LIV Golf’s moment of truth — and moment of Trump — arrive this weekend

The most fascinating moments in golf often don’t come on back-nine Sundays. Some of the game’s finest drama happens two days earlier, on Friday afternoons, when players desperate to make the weekend are grinding to make the cut. Every shot matters, every decision carries ramifications for both the tournament and a career. The cut line is cold, merciless and final.

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LIV Golf isn’t quite facing a cut line this week, but this will do until an actual one comes along. Now in its fourth year of competition, the Saudi-backed breakaway tour will receive its first true national closeup, on broadcast television at a course owned by the president of the United States. If LIV is going to become anything more than a well-funded payday for a few dozen players, this is its best opportunity for national awareness.

At the same time, LIV is facing increasing headwinds as it attempts to navigate a golf landscape either in connection with, or parallel to, the PGA Tour. The financial impact of creating an entire worldwide tour from scratch, paying the world’s best players hundreds of millions to attract them, is becoming clear, as is the PGA Tour’s wait-’em-out strategy.

LIV’s biggest challenge: getting eyeballs

Every sport with national or global ambitions is only as strong as its broadcast agreement. For most of its existence LIV has stitched together a series of networks, both broadcast and streaming, to carry its tournaments. So far this season, LIV has struggled to draw American viewers due in large part to the late-night/early-morning start times for its international events.

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That changes this weekend. LIV plays at Doral in Miami with a favorable broadcast window, and for the first time will debut on Fox — the broadcast channel, not a cable offshoot. That gives LIV a far easier pathway to millions of potential viewers than, say, YouTube’s “everyone has YouTube!” pitch. Plus, LIV Doral will be facing off against one of the PGA Tour’s smaller events. If there’s ever a time for Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka et al to claim casual viewers, it’s this weekend.

Then there’s the matter of President Donald Trump. The polarizing president arrived in Doral on Thursday as the effects of his tariff imposition rippled through the news cycle and sent the stock market plummeting. Trump’s presence will endear LIV to some segment of his base, while at the same time rendering it toxic to the president’s opposition. For a sport that has sought to remain publicly apolitical — no sense offending either party — LIV’s close alignment with Trump brings a set of political and public-relations challenges that the Tour doesn’t face.

Internal dissent, external pressure

LIV’s key selling point has always been its players — the marquee, elite-level talent it poached from the PGA Tour, including Rahm, DeChambeau, Koepka and Phil Mickelson. Those stars were lured with nine-figure paychecks several years ago, and play now on contracts with an expiration date. When Koepka was asked recently about the possibility of either remaining on LIV or returning to the PGA Tour, he was as noncommittal as he could be, a strange tactic for a captain of a team with a vested interest in LIV’s long-term success to take.

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Asked directly this week about the state of LIV, Koepka replied, “I think we all hoped it would have been a little bit further along, and that’s no secret.” He then softened the edge a bit: “No matter where you’re at, you always hope everything is further along. But they’re making progress, and it seems to be going in the right direction.”

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported the Saudi Public Investment Fund, the financial backer of LIV, approached the Tour with an offer: an investment of $1.5 billion, conditioned on the continued existence of LIV and the installation of PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan on the Tour’s Policy Board. The Tour, according to The Guardian, rejected that offer outright, leaving the near-term possibility of an agreement very much in limbo.

Last month, prior to The Players Championship, Tour commissioner Jay Monahan noted that “we believe there’s room to integrate important aspects of LIV Golf into the PGA Tour platform” — a positioning which seemed to indicate the Tour believes it has the upper hand now and can dictate the terms of any alignment between the two tours. If that means the end of LIV Golf, in the Tour’s eyes, so be it.

In business, as in golf, winning cures a whole lot of ills. This weekend marks LIV’s best opportunity in its short history to put up a win against the PGA Tour and establish itself as a viable golf entity, rather than a very expensive curiosity. The best players — including many on LIV’s roster — come through when the stakes are highest. We’re about to find out how LIV itself handles the moment.