LIV Golf was given an opportunity on Sunday.
The final round of the PGA Tour was postponed due to really bad weather conditions at Pebble Beach, giving the first LIV event of the 2024 season the full stage. And it was Jon Rahm’s first event as an LIV golfer, with Rahm vying for the win in Mayakoba, Mexico. Despite all the money LIV has spent to get off the ground and fill its 54-man roster, sometimes luck still brings the best chances you’ll get.
So how has the 3 year old product fared? I had some thoughts.
Legion before me
Rahm didn’t win on Sunday: he finished in bogeyman fashion, losing the shared lead and ceding the stage to Joaquin Niemann and Sergio Garcia for a four-hole playoff, won dramatically by Niemann with the only light on the course coming from the leaderboard that dominates the 18 green.
Rahm was dejected, as anyone who has ever seen Rahm play golf could have imagined, and received some coaxing from the LIV broadcast team to acknowledge that his Legion XIII team had won the team competition. It will be interesting going forward to see how Rahm handles this pushing and pulling. Most of these kids are still programmed to only care about their own performance and LIV is calling for a reset of priorities.

Jon Rahm finished third in his first LIV event. (Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)
The impact of Rahm’s LIV Golf
Rahm’s biggest impact on the league so far is that his presence appears to have tipped the scales when it comes to LIV’s relevance.
The starting roster was so full of have-bes and never-wills that Dustin Johnson felt like a total outlier. Well, Brooks Koepka made things a little better. Bryson DeChambeau did the same. Then Cameron Smith. It still wasn’t enough to shake the feeling that every week an established star didn’t win the LIV event was a missed opportunity, and if two or three of those guys had an off week it was easy to make a mockery of the rankings.
But Friday’s first round was different with Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. There were more guys you want to see play golf, not out of sentimentality or curiosity but because you want to see the best of the best.
Mayakoba’s top 10 included Niemann, Garcia, Rahm, Johnson, Koepka, Hatton, Smith and Louis Oosthuizen. You tell yourself this if you reject him.
Niemann wants to enter Augsburg
I’m not sure what to make of Niemann launching the winning putt and dedicating much of his interview about the victory to his exclusion from the major championships. “I’m not in the majors,” was the first thing he said when he was handed a microphone. Is it a sign of his competitiveness that his mind immediately went to the next thing, or something else?
The 25-year-old Chilean has competed in the last 12 majors but is currently out chasing the Masters at world number 66, according to the Official World Golf Rankings. (He is ranked 27th on DataGolf.com, which takes into account LIV results.)
Niemann entered the Open Championship thanks to his victory at the Australian Open in December. However, he will have to work on Asian Tour events and hope to accumulate enough points to crack the OWGR top 50 before April.
While we sympathize with his plight, we all get the deal here. LIV has had an OWGR problem since day one.
LIV on TV
Let’s talk about the transmission.
First, the positives: Most of what you see on screen is pretty good. The leaderboard is a plus, the relevant statistics are ready and the putting line graphics help the viewer understand what they are looking at. They also did a good job of laying out and letting us hear the player and caddy discussing shots, and that’s the good thing. Lots of golf shots are also shown, which shouldn’t seem that revolutionary, but to an audience subjected to NBC’s PGA Tour broadcasts it just is.
What about everything else? Leaves a lot to be desired.
The biggest problem with an LIV Golf broadcast is that it constantly tries to convince us of something, instead of letting events speak for themselves. There’s a constant barrage of Tweets, which as a storytelling mechanism still feels stolen from a 2012 game broadcast – and they’re all more or less the same. That player is fantastic. This is exciting. I’m watching right now. They add nothing, and if Arlo White doesn’t read them for us, they scroll to the bottom of the screen.
White is often in this position, more thrower than handler. There’s a three-man booth and two field reporters, and plenty of time to talk. But precious little information is offered, and it often seems like everyone is simply passing the baton as to who will repeat the company line this time.
Whether they feel this way or simply what is asked of them, it has the same impact. When you constantly tell me that everything is great and that normal rounds of golf are something more, then when the truly high level moment comes there is no higher level to go to. This is why newspapers didn’t publish the font size of Pearl Harbor every day. It would stop holding your attention.
So on Friday, as Niemann tried to get down to 57, which would have been the lowest round ever recorded on a major professional golf tour, the broadcast failed to sufficiently rise to the moment. He had nowhere else to go.
LIV has a chance to get more eyeballs this year. The current product is much better than when it started. The rest just has to grow with it.
(Top photo by Joaquin Niemann: Manuel Velasquez/Getty Images)