The No. 2 participant on the earth has moved on from the golf league that made him the No. 2 participant on the earth. Cameron Smith will leave the PGA Tour and play within the LIV Golf League beginning this week in Boston. It is LIV’s greatest scoop to this point by way of buying extremely ranked gamers who’re thriving within the present panorama.
This represents a giant loss for the PGA Tour. Smith is the reigning Event of Champions winner, Gamers champion and Open Championship winner. The primary two of these occasions are among the many 13 elevated tournaments for the PGA Tour in 2023, and the defending champion will not be at both.
There may be additionally a development right here for LIV. The Saudi Arabian-backed league now has a group of golfers who’ve gained 12 of the final 26 main championships. That is a giant deal for the advertising and marketing of its product, though I stay doubtful that anybody exterior of Tiger Woods can have an effect on viewership for any league exterior of the context of the PGA Tour and the main championships.
It is that context that the PGA Tour nonetheless holds over LIV Golf and should lean on as LIV undoubtedly pours increasingly more cash into its future league. The Tour can (and will) do a greater job of contextualizing its personal product by making a number of the decisions it has already made, like elevating its occasions, but additionally by probably reforming the FedEx Cup.
My colleague Rick Gehman made the good level in our latest podcast (see beneath) that Smith and LIV are the proper marriage. Along with his Open win this summer season, Smith is exempt into all the main championships for at the very least the following 5 years, and LIV will get the latest main winner so as to add to its secure of gamers that already contains Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka.
No matter what you assume is the correct path ahead, what LIV has completed up to now has been spectacular and significant, because it has remodeled itself into the second-best tour on the earth in lower than a yr. We focus on all of this and rather more in our latest First Reduce Podcast as we attempt to decide what the most recent information means and the way every league will deal with it.
Cameron Smith is formally becoming a member of LIV Golf. Rick Gehman and Kyle Porter focus on what this implies for the PGA Tour. Comply with & hearken to The First Reduce on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
