Moments before Bryson DeChambeau teed off to open LIV Golf’s first American tournament of the year, at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, the public address announcer bellowed “Long! LIV! Golf!” to try and electrify a modest crowd by the first tee.
The irony wasn’t lost on the devoted group who skirted work and school to enjoy a sunny afternoon just 40 miles outside Washington DC: this was the first tournament since the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund confirmed it would no longer fund the outfit that it once imagined as the world’s premier collection of professional golfers. Before that news was finalized, the league postponed a tournament scheduled to take place in New Orleans at the end of June.
“We have a good runway through this season fortunately,” LIV’s chief executive, Scott O’Neil, said during a press conference on Tuesday. “And it’s for next year that we’re going to be making some pretty significant, substantive changes.”
The news hung over a predictably quiet Thursday afternoon to open a tournament that Donald Trump is expected to attend on Saturday. Trump, who had publicly supported LIV’s growth after the PGA temporarily refused to hold tournaments at his properties, told reporters that he believes the PGA should welcome back players seeking to leave LIV with its future in question.
Among the crowd were two distinct classes of golf fan that LIV has been working for the past years to capture as part of their breathtakingly expensive and ferocious effort to become a viable competitor to the PGA Tour. Perched behind a railing with a pink baseball cap and synthetic golf shirt covered in pastel dots was Riley Robbins, a mustachioed contractor who traveled with his mom and fiancee from Virginia Beach, Virginia to celebrate his 21st birthday by attending all four days of the tournament.
“I came here to watch Bryson hit the shit out of the ball,” Robbins said with a chuckle. “I came here to watch Jon Rahm hit the shit out of the ball.”
Robbins is an avowed golf fanatic: he tries to golf every day when he’s not at work and is an avid follower of various YouTube channels. He is especially fond of DeChambeau, who indicated this week that he would rather continue building his YouTube channel instead of trying to rejoin the PGA; (DeChambeau was part of a 2022 lawsuit against the PGA that included fellow defectors Phil Mickelson and Ian Poulter). As a teenager, Robbins remembered DeChambeau as the less likable party in the golfer’s bitter feud with Brooks Koepka.
That was before DeChambeau started building his YouTube channel featuring footage of his workouts and personal guide to his life as a pro golfer. It was this kind of individual brand building and media strategy that LIV welcomed while the PGA only recently loosened its restrictions on what its golfers can post.
“I pretty much get everything through YouTube because I’m part of the younger generation,” Robbins said. “I follow live tournaments, but other than that, I am more attracted to the personality-driven side.”
The problem for LIV is that Robbins was here to see DeChambeau, not the Crushers team that he captains. Few fans were wearing LIV merchandise despite the outfit’s intense marketing effort to try to popularize the team-based concept that separates it from the PGA. The course featured team-branded pop-up bars and signs with QR codes encouraging attendees to join specific fan clubs. One team, the Southern Guards, celebrates by doing the “rhino jive” and asked fans to post videos of their best efforts. In the “Fan Village,” attendees could receive a temporary tattoo with their favorite (or newly adopted) team. Maybe fans would be more invested if the tattoos were permanent.
If LIV has any future, then it will need the likes of Robbins and other American fans to find a team and start buying merchandise and pledging allegiance to the Rangegoats or Crushers or Hyflyers. Inside the course’s largest merchandise tent, however, most of the space was devoted to selling agnostic LIV-branded clothing.
“I think the team format is transformational,” O’Neil said. “The players as partners is something that doesn’t exist in the world of sports.”
O’Neil cited not just the high audience turnout in LIV events in Australia and South Africa, but how those audiences welcomed the national affiliations of teams like the Southern Guards (South Africa), Ripper GC (Australia) and Korean GC (South Korea). Before DeChambeau teed off, four parachuters descended waving the flag of OKGC, a recently rebranded team that is the first to be directly anchored to the United States. O’Neil insists that several of LIV’s players are dedicated to making the team concept work, and reports have surfaced that a core part of O’Neil’s strategy is finding investors for the 13 existing teams.
That was the same reasoning adopted by Jeff Eisenhard and Michael Cafferky, two friends from nearby Reston, Virginia who purchased a $29 day pass to watch some of the world’s best players up close. Like Robbins, they also consider themselves obsessed: they play in a fantasy golf league together and have attended several PGA tournaments as spectators.
Yet they never check the LIV standings and scoff at the notion that anyone – even those attending that day – pays any attention to the team standings that LIV believes is essential to the league’s survival. “If it was drizzly and cold, I wouldn’t be here,” Eisenhart quipped. Instead of purchasing the four-day grounds pass, they admitted that they would be following this weekend’s PGA Tour event so they could pay attention to their fantasy golf teams.
“This team concept is just silliness,” Cafferky said. “Nobody is connected to these teams or franchises.”
If LIV hopes to survive, especially without one of the world’s wealthiest backers, then it will need to reach these fans before it runs out of money.