LIV Tour faces a number of challenges
Filling out its 2023 schedule is among the major obstacles
The first three weeks of 2023 have brought destructive rains and winds to the Redwood Empire, impacting local golf courses with flooded fairways, downed trees and washed out cart paths. January is normally a very slow time of the year when it comes to golf in our neck of the woods. If the rain, wind and snow won’t deter avid golfers, then sometimes unplayable courses will. Yes we do need the rain. We just so happen to want it to be steady instead of excessive. Such is life with Mother Nature.
Meanwhile the PGA Tour has now left Hawaii after two competitive weeks. It will spend the next five weeks on the West Coast, traveling from the Palm Desert area to San Diego to Pebble Beach to Phoenix and finally to Los Angeles. These long-running tournaments have been part of the PGA Tour’s schedule prior to the advent of televised golf. Meanwhile the LPGA Tour is holding its Tournament of Champions while the Korn Ferry Tour is visiting the Bahamas and the DP World (European) Tour is spending another week in Abu Dhabi. It’s just another week in the world of golf. However, professional golf’s newest tour, LIV Golf, is struggling to fill its 14-event schedule and has a handful of other issues that could spell trouble for the upstart tour.
As of the moment, LIV Golf is expected to kick off its season from Feb. 24-26 at Mexico’s Mayakoba Resort. The breakaway tour that is underwritten by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund goes to Tucson in March, to Australia and Singapore in April, tees it up in Oklahoma in May, has a late June tournament scheduled for Spain, and visits the Greenbrier in West Virginia in August. As of now, that’s it. Those seven tourneys represent half of the LIV schedule, but we know of little else. Putting on a professional golf tournament for LIV linksters as well as past major champions such as Cam Smith, Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia and Bryson DeChambeau is quite the organizational endeavor. You just can’t “wing” a tournament at the last moment. This is a big-time prob