LIV Golf got an opportunity on Sunday.
The final round of the PGA Tour was postponed due to adverse weather conditions at Pebble Beach, allowing the first event of the LIV 2024 season to be played. This was Jon Rahm’s first tournament as a LIV golfer, as Rahm competed for the championship in Mayakoba, Mexico. Even though LIV spent a lot of money to get off the ground and fill out its 54-player roster, sometimes luck still gives you the best chance.
So how does this 3-year-old product perform? I have some ideas.
Legion before me
Rahm didn’t win on Sunday — he went bogey-bogey, losing a share of the lead and giving the stage to Joaquin Niemann and Sergio Garcia in a four-hole playoff that ended with Niemann Mann won dramatically, with the only light on the course coming from the leaderboard overlook. 18th green.
Rahm was frustrated, as anyone who has watched Rahm play golf can imagine, and accepted the cajoling of the LIV broadcast team into admitting that his XIII Corps team had won the team event. It will be interesting to continue to see how Ram handles this push and pull. Most of these people are still wired to care only about their own performance, and LIV requires a reset of priorities.
Jon Rahm finished third in his first LIV event. (Manuel Velazquez/Getty Images)
Rahm’s influence on LIV Golf
Rahm’s biggest impact on the league so far is that his presence seems to have changed LIV’s relevance.
The original roster was filled with people who were and people who would never be, and Dustin Johnson felt like a complete outsider. Well, Brooks Koepka has made things better. The same goes for Bryson DeChambeau. Then there’s Cameron Smith. That’s still not enough to shake the feeling that every week a veteran star doesn’t win a LIV event is a missed opportunity, and if two or three of them had a week off, it would be easy to scoff at the leaderboard.
But things looked different for Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton in Friday’s first-round match. You want to see more people playing golf, not out of sentimentality or curiosity, but because you want to watch the best players.
The top ten from Mayakoba include Niemann, Garcia, Rahm, Johnson, Koepka, Hatton, Smith and Louis Oosthuizen. If you deny this, you are beating yourself up.
Niemann wants to go to Augusta National
Not sure what Niemann deserves from his blunder on the winning putt and his gushing in the victory interview about his exclusion from the majors. “I’m not playing in the majors,” were the first words he said when he got the microphone. Is it a sign of his competitiveness that his attention immediately goes to the next thing, or something else?
The 25-year-old Chilean has competed in the past 12 majors but is currently ranked 66th in the world according to the Official World Golf Ranking as he prepares for the Masters. (Taking into account LIV results, he ranks No. 27 on DataGolf.com.)
Niemann enters the Open Championship with a win at the Australian Open in December. Still, he must compete in Asian Tour events and hopes to accumulate enough points to enter the top 50 of the OWGR by April.
While we sympathize with his plight, we all understand the deal here. LIV has had problems with OWGR since day one.
live TV broadcast
Let’s talk about radio.
First, the positives: Most of what’s shown on the screen is pretty good. Leaderboards are a plus, relevant statistics are in place, and putt line graphics help viewers understand what they’re watching. They also did a great job setting it up and letting us hear the players and caddies discussing shots, which is good stuff. There’s also a lot of golf footage, which shouldn’t feel so revolutionary, but to the public who receive NBC’s PGA Tour broadcasts, it certainly is.
As for everything else? It leaves a lot to be desired.
The biggest problem with LIV Golf’s broadcast is that it constantly tries to make us believe something rather than just letting the event itself speak for itself. Tweets keep coming, and as a storytelling mechanism it feels like it was stolen from a 2012 gaming stream – and they’re all the same. That player is awesome. This is really exciting. I’m watching it now. They don’t add anything, and if Arlo White wasn’t reading them for us, they would be scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
White is often in this position, more like a spokesperson than a broadcaster. There was a three-person bench and two on-site reporters, who had plenty of time to talk. But they offer little insight, and it often feels like they’re just passing the baton on who will repeat the company’s path this time around.
Whether it’s something they feel or it’s just something they’re asked to do, it has the same impact. When you keep telling me that everything is great and the average game of golf is even better, then when the time comes for the really high level to come, there is no higher level. That’s why newspapers don’t use the Pearl Harbor font size every day. It will stop getting your attention.
So when Niemann shoots a 57 on Friday, which will be the lowest round ever on a major professional golf tour, the broadcast can’t adequately reflect the moment. It has nowhere to go.
LIV has a chance to attract more attention this year. The product on the field is much better than when we started. The rest just needs to grow with it.
(Top photo of Joaquin Niemann: Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)
