If you follow sports as closely as I do, you know about the challenge being mounted to the PGA Tour’s professional golf monopoly by LIV Golf, headed by Hall of Famer Greg Norman.
Two dozen PGA Tour golfers — including recent winners of the U.S. Open and the Masters such as Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka and British Open victors Henrik Stenson, Phil Mickelson, and Louis Oosthuizen — are now playing in LIV tournaments, with more on the way for the organization’s fifth event, Sept. 16-18 at Rich Harvest Farms outside of Chicago.
LIV Golf is not just the PGA Tour with bigger purses. It is reshaping the game itself through shorter, more intense tournaments and team golf. As an economist, I view LIV’s innovations as the natural result of the competitive process. As a close observer of the sports world, I say it’s about time.
Unfortunately, the PGA Tour’s initial response to the LIV challenge was self-destructive. Rather than improving its own product, the organization banned golfers for playing in LIV tournaments, triggering a U.S. Justice Department investigation into anti-competitive practices. The tour is now adding sticks to the carrots, but a lot of damage has been done.
Professional golf has barely changed in a half-century. On television, the most common sight is a player lining up a putt. By contrast, other professional sports have been reinvigorated with such innovations as interleague play and giveaways between innings in baseball, three-pointers in basketball, the on-screen first-and-10 line in football, 14-camera goal-line technology in soccer, and knockout playoffs that encompass more and more teams.
Meanwhile, Formula One auto racing, with a thrilling, strategic format and exotic locations, has become the fastest-growing sport in America. And nearly all sports have deployed new media technologies, such as drones and widespread microphoning of athletes, to enhance the engagement of viewers.
With a format geared to engage fans, LIV is off to a smooth start. Norman hired a team of former executives from such athletic success stories as Fox Sports, ESPN, WWE, the New York Yankees and Populous, designer of 34 Super Bowls. LIV’s broadcasts feature the popular former NBC analyst David Feherty.
LIV’s first season of eight events began June 9 on a course outside London and was followed by tournaments in suburban Portland, Oregon, and New Jersey. LIV’s slogan is “golf, but louder,” and a USA Today article about the Portland event quoted fans who enjoyed not just the golf but music, parachutists, jugglers and other diversions and services. “There are changing stations and nursing stations here, everything is clean and there’s so much stuff for kids,” said a woman who attended.
Josh Sens, a senior writer with Golf.com, said that LIV is “working as spectacle.” Assessing the Trump Bedminster event in New Jersey, The New York Times called the crowd “younger, less stuffy and clearly more open to experimentation than on the established PGA Tour.”
Prizes are huge, with a minimum $25 million purse. Unlike PGA tournaments, where half the field gets cut after two days and is paid nothing, LIV participants earn at least $120,000. Because all the players tee off at the same time on different holes, each round takes only about four hours. The contest itself is more concentrated, with a limit of 48 golfers in 12 teams playing 54, instead of 72, holes. The number of holes played corresponds with the tour’s name — the Roman numeral for 54 is LIV.
But the big change is a new kind of team contest, with $5 million on the line in the first seven events and $50 million for the big finale. Teams have proven outrageously popular in such events as the Ryder Cup, and golfers themselves love the camaraderie. But the PGA Tour has stuck almost exclusively to its old-fashioned, individual-player format. Appeals to tradition may not be all that fans value.
Massive change is on the way. Daniel Dalton, an ex-professional cricket player, described in a recent article how his own sport was disrupted when an Australian media mogul challenged the cricket establishment in the 1970s. The result was not just higher pay for cricketers but the introduction of a “shorter, more dynamic, more exciting” format.
Cricket today, writes Dalton, is “a far more modern, marketable and lucrative sport.” As with cricket, the exact structure of golfing competition will change over the years, but without competition, the sport will stay moribund. To avoid failure, the challengers to the PGA Tour have to innovate to please the fans and expand the audience.
In recent days, the PGA Tour has announced it is keeping up with changes of its own, including bigger purses for some tournaments and an annual income guarantee for regular participants. While its prizes are still smaller than LIV’s, the tour is showing that competition brings benefits to both players and fans that monopoly can’t match.
Cameron Belt is a Nevada-based economist and avid golfer. His grandfather was a member of the PGA for 50 years and was inducted into the inaugural class of the Las Vegas Golf Hall of Fame.
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