Golf was great last weekend. But did you sing?

BOLINGBROOK, Ill. – Jon Rahm was doing what he does best: going through each question in a press conference carefully. After winning LIV Golf’s Individual Championship on Sunday, the 29-year-old Spaniard went into depth about advice, staying strong, his LIV journey, driver’s irons, and even how upset he was that Tyrrell Hatton was blowing champagne. in the middle Rahm’s nose.

Jeff Koski, Rahm’s agent and general manager of Legion XIII, watched from the back of the ballroom. He looked happy, and he had every reason to be: He was going to get his star client, now $22 million rich, on a private jet soon, heading home to his pregnant wife and his bed for a few nights. It’s been a long summer for Rahm, but that’s all.

This was almost six hours after Rory McIlroy made his own media, six places east, after a difficult but tough match at the Irish Open in Royal County Down, about 40 miles from where McIlroy grew up. Meanwhile, Patton Kizzire – the leader by a few shots at the Procore Championship in Napa – was hours away from what would be his first post-win press conference in six years.

The strongest field figuratively? It was in Chicago, where a crowd of high achievers filled the tee sheet. The strongest field literally? It was in Northern California, where a number of President Cuppers were competing. Best fan experience? That was in Northern Ireland, on one of the best golf courses in the world. National Opens, at home it opens up – it creates a connection between the golfer and the viewer that other events cannot.

So, yes, golf was a very good Sunday, and if you come a lot meaningful event of the day – the Solheim Cup – until the middle of that program, the game was in the air from sunrise to sunset.

Which raises an important question:

Did you watch it all? It is possible to watch everything? You had every right to feel frustrated.

Or did you just watch football?

IT’S A WEEKEND LIKE LAST where the revelation of pro golf is most evident. Once, a tightly tied thread, last weekend’s game felt looser and weaker than the sum of its parts. Rahm used to love playing the Irish Open. His results there: 1st, T4, 1st. Played at the Napa event many times, too.

At Illinois, Rahm battled one of the game’s brightest talents in Joaquin Niemann. In Ireland, McIlroy lost to one of the newcomers to the game in Rasmus Hojgaard. The past of the four of them together unfortunately remains in the imagination. This week, McIlroy is playing the BMW PGA in Wentworth, outside London, where he built a golf course a short walk from DP World Tour headquarters. Rahm flew home to Scottsdale a few days before going to play in Dallas for the LIV team tournament. McIlroy likes club golf, not just the LIV kind. Rahm loves the DP World Tour, but he owes them a lot of money. This is the state of pro golf these days. It’s not a good feeling.

That McIlroy and his team felt compelled to fix a PGA Tour-LIV matchup with Scottie Scheffler, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau – who will likely go without a hitch but also without involvement in the Tour or LIV – tells you something. The show was originally planned for the Stanwich Club in Connecticut, a recently renovated, 60-year-old gem and among the best courses in the Northeast. But Stanwich can’t host a golf match in mid-December, which is, among the tour’s clever schedules, the most likely date. Instead, it will be played in Las Vegas, the de facto a venue for made-for-TV events to pursue the hype enjoyed by MMA and boxing fights in Sin City. As reported last week by Journal of Sports Businessthe event seeks $8 to $10 million in title funding for one round of golf at an unspecified course on an unspecified date. Rest assured, though, its name has been decided: The Showdown.

McIlroy says the Showdown will give fans what they want – the best players from either side playing together often – while building momentum for the upcoming season. The event may serve both of those purposes, but for now, despite the strong investment figures from the Saudi PIF, it may also serve as a reminder that LIV Golf’s best players are all under contract for at least another year. Merger or not, a rival league has a multi-year trajectory.

Until then, we have the fall of the FedEx Cup working on the funding issue itself. The Tour will award more money in its fall season this year than ever before, but that’s expected with one more tournament on the schedule. Instead, the real story of fall bags is much darker. Like Doug Ferguson of AP reported last week, most of those tournaments (five out of seven) saw their purses increase reduce in 2024, a surprising reversal of the trend that almost all pro sports have seen for decades: that the money always rises. Always. Not just on the PGA Tour this fall!

Taken on their own, these pieces of news aren’t all that shocking, but taken together, it’s hard not to view the current state of golf as anything but a wider sports conundrum, and one that not only refuses to be resolved. and it actually gets worse.

On the outskirts of Chicago this week, LIV Golf announced a home record of 15,000-plus fans in attendance on Saturday. It’s no doubt that the top-tier pro-golf event visits the largest market in the American Midwest every year. And many would argue that it is undoubtedly good that LIV is seeing growth. “The patience of the LIV brand and what all of us players, 54 of us, including the staff who closed the doors, have worked so hard to do,” said Bryson DeChambeau on Sunday night. “This is just the beginning.”

But one can also make the obvious argument that LIV’s attendance numbers are not what they could be. When the BMW Championship visited Olympia Fields, Chicago, more than 120,000 spectators were seen during the week – and more than 30,000 on the weekend days – which means that the average daily attendance came out of the list of the best LIV in the United States…always. The fans come out to see the players, they will also watch the event definition and/or finding high-level competition in a specialized area. LIV Chicago had many world-class players, and there was a lot to say in golf (or at least money on the line), but the host course left a lot to be desired, even if Paul Casey rightly notes that at Bolingbrook Golf. The Club’s structure is strong and fast, “it was as if the Chicago major had appeared.”

Bolingbrook, a municipal course that will enjoy the publicity and money that comes with hosting the LIV event, got the tournament in part because it could be organized on short notice. The continued operation of LIV’s environment requires this flexibility of its hosting sites; The tour compiles its schedule over time, confirming host sites months in advance rather than signing multi-year contracts. Ultimately, this method maximizes the number of people entering the gates, as well as the number of people singing. We will never know how many viewers watched the LIV event in Chicago because LIV, which has struggled to attract viewers. in abundancedoes not report actual TV ratings. The PGA Tour, on the other hand, has been dealing with its declining ratings; 2024 will go down as one of the most disappointing years of golf on TV in recent memory.

Which brings us back to last weekend, when pro golf episodes were ranked in the most orderly fashion for TV viewing purposes. The Irish Open got underway early on the East Coast, handing over the baton to the Solheim Cup early in the morning, which led some fans back to each of the LIV tournaments followed by the Procore nightcap.

This coming weekend will provide a few options. Once the PGA Tour is closed, fans will have a choice of the DP World Tour (BMW PGA) major event, the LIV major event (a club tournament in Texas) or the Kroger Queen City LPGA event in Ohio. Will you be inclined to look at one over the other?

Or will you just watch football?