LIV Golf Sees Success in Las Vegas, Eyes More U.S. Stops in Future
The PGA Tour competitor continues to gain momentum in its third season
Posted On: April 5, 2024 By :Since its inception in June 2021, LIV Golf has been a lightning rod of conversation in the golf and sports world. No organization has ever challenged the PGA Tour, nor had anybody come along with the resources that LIV boasts financially.
So as the Saudi-backed alternative to “traditional” golf plows ahead into its third season, LIV hosts its second U.S. event of the year this weekend in Miami after visiting Las Vegas on the weekend of the Super Bowl in February as the organization looks to expand to a variety of fans in different parts of the country.
“We’re not trying to replace other golf opportunities,” said Troy Tutt, senior vice president of ticketing and hospitality at LIV Golf. “We’re just trying to be additive to what’s already out there. … It’s a little bit different than a lot of professional golf that’s out there, which maybe they’re in the same market every year for 20 years or so. We pride ourselves on wanting to move around a little bit.”
After this week’s events for both the PGA Tour and LIV, the golf world will descend upon Augusta, Georgia, and The Masters. The home of the most legendary tournament in the sport and the first of the year’s four major championships will feature 13 players from LIV, including seven past Masters champions, and comes at a time where many of the sport’s biggest stars — no matter what tour it competes in — are calling for a unification.
“The fans are what drive this sport,” Bryson DeChambeau said Wednesday at a pre-LIV event news conference in Miami. “If we don’t have fans, we don’t have golf. … There’s got to be a way to come together. And it needs to happen fast. It’s not a two-year thing. Like it needs to happen quicker rather than later just for the good of the sport. Too many people are losing interest.”
Rory McIlroy, who has been one of the PGA Tour’s most vocal supporters, said Wednesday at the PGA Tour stop in San Antonio that “I just think with the fighting and everything that’s went on over the past couple years, people are just getting really fatigued of it and it’s turning people off men’s professional golf, and that’s not a good thing for anyone.”
While golfers and golf fans debate the future of the two tours and what could come in the coming months and years, LIV continues to play on. Along with Las Vegas and Miami, LIV stops in the U.S. include the Golf Club of Houston from June 7–9, the tour’s first stop in the state of Texas, and The Grove in Nashville from June 21–23. The Old White course at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, will host the tour from August 16–18.
“We want to provide LIV Golf, especially as a newer product, to a wide variety of audiences that are across the country,” Tutt said. “So we certainly focus on the Midwest or the Southeast or the West Coast and are doing the best we can to spread the love across the entire market and across the nation.”
Las Vegas a Super Success
One of those new sites for LIV this year was the Las Vegas Country Club, which ran from February 8–10 and drew many of the fans who were in town for the Super Bowl on February 11. The crowds were large on the final day of the tournament, with a good number of fans in the gallery sporting 49ers or Chiefs gear.
“Whether it’s a Super Bowl or any big events happening, I wouldn’t say there’s a set answer that, yes, we want to piggyback off those as much as we can,” Tutt said. “It’s really on a one-off basis. There’s a lot that goes into scheduling, market by market, but there’s also the players’ schedules. They have other things going on outside of LIV Golf. Some of our players are playing in the majors.”
That said, next year’s Super Bowl will be in New Orleans, a city that hasn’t seen LIV action and seems like a natural fit.
“We saw a lot of success being in Vegas and we’d be silly not to heavily consider (doing another event around Super Bowl). And the market does have a lot to do with it,” Tutt said. “If the Super Bowl — or another big event like that — was going to a market that maybe we’ve been in or we don’t feel like has a lot of success, that’s in consideration. But New Orleans is a market we haven’t been in yet and maybe we want to bring LIV Golf to that area of the country that we haven’t been in too much over the past couple of years.”
Tutt knows how important a local tourism CVB or sports commission can be when LIV is putting on an event for the first time in a new city. Before coming to LIV, he had previous stops with the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Yankees and was the senior director of tournament revenue for the PGA Tour from 2013–2016.
“We 100 percent work with the local sports commissions and tourism organizations,” Tutt said. “Every market’s different and basically how they are prominent within that market is different too, but we lean into it every single time. There’s definitely an outreach and I would say a majority of the time it’s open arms and they’re extremely excited and they go above and beyond to support us.”
One specific instance Tutt recalled was with the Tulsa Sports Commission and Visit Tulsa for an event in 2023.
“The sports commission and the local authorities there just really embraced us and kind of bent over backwards to support us the best way they could,” Tutt said. “They understood how big this was for their market, especially bringing some of the best golfers in the world that don’t come through that market too often.”
There’s been plenty of outreach between LIV and all of the U.S. stops for the 2024 season as well.
“When we align ourselves with these markets, we don’t do it with the intent of, ‘How can they help us?’ We think, ‘How can this be a good partnership and how we can help promote their city and their tourism?’ Because we know that’s a big piece of it,” Tutt said.
“Golf, But Louder”
That three-word tagline is embedded all over LIV events. Since the inception of the sport, golf has enforced a buttoned-up, business-like atmosphere at its events but that’s not the case on this tour. In Vegas, LIV had DJ Gryffin performing as the par 3 eighth at Las Vegas Country Club provided live music during the final round as players had their own walk-up songs, akin to a baseball player coming to the plate.
“I think a lot of people are thrown off with music being played, but I think it’s just the evolution of the sport and they actually love it more than it being what most would assume a distraction,” said Tutt, adding that players have a Tour liason for any feedback that they feel comfortable or uncomfortable with such as music. “If we have a lull and the music is off for five minutes, you feel it and it does not feel the same. It’s a big piece of what LIV Golf is all about.”
The Las Vegas event also featured a fan village that included an interactive putting challenge for adults, a glow-in-the-dark mini golf area for the kids and cornhole boards for impromptu games.
“We’re constantly looking at how can we tweak that and make that better,” Tutt said, “because that is something that draws a variety of demographics to our events and you don’t have to be the biggest golf fan in the world — or you don’t have to fit in a certain niche of golf fan — you can truly enjoy the entire experience. And that’s how we’re building fans because by the time they leave, they’re a fan of golf.”
When it comes to high-end hospitality, Club 54 is the extensive VIP area that surrounds the 18th hole green and offers the best views of the final hole, as well as a variety of food and drink options. But Tutt says that at its core, LIV is more worried about growing its fanbase than charging a large amount to attend an event.
“If you look at the optimal opportunity for us from a pricing standpoint, that’s really not what’s driving us. What’s driving us is really exposing LIV Golf to newer fans,” Tutt said. “So that’s more of a priority. It’s not every dollar that we can see within the market, it’s how many more eyeballs can we have on course consuming and seeing LIV Golf.”
Looking to the Future
While the future is uncertain when it comes to the structure of professional golf as LIV and the PGA Tour continue the dialogue about how to co-exist, from Tutt’s perspective, the goal is to create more fans.
“A lot of times we’ll look at it from the perspective of from the time someone leaves their driveway to the time they go home later in the day, what does that entire experience look like attending LIV Golf?” Tutt said. “You’ll never hear us say, ‘This is what we’ve done for the past 10 years.’ It’s constantly trying to change and innovate to grow the game.”
He added through two seasons so far, the most common question asked by cities after an event is what’s on tap for next year.
“That’s where we’re very fortunate,” he said. “(And) we’ve received calls already this year from markets that we’re not going in, but they see what LIV Golf is bringing and are looking to work with us. So we’re very fortunate, as a brand that is still very much in our infancy, having that type of support.”
Posted in: Golf, Main Feature