STERLING, Va. — Bryson DeChambeau limbered up on the first tee at Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, taking his last fierce lashes before teeing off to start the latest event on the Saudi-funded LIV Golf tour. Before him stretched the links-style golf course, tents and grandstands visible nearby, the Potomac River beyond. High above him, members of the Frog-X daredevil skydiving team pinwheeled toward the ground. Around him, a few dozen fans cheered as AC/DC’s “Back In Black” echoed off the back of a clubhouse owned by the President of the United States.
At exactly 1:05 p.m., colorful clouds burst in the air down the course to mark the shotgun start of the tournament. As they dissipated, DeChambeau ripped an iron off the tee, a hype man bellowed, and the day’s play got underway.
This is a LIV Golf tournament. There’s a lot going on here.
LIV Golf is facing an existential moment of crisis and/or opportunity. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the near-trillion-dollar source of LIV’s financial foundation, announced it would be cutting off the flow of funding at the end of this season. The move came as a shock to players and officials alike, and everyone involved is now scrambling to find either a way forward or an exit ramp.
I came to Trump National Golf Club Washington DC — which is actually in Sterling, Virginia, more than 26 miles from the White House — neither to praise LIV nor to bury it, but to get a vibe check on the entire operation post-PIF news. What I found was a tour that’s connecting deeply with its players and dancing carefully with its sponsors while trying to resonate with American fans.
LIV hasn’t yet crafted its post-PIF identity. There’s a path forward for the league — a scaled-down, scaled-back, globe-trotting path, but a path nonetheless — as long as the tour can craft the right answer to one essential question: What, exactly, is LIV Golf trying to be?
The first thing you notice when you walk onto the grounds of a LIV tournament is that the build-out is absolutely massive. Stand on the back patio of Trump National’s enormous, steroidal Colonial-influenced clubhouse, situated on a bluff high above the Potomac, and you can see the entire sweep of the golf course — and, this week, the enormous hospitality tents, fan zone, and grandstands around the 18th hole. A pristine speaker system pumps club, rock and country tunes to every corner of the vast course. IMAX-sized video screens dot the course, and LIV signage and iconography is everywhere, right down to the towels in the locker rooms.
LIV in the Saudi era is all about conspicuous spending, using massive head shots of DeChambeau and Jon Rahm as a de facto flex. When you can create a golf tournament environment out of thin air, you’re halfway to establishing that tournament’s legitimacy, right? It’s the corporate version of fake-it-til-you-make it.
Problem is, as LIV has learned, golf tournaments are more than just club music, fancy graphics and vibrant team logos. Without the history and legacy behind them, they’re as empty as a Hollywood set, and no matter how much money you spend, you can’t speedrun history. Most of us are old enough to remember when Rahm, DeChambeau and the rest played on the PGA Tour, and LIV Golf [Insert Host Venue Here] just doesn’t carry the same historical weight as a major, or even longstanding regular-season Tour events like the Memorial or the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
For many — most? all? — of LIV’s players, though, that break with tradition is a feature, not a bug. Earlier this week, Anirban Lahiri declared that he knew of “at least a dozen players who’d rather not play golf than go back to the PGA Tour.”
More notable: No players withdrew from this week’s event, even though the PGA Tour’s current policy to return seems to be a mandatory sit-out period of one year, as former LIV player Patrick Reed is currently doing. Checking the pulse of LIV players and teams at a LIV event is the very definition of a biased sample, but players and team officials here in Virginia seem satisfied with LIV’s player-focused initiatives, teams and equity offerings. (And the paychecks, too, but we’ll get to that in a bit.)
“Team golf is awesome, having your boys be able to back you up, be able to remind you of how great of a golfer you are,” Sebastian Muñoz said after his round. “You don’t have to look at yourself always in a bad look, always criticizing yourself. I feel like it’s a nice little reminder.”
Round 1 leader Lucas Herbert elaborated on how the team aspect has set LIV apart for the players. “I can see some of the feedback online that it might come across as seeming fake, but it’s not. It really is genuine,” he said. “We really enjoy traveling together, getting dinners together, playing practice rounds together, feeding off each other for advice. … I’ve become a better player the last three years, and I know that’s because of the experience being in the team aspect. It’s the conversations we’ve had over dinner. It’s the conversations we’ve had on planes going to the next event. It’s just invaluable.”
Making professional golf players, a famously persnickety bunch, happy enough to sing your praises is one challenge. Satisfying fans — the ones who, going forward, will have a larger role in paying LIV’s bills — is another.
LIV has struggled to connect with American fans, posting ratings that have run from anemic to halfway decent. LIV’s real fan successes have come in traditionally underserved golf markets; the tour touts its six-digit attendance figures at the Adelaide (Australia) and South Africa events.
Attendance at the Virginia event didn’t quite hit those numbers, but the galleries around DeChambeau were respectably full. The rest of the course was fairly sparse, with plenty of room to spread out and no wait at any concession stand, merch tent or restroom.
“You can get right up on the ropes,” said Gary Presslaff of Chevy Chase, Maryland, walking the first hole with his cousin Les Levine of New Jersey. The two have attended golf tournaments for years — Levine toted a U.S. Open Shinnecock bag — and both had high praise for the look of the course and the organization of the event.
“Beautiful course, easy to get in,” Levine added. (A cynic would say that logistics are a lot easier when you’re not dealing with Ryder Cup-level numbers, but let’s leave that aside for now.)
The cousins hit upon a recurring theme — once you’re in the gates and walking the course, a LIV event can be a fun experience. Someone has wisely turned down the volume and abrasiveness of the music from LIV’s earlier days. There are abundant — for now — options for refreshment and lounging all over the course. And although LIV isn’t going to tout this as a selling point, the sparse crowds mean it’s easy to get up close to literally any player on the course, even DeChambeau.
