PGA Tour's BMW Championship paves way for rival LIV Golf in Chicago

As anticipation for LIV Golf's return rises, Chicago golf fans flocked to Olympia Fields Country Club this past weekend, where PGA Tour golfer Viktor Hovland secured a victory and $3.6 million at the 2023 BMW Championship. As reported by Golfweek, the 25-year-old Norwegian golfer set a course record with a 61, including an impressive 28 on the back nine. With this win, Hovland has climbed up to second place in the FedEx Cup Playoff standings.

Despite excessive heat on Sunday, Chicagoans still came out in droves to catch the action and watch fan favorites like Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler finish in the top five on the leaderboard. 

The BMW Championship comes to an end with more than just a win for the golfers, who competed for a total purse of $20 million. All proceeds from the tournament benefit the Evans Scholars Foundation, a program that provides full tuition and housing scholarships to youth caddies nationwide and has helped over 3,300 students attend college. 

PGA rival LIV Golf Series returns next month

Following the excitement at Olympia Fields Country Club, the LIV Golf Invitational Series is making its way back to Chicago at Rich Harvest Farms from Friday, September 22, to Sunday, September 24. This will mark the 12th stop in the 14-tour series. Keeping to its promotional slogan “Golf, but louder,” the weekend will also boast a post-golf concert Saturday night with a performance by Grammy award-winning artist Tiësto.

This isn’t the first time the PGA Tour’s rival has come to Chicago. The startup league played at Rich Harvest Farms in 2022 in its inaugural season with prominent pro golfers like Dustin Johnson, Phil Michelsen, Brooks Koepka and Martin Kaymer. LIV Golf offers a fresh format that showcases teams vying for a whopping sum of more than $250 million in prize money. Its inaugural series, held in multiple venues including Boston and Chicago, provides a platform for global golfers to test this innovative format.

“Building off our successful Chicago tournament last year, we’re eager to return to Rich Harvest Farms and once again deliver a memorable event for the region’s passionate sports fans,” said Greg Norman, LIV Golf Commissioner and CEO, in a press release by the organization. “Illinois was a fantastic host in 2022 and we’re going to raise the bar even higher this September. Adding a global music act like Tiësto brings another supercharged element to the tournament experience that fans are embracing.”

While Chicago golf fans haven’t seemed to mind the controversial tour and still came out to watch, a report by GOLF.com detailed the tension at Rich Harvest Farms. Several LIV golfers, including the winner Cam Smith, expressed their disdain for being shut out of upcoming PGA tournaments, like the prestigious Presidents Cup in Charlotte. Phil Mickelson, despite shooting his best round, declined to speak to the media altogether, having been highly scrutinized publicly since joining LIV Golf in the summer of 2022.  

Hovland may have taken home a hefty monetary prize this year, but thanks to his hole-in-one at last year’s BMW Championship, he won’t be the only one to come out on top. According to a press release by the organization, it is tradition that when a player hits the first ace at the BMW Championship, BMW donates a full four-year Evans Scholarship — a full tuition and housing scholarship worth $125,000 — in the player’s name to the Evans Scholars Foundation. This year’s winner was Evans Scholar Diana Llamas, a Chicago native and caddie at the Ridgemoor Country Club who will attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign this fall.

PGA Tour vs. LIV Golf, the controversy explained

As reported last year by Golf Digest, LIV Golf's recent emergence is signaling a potentially divisive shift, challenging the PGA's longtime dominance.The brainchild of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, LIV Golf is backed by a $3 billion fund. Despite being shrouded in controversy due to political and human rights concerns, LIV Golf's audacious efforts have shifted the status quo. The Saudi-backed entity is offering deals to top golfers that the PGA hasn’t matched, covering expenses such as travel, accommodation and even paying host venues. 

In response to LIV Golf's ascendancy, the PGA Tour amplified its game last year. From introducing high-value international events to bolstering prize money, the PGA's objective remained clear going into 2023: be the unrivaled hub for professional golf. Yet, as players like Jon Rahm and Rory McIlroy suggest, as seen in the same Golf Digest report, a symbiotic relationship between the PGA and LIV might be the future, benefiting both entities and the fans.

According to a more recent report by Golf Digest, both the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have agreed to drop their antitrust lawsuits after a year-long legal battle. The dispute ensued when top-name golfers like Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau were suspended by the tour for joining LIV Golf. 

As of June 2023, according to a report by the New York Times, LIV Golf and the PGA Tour have come to a tentative agreement, with both of their commercial rights being owned by a for-profit entity called “NewCo.” The agreement still has yet to be made official by PGA Tour’s policy board with the rest of 2023 tournaments remaining separate for the two organizations. As stated in the same New York Times report, the potential agreement has left PGA Tour players feeling more blindsided with the likely win for LIV Golf. 

While tensions between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour rages on, sports fans will have to wait and see if a unified future is in store.

The author generated this text in part with GPT-3, OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model. Upon generating draft language, the author reviewed, edited, and revised the language to their own liking and takes ultimate responsibility for the content of this publication.