Tour’s alleged shortcomings as the LIV Golf drama has played out. To some, the PGA Tour is the evil empire, impacting golf around the world, and LIV Golf is there to rescue the game.
“The tour here is a shadow of what it was.’’ — Michael Clayton, Australian pro and architect
Fans of the DP World Tour lament the fact that so many of its best players have left for the more lucrative PGA Tour. In fact, there is now a system in place for direct access via the top 10 in the Race to Dubai securing PGA Tour cards. Supporters wonder how that is good for European golf. (A fair counter point: for the better part of three decades, a good number of the best in Europe always sought to play on the PGA Tour.)
In a place such as Australia, the situation is even more bleak. The two biggest events — the Australian PGA Championship (won in 2023 by Min Woo Lee) and the Australian Open (won by Joaquin Niemann) — had $2 million (Australian) purses, which is not much more than a Korn Ferry Tour event. Most of the PGA of Australasia purses are for less than $500,000.
Greg Norman was an impossible icon to replace. (Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images)
“A lot has happened,’’ Clayton said. “The TV landscape changed, the (PGA Tour’s) wraparound season, guys stayed longer in Europe. Greg (Norman) didn’t play any more and nobody replaced him. Adam (Scott) played here, (Geoff) Ogilvy, but none of them were going to replace him. No one was Greg. Greg was Seve (Ballesteros) and Tiger (Woods). You don’t replace those guys. It takes generations. In America, it was Arnold and then Jack then and then Tiger. So the tour here is a shadow of what it was.’’
Clayton believes that Woods’ ascent actually hurt golf around the world in a way —through no fault of his own. It brought more sponsorship and television income to the PGA Tour. That raised purses and allowed the tour to grow stronger than its global peers. There was no reason, really, for players who made it on the PGA Tour to venture outside the States.
That’s not exactly the PGA Tour’s fault. Until the recent shift that is seeing the PGA Tour take care of its stars in a bigger way financially, it has always been about playing opportunities. The belief was if there was going to be golf anyway, why not have it be a PGA Tour event?
The PGA Tour did make attempts to branch outside its American shores. It has annually played a tournament in Canada and Mexico and looked to venture into Asia with a swing of three events including a World Golf Championship event.
And the original concept for the WGCs was to see them move around the world — an effort that wasn’t sustained after initially playing events in Spain, Ireland, England and Australia. Events that were rotated internationally eventually settled into U.S. venues permanently. “Where is the World in WGC?’’ became a common refrain and it understandably angered those outside of the U.S. who already gripe that three of golf’s four majors are played in America. But in the PGA Tour’s defense, it went where the sponsorship money and television interest was the greatest.
LIV Golf is seeing far more support outside of the United States for some of those reasons. In America, we take weekly access to elite professional golf for granted, but other spots around the world don’t get to see Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Cam Smith and now Jon Rahm. In Australia, the Adelaide event was a rousing success that saw state funding and give LIV one of its few events with considerable income.
Rippers GC captain Cam Smith (Jon Ferrey/LIV Golf)
Clayton acknowledged its popularity in his country. “LIV was massive,’’ he said. “It’s a party and it wasn’t a normal golf crowd, which is really what they sell. It was much different from any other tournament ever in Australia. They could run a LIV event in every state in Australia and have the same reaction. They could have five events and have massive crowds, which begs the question, why don’t they?’’
Well, Dustin Johnson and Koepka and Rahm and a few others might not be on board with the idea of spending a month in Australia.
The point, however, is that there is a market for golf around the world, one that is often not considered domestically where we are blessed with an abundance of golf riches. Following the event this week in Adelaide, LIV heads to Singapore, where another strong turnout is expected.
As the “framework agreement’’ is still being worked out between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Public Investment Fund that bankrolls LIV, it is unclear how an agreement might look. There are a lot of pieces to fit into what would ultimately be a new product or collaboration. And the negotiations have plodded on, with no end in sight.
“If we can create a perfect golf calendar, what would it look like?’’ Rory McIlroy asked recently. “And I don’t think it would like it looks right now. I think there would be changes made.’’