Maybe that’s why a significant percentage of the fans I spoke to this week were attending their first-ever golf tournament. The weather was beautiful, the cost was reasonable, the players you’ve seen at Augusta National and the U.S. Open were right there … what’s not to love?
Travis Napier of Doswell, Virginia, walking with his wife Connie, came to the tournament because he’s a fan of “Bryson and Trump.” Mary Hossier of Dumfries, Virginia, was happy to give her daughter a chance to walk a golf course “without the commitment of playing a full 18 holes.” It’s worth remembering that not everyone who walks through the gates of a golf course is consumed with thoughts of the LIV-PGA Tour feud; some just want to enjoy a little golf on a sunny day. And if they pronounce “LIV” to rhyme with “alive,” as one fan did Friday … well, that’s easy enough to fix.
Out at the far northeastern corner of Trump National Washington D.C., between the 14th and 15th holes, an enormous American flag waves atop a towering flag pole. A plaque at the base of the flagpole commemorates “The River of Blood,” a Civil War battle in which “many great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot.” Signed by Trump, with the full sweep of the broad Potomac behind it, it’s a powerful monument. It would be even better if the battle had actually happened; Civil War historians agree that no battle actually took place anywhere within 10 miles of this spot.
Declaring legitimacy is quicker than waiting for legitimacy to be conferred upon you, and that’s exactly what LIV did in its earliest days. Although it painted itself as a legitimate competitor to the PGA Tour, LIV Golf began as a Saudi vanity project, a highly-capitalized opportunity to sportswash the kingdom’s image through sport. Even now, some aren’t inclined to forget; a small coterie of protesters stood outside the gates of TNGC both mornings, and photographs of Jamal Khashoggi — the Washington Post journalist murdered with the consent of the Saudi ruling regime — lined one stretch of the road leading to the golf club. As long as the Saudi money backed LIV, many — from protesters to notable media members — refused to take LIV seriously as a golf tour.
What about now, though? Once the Saudi funds are gone, how does LIV transition to being a straightforward golf tour?
Ironically enough, given the timing of the PIF withdrawal, LIV is closer now to full legitimacy as a tour than ever before. After years of screaming to be taken seriously, LIV has finally made substantial progress, gaining both Official World Golf Ranking points and a thank-you by name from Augusta National during the green jacket ceremony earlier this year. Plus, it still boasts two of the world’s best players, both of whom are threats to win at any major they tee up.
LIV’s PR and operations staff are doing everything they can to embrace the traditions and techniques of a normal golf tournament. They’ve prepared tournament fact sheets on the course’s setup, statistics and agronomy (Trump National’s fairways are .4” bentgrass, and the rough is a mix of fescue and bluegrass, but you knew that already.) Tee sheets include the shotgun start locations of all players, from stars like Rahm and DeChambeau to names like Anthony Kim and Sergio Garcia to golf’s version of Let’s Remember Some Guys (Paul Casey, Charles Howell III, Graeme McDowell).
But go back to that opening tee shot, and the hue and cry surrounding it. That spectacle is an inextricable element of the LIV experience, and yet at the same time it completely undercuts the tour’s claims to legitimacy. All due respect to the wee goats in the Range Goats Petting Zoo, but there’s a reason you don’t see that kind of attraction — or dunk tanks, or DJs — at PGA Tour events.
Much of this push-pull is baked into the tour’s DNA. In addition to being way too arrogant out of the gate, LIV’s initial organizers seemed to fundamentally misunderstand that there’s a deep difference between the kind of golf we like to play (chill, casual, with a Bluetooth speaker in the cart) and the kind of golf we like to watch. We expect certain standards of decorum of our professional golf events that we don’t of ourselves.
Right now, the Savannah Bananas are blazing a trail in fan-first sports entertainment. It’s undeniably entertaining, but it’s also a long way from actual baseball. Despite a few cringeworthy social media dance videos, LIV Golf still isn’t anywhere near the Bananas on the jazz-hands scale, but again — there’s a reason you don’t hear Guns n’ Roses and see fireworks at other tours’ tournaments.
Put simply: LIV is at the moment too much of a spectacle for a serious golf tour, and too compromised and controversial to be a universally welcoming hang. If it’s going to grow into the world-spanning, F1-level phenomenon it hopes to be, LIV will need to pick a lane.
At the conclusion of Thursday’s round — LIV Golf days tend to wrap up in a tidy four-and-a-half hours or so — Tyrrell Hatton came into the LIV media center for his postround interview. At Trump National, the media and LIV officials work in the club’s cavernous indoor tennis center, meaning Hatton took questions as portraits of Serena Williams and a mulleted Andre Agassi looked down from above.
“Big room, not a lot of people,” Hatton smiled. “Budget cuts?”
He was joking, but the blade is coming. There’s simply no way LIV can continue to function at this level of expenditure; the league has already burned through $5 billion to $8 billion of Saudi funds in its first four years.
It’s more complicated than this, but at its heart, LIV is the equivalent of a college student who’s just graduated and is now off the parents’ payroll, going from the family home to a small apartment, from a home-cooked meal to ramen. Adjustments must be made.
And if LIV is indeed entering its Ramen Era, if sponsors can’t pick up the considerable slack left by the PIF’s departure, then smaller purses, reduced footprints, less prominent tournament venues might all be coming. LIV could evaporate in six months, it could survive by striking deals with various legacy tours, or it could ride out golf’s coming shakeout and end up in a better position — image-wise — than it is right now.
Every LIV tournament round begins with pyrotechnics. But for LIV itself, the real fireworks are about to begin.