Almanac Golf – LIV Adelaide: The start of something even bigger for the latest rival tour?

 

 

Golf is far from the most popular sport in the world, but it is one of the few that has the ability to be played by people of all ages and abilities, has a strong tourism market, and has a valuable professional game that is ripe for innovation. So it is no surprise that a new investor, the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has targeted professional golf as a potential area of growth for its portfolio, creating the ‘LIV Golf’ series.

As the LIV Golf Adelaide event fires up this week, it has brought into focus a range of questions about politics, both international and local, sports management and marketing, and how the sport of golf actually fits into the global sports pantheon. Over the last two decades, the professional side of golf has become very America-centric. As the best player of all time, Tiger Woods, attracted investment into the US PGA Tour, and grew prizemoney beyond anything seen before, the US PGA Tour has become the centre of the golf world. This in turn has had a negative impact on other tours around the world, including Europe, South Africa and Australasia. The US Tour grew to a year-round behemoth, meaning that if players wanted to play in the richest events, almost all in the USA, they had to qualify by playing more US Tour events, many of which clashed with events in the Australia, New Zealand and South African summers, making a trip home for players from those countries near impossible.

Was this an inadvertent result of good luck by the US PGA coinciding with Tiger’s arrival? The flat answer is no. This was intended attempt to capitalize on all of the above by centralizing the golf world in America.

There are probably only two people who can tell you who won the WGC Accenture World Match Play Championship in 2001 off the top of their head. One is me, the other is Steve Stricker. Before I explain to you why I’m involved in this story, and why this is relevant to this article, let’s have a little history lesson. WGC stands for “World Golf Championships”. They were introduced in 1999 as a way of offering some higher prizemoney events outside of the traditional majors, to bring the world’s best players together. Sound familiar? Yes, they were a precursor to what we are seeing now, with the LIV Golf Tour trying to have big money events for the best players, except this was run by the American PGA Tour, in conjunction with other tours, to ward off a proposed rebel tour conducted by a bloke you may have heard of – Greg Norman. Greg wanted a ‘world tour’ for the best players to compete for big purses, but having fought to get players to come to Australia, he wanted it to be a ‘world’ tour, and not just in America or Europe. However, only one of these events ever made it to Australia – the 2001 WGC Accenture World Matchplay Championship at Metropolitan golf Club, Melbourne.

In the long run the WGCs have been successful, in that they normally have most of the best players and have become part of the usual tour cycle. However, this event in Australia was an exception to that rule. While the field was meant to include the top 64 in the rankings, several players did not make the trip – partly due to distance, partly due to the timing of the event in early January.

Some of the players missing included: Tiger Woods (ranked 1), David Duval (3), Phil Mickelson (4), Lee Westwood (5), Colin Montgomerie (6), Davis Love III (7). Interestingly given the current circumstances, Sergio García (16) didn’t attend, and neither did prominent Australian players Steve Elkington (101), and, wait for it, Greg Norman (42). The lowest player competing was Greg Kraft (104). This is despite the first round losers still receiving $25,000, and the chance to take the Champion’s prizemoney of $1,000,000 (which, in those days, was a lot for golf!)

The winner of the event was Steve Stricker. While he was playing in the 36 hole final on the Sunday, I was serving coffee and sandwiches in a dining room. At one point, the room was cleared out and two men came in for a meeting. Wayne Grady, then chair of the Australasian PGA, and Tim Finchem, commissioner of the US PGA Tour. Wayne was seeking support for the Australian professional game, in the form of more events, or removal of the American clashing events which were impacting Australia’s existing events. He spent the meeting explaining the impact of the expansion of the US season on Australian events, the detrimental effect that proposed US tour centralization was having on other countries around the world, but also the long term impact this might have on the PGA Tour. He pleaded for co-sanctioning of events so as to attract players to countries other than America, even if it was to be during the PGA Tour ‘Fall Season’, and help stimulate interest in the professional game. Sadly, he was met with nothing but rejection, with arguments about Australia being too expensive to come to dominating the discussion, and offers of minor tour events to placate the Australians showing a lack of desire to promote the game, just to take Australian sponsor money back to America.

I don’t think Tim knew that the guy serving the coffee would write about it 22 years later, but here we are!

In the subsequent years, Wayne was proven correct as the Tour was decimated. While a 16 event tour still exists, there’s only two events in Australia that have the sort of power that attracts eyes from overseas, and these are the Australian Open and the Australian PGA. Sadly, they don’t attract highly ranked players anymore, unless there’s an extra cheque involved such as those that attracted Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy early in the last decade. I should also add, eventually all of the WGC events were held in North America, so the “World” aspect of these events was more like the way the term is used in Baseball, not golf!

Australia’s golf industry over the subsequent years has steered away from the professional game, focusing more on golf tourism. Holidays to Barnbougle, King Island, the Murray River or the Sunshine Coast make a lot more money for effort than trying to attract already-well-paid golfers to an event for four days. But, the desire to host the best in the world on our world-leading courses remains, and we have hosted the Presidents Cup team event on a few occasions. However, that has never been enough.

As a result of this poor treatment by the US PGA Tour, a lot of Australian golf fans are pretty keen on the arrival of LIV Golf. Shaping themselves as an upstart underdog to the big bad US Tour (despite having considerably more money than the supposed big dog) has appealed to the Australian ‘cut down the tall poppy’ psyche. Even in the face of abject horrors committed by those behind the funds, people are happy to go along with the LIV bandwagon because it is disrupting the people who disrupted the pro game here. If I were to ignore the human rights record of the Saudis (and you definitely should not do that) and to ignore the questionable business plan behind LIV (the only people who could pay enough for the team franchises to enable the Saudis to make back the money… are one of the Americans spending their money on going in to space), there are still lots of questions to ask about whether LIV can deliver benefits for golf, whether for their owners, or more generally.

We know that the main aim of LIV Golf is not to ‘grow the game’, despite the carefully scripted appeals by its players recruited over the last 12 months. This series is part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, intended to diversify Saudi income streams as the world reduces it’s reliance on Saudi oil. The aim of LIV Golf is to make money for Saudi Arabia. Of course, a way to make money from Golf is to grow the audience of golf and, where possible, capture an audience that exists where it hasn’t been captured before, so while it’s not the primary goal, arguably there is some basis on which LIV is trying to ‘grow the game’.

This is where Australia, and Adelaide, are the perfect choice.

I think this week’s event will be LIV’s best event yet.

Despite being during the seasons of the major football codes, and only one week after every AFL game was in Adelaide, it’s a sellout. TV Ratings may be impacted by the fact it’s up against some big AFL and NRL games on TV, but the on-the-ground crowds will be great. I’m surprised they’re not teeing off earlier at, say, 10am Adelaide time, to enable a broadcast into prime time in America, but the coverage into Australia should be strong on Channel 7, and the timing will suit Asian audiences too. There’s concerts after play, much like the F1, and a hole surrounded by tents and stands creating a vibe similar to the famous 16th at Phoenix. Most importantly, all of LIV’s star players will be there. Not that they have much of a choice if you believe the stories about what is in their very rigid contracts, but it should be the best field ever assembled for a golf tournament in Australia, and that includes some of the times that Kerry Packer bankrolled the Australian Open in an attempt to make it the 5th major. Several of them are coming into the event in tremendous form after brilliant performances at the Masters in Augusta, especially Koepka, Mickelson and Reed.

I think this week will provide a model of what LIV’s tournaments could really be like. Comments about how great it is that LIV Golf is playing outside of America are arguably correct (just ask Wayne Grady) but ignore the fact that this event is the exclusion from the rule. Nine of the fourteen events are played in North America, and only five (Adelaide, Singapore, London, Spain and Saudi Arabia) are played internationally. If I were running LIV (which I’m obviously not, and to be fair I don’t think they need any business advice from me!) I would pivot away from trying to rival the US PGA, and instead create its own markets and buzz around the world. If LIV wants to make money, this week in Adelaide might just be the model they need to follow. Perhaps they should abandon what is currently their America-centric tour and seek to go to the places that have an appetite for professional golf that has not been served by the PGA Tour. LIV South Africa and LIV Chile both have a nice ring to it.

LIV uses a team event model, copied directly from the plans of the Premier Golf League (who must surely be planning the lawsuit of the century for stolen intellectual property, but I digress). The Premier Golf League sought to adapt some aspects used by sports such as Formula one, where people would come to support a team, and each event would be like the Superbowl has come to town, just like F1 has shown over the last few years with skyrocketing attendances. Taking these glamorous events to places that haven’t had these opportunities to see top level golf will continue to create buzz and excitement around the tour, rather than just going back to America and being a low key player in what appear to be off-Broadway places.  It will be more likely to attract attention, sponsors, and TV, which is something they seem not to have much of in America, which they will need to get soon to pay for those $25M purses and the sizeable sign-on-fees.

Of course, if the aim of LIV Golf is to get influence in the USA, and not to make money, then it will continue to play events at Trump-branded courses in America, get low ratings on American TV, and miss the opportunity to get return for investment by having hyped, major level interest in each of their events. But, surely that’s not why they are doing this, right?

Oh, yeah, right.

 

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