LIV Golf merging with the PGA Tour? Not this year. A LIV pro offers a dim view of merger

On a red carpet in front few members of the media, most of the best golfers in the world arrived for their final tournament of the season and the point of discussion is not performance but the potential arranged marriage of LIV Golf and the PGA Tour.

It was a little odd to see Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, Kevin Na, Henrik Stenson and the rest walk this red carpet. Where have they all been? On the LIV tour.

For every person who follows professional golf, the only question is when/if these two leagues will merge, and what this future will ultimately look like.

LIV Golf is making its first stop in DFW with its season-ending “team championship” at Maridoe Country Club in Carrollton, which runs from Friday to Sunday.

LIV and the PGA Tour “merging”

At the Toyota Music Factory on Wednesday evening, the players strolled in to a private corporate partner party complete with alcohol, live music, pretty girls and pictures for players to sign.

More than a year has passed since the announcement came that LIV Golf would “merge” with the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour. This agreement is now about money, lawyers, and the details of a “potential framework” remain in the myth phase.

Former PGA Tour and current LIV Golfers Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter stopped for a couple of minutes to “chat,” and I asked Westwood whether these tours can actually co-exist.

“I’ve run scenarios through my head and somebody is going to have to give up something and I don’t which side that’s going to be,” Westwood said. “At this very moment I don’t see them coming to an agreement.”

For the most sobering shot of all, Will an agreement between the two be announced this year?

“It won’t be Friday,” Westwood said.

This year?

“No,” Poulter said.

Next year?

“No,” he said.

This flies directly in the face of what many PGA Tour players have said this season, that an agreement is coming. The latest sticking point is the PGA Tour players want the LIV Golfers to give back some of the money they agreed to when they left the Tour.

How aLIVe is LIV in Year 2?

Golf is finishing its “second season” with LIV and the PGA Tour existing simultaneously, and the winners are the players. They have all cashed in while the sport suffers consequences that will take years to recover. The history, or growth, of the game are empty talking points about what is a massive cash grab.

The outrage that players such as Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and the rest would take the “Saudi blood money” to play for a league funded by Saudi Arabia’s PIF Fund has, predictably, faded. LIV played the long game knowing that, societally, we move on quick to the next moral outrage.

You may have noticed the two biggest figures in all of this, Mickelson and former PGA Tour great Greg Norman, have faded this season. The “faces” of LIV Golf got their money. Hundreds of millions of it. They’re still with LIV, you just don’t see them as often because, why bother? They are both over 50, and they got theirs.

With Tiger Woods now 48, and all of golfs few stars scattered between the two tours, the sport is now about four tournaments a year - the Masters, U.S. Open, PGA Championship and The Open; the rest have become corporate tent events. To the player, there is little difference between winning the PGA Tour’s Sanderson Farms Championship and the LIV Golf event at the Golf Club of Houston.

LIV Golf is a startup, and every startup is messy

With LIV, the format is different from the Tour, and there is an adjustment period for a fan who watches a 54-hole tournament, as well as a “team” element that LIV sells. Even the players themselves admit tweaks are necessary.

“The team aspect needs to be explained a little bit better to the fans,” LIV player Martin Kaymer said. “People don’t understand yet what it means. ... It changes a lot, that’s the issue. Once they get it right, by next year, they’ll know exactly what they want to do and it will be straightforward like any other sport. In order to get it right, there needs to be adjustments and those adjustments can be confusing even to us players.”

Said LIV player Bubba Watson, “Anyone who says they can’t understand the format, it’s the same as high school or college golf.”

Who watches high school or college golf? Family and friends of the players. LIV aspires to reach a lot more than just family ‘n’ friends.

The biggest difference is LIV is the startup with limitless funds, and its model stomped on golf’s longest standing, most established organization, the PGA Tour.

LIV Golf goes ‘young’

Depending on whom you believe, the crowds for the LIV Golf events have been good. Whatever “good” means. Much like auto racing, LIV Golf events feature concerts to draw fans. LIV’s aim is to lure younger people whom the adults in the room think require multiple points of stimulation.

“We are pulling in different crowds. They’re a lot younger. Younger people coming with their music at the golf course. A lot more people not really knowing golf,” LIV golfer Louis Oosthuizen said. “It’s easier for them to follow because it’s completely new than for the hard core guy who followed golf from the start and the other tours.

“It’s quite different. The whole idea is to have a younger crowd and pulling younger people to LIV and you can see it every week.”

One thing about a younger crowd, they go for the party. Any party. A LIV Golf event is an 18-hole tailgate that is a reason to drink, eat, socialize, and post pictures of themselves on their Instagram or TikTok accounts. The outcome is irrelevant.

What you can’t necessarily see every week is the tournaments themselves. LIV Golf’s television network partner remains The CW. No matter how hard LIV tries to sell that it has a real broadcast partner, as the NHL will tell you, unless you are on a major TV platform you aren’t a reaching a real audience.

These are the challenges that come with a startup league; establishing an identity, a routine, and a norm while trying to grow an audience takes decades. It’s why most of them fail.

No startup league has ever had funds like LIV, which is why ultimately it can succeed.

“In the early stages LIV Golf wasn’t there to go head-to-head with the Tour; it was to be side-by-side and occupy some of the golf ecosystem space,” Westwood said. “The attitude of the other tours has been to alienate LIV and that’s where all of the confusion and angst comes from, really. That’s why we’re in the position that we’re in.”

LIV has survived the initial backlash that originated from being funded by Saudi family. Where LIV “fits” with the PGA Tour, if it does, only a few people know.

Just don’t expect an announcement this Friday, this year, and probably next year, too.