Were you one of the few people who watched men's professional golf in the United States last Sunday?
Over on The CW, LIV Golf's individual season came to a conclusion in the Chicagoland area at the publicly accessible Bolingbrook Golf Club, where Jon Rahm won $18 million as the league's season-long champion and another $4 million for taking the 13th event of 14 this year. He played in a final group with Brooks Koepka, and multi-time winner Joaquin Niemann was in the hunt for the season-long title. Sergio Garcia gave it a good run and wound up nicking Tyrrell Hatton for third place in the season-long race to earn $4 million in bonus money.
That all drew 89,000 people, on average, on The CW, per multiple reports, including Josh Carpenter at Sports Business Journal. Hideous. Even hideous knowing that LIV Golf struggles to draw a substantