The final event of the inaugural LIV Golf season started yesterday in Miami with the first day of team matchplay. After jigging around with the game formats, they decided on 2 * singles and a fourball match so each team had 3 games with 4 players. All set for a great day? Here are 5 reasons why today did not work.
No one cares about the money
The fact that Dustin Johnson has won $35 000 000 this season, on top of his signing-on fee, is neither here nor there for most people. It is an obscene amount of money. It takes the sport to a whole new reality but ultimately it is about the competition and, dare I say, legacy.
Over sensationalism
From the on-field commentary to the “pressers” LIV is a hype machine. Even Donald Trump tries to get in on the act. Boring. Too much.
The field
I know they are trying and are not helped by their top players sliding down the OWR rankings but there are a lot of players who are severely past their prime and many who are totally unproven on the highest stage.
To me, who is quite an avid follower of World golf, I don’t know about a third of the field: which is about the same as a USPGA event.
Quality of golf
Tricky to call this as most of the challenges come below, but while Cam v Phil was an epic matchplay match was the scoring that good? Especially in the others, with the exception of HV3 who was outstanding but wasn’t featured too much in the coverage. Does it matter in matchplay anyway?
TV Coverage
The biggest faux pas for me was the TV coverage. I do not even go near the condescending and brown-nosing commentary: it was what was shown. I am not sure if this is due to a lack of cameras, editors that don’t understand golf, the format, or the fact that only a few matches generated any interest… but it was awful.
The main feature was Cam v Phil, and rightly so – it was 2 of their biggest “stars” in what turned out to be a very good match. Then LIV flitted between other “star” matches to get the ones with the most excitement. However, that meant that they didn’t really feature any of the other matches in any detail.
As the fluff content, they tried to show the climax of every hole but it turned out to be a putting roll. USPGA YouTube channel gets slammed for producing highlight reels that are 90% putting: this was LIV today.
Add the out-of-context nature of the presentation: who was that? what team does he play for? what hole are they on? how many holes do they have left? was this earlier or live and has the score been updated already or not? It was even more confusing than the normal presentation.
A lot of ranting yet I watched all of day 2 too. I will follow up shortly about what was right about this weekend’s LIV tournament. What did you think?
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