How the LIV Golf Tour can steal the spotlight from the PGA before the end of the year

All four majors of the PGA Tour season have been completed, and now there are just six tournaments left in the calendar year. While the PGA is fading out of the spotlight, the LIV Golf Series is just starting to heat up in it’s first year and this could be their time to strike while the iron is hot.

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PGA’s season coming to a close

The LIV Golf Series has been an idea that has been thrown around for the last few years, as Greg Norman and the Saudi Arabian-backed tour has lingered over the PGA for some time. This year the wheels finally started to roll, and the new aged tour is growing in momentum and star power.

When Cameron Smith lifted his first major championship trophy at the end of the British Open, it marked the end of the fourth and final major of the PGA season. The PGA Championship used to be in August, but it was moved to mid May in 2019, making the British Open the grand finale of the major schedule.

Scottie Scheffler won the Masters back in April, and then Justin Thomas won the PGA. Matt Fiztpatrick waited to get his first win on tour until the U.S. Open when he lifted the Wanamaker Trophy and then it was Camron Smith’s turn to hoist the Claret Jug after a brilliant back nine at St. Andrews.

Major Champions will be targets by LIV

All four major winners are under 30 years old. This should be something that has the PGA ecstatic, but instead the threat of the LIV Tour looms around golf’s premier league and has the PGA and it’s fans shook.

There’s no question when the major championship season comes to an end, golf ratings plummet. Not a whole lot of golf fans outside of the die hards tune in from Thursday to Sunday to watch tournaments like the Rocket Mortgage Classic. With all due respect to the tournament, it’s not as big of a draw as say, the 150th Open at St. Andrews. And viewership will go down even more without some of the game’s biggest names.

The PGA has six more tournaments left before the end of December. The 3M Open will tee off this week, and then it’s the Rocket Mortgage Classic, the Wyndham Championship, the FedEx St. Jude Championship and the BMW Championship before the season wraps up with the Tour Championship from East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, GA during the last week of August.

Lefty started the movement to LIV

The Tour Championship might draw a nice audience, as it is the crowning tournament for the PGA Tour Playoffs, but it has none of the prestige of a major championship.

While the LIV is far from matching the prestige of a Masters or an Open Championship, what they do have is star power, and plenty of it. Their lucrative tournaments prizes and shortened scheduling has enticed some of the game’s biggest names. Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Louis Oosthuizen, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, Sergio Garcia, Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter and last but not least Phil Mickelson have all joined the Saudi-backed tour.

So with the PGA season winding to a slow halt, the LIV tour has an opportunity to outshine it’s competition from here until the end of the calendar year. It may be true that it needs to be marketed a bit better and more easily accessible television broadcasts. But they have money and they have plenty of tournaments from now until New Year’s Eve to steal some of the golfing spotlight from the PGA.

PGA and LIV both have six events left

There have been two events played in the inaugural season of the LIV Tour. Six events remain, with the next one being played at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey on the last weekend of July.

The LIV tour will skip the month of August, perhaps wisely seeing as that is the final month for the PGA to pack in their closing tournaments, and then the Greg Norman backed tour will take center stage. The International in Boston, Massachusetts with host event number four on the slate from September 2-4. Rich Harvest Farms in Illinois will be the scene for the fifth event in the middle of September, and then there will be thee events squeezed into October. One at Stonehill in Bangkok Thailand October 7-9. Next is the Royal Greens Golf & Country Club which will be hosted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and the final event of the season will be played at Trump National Golf Club Doral on October 27-30.

While it may take a while for this new tour to get the notoriety or build the legacy the PGA has, the LIV Golf Tour is going to be making noise in the golf world over the next couple of months.

While there are just eight events scheduled this year, next year there will be 10, and after that the 14 event schedule will be installed in 2024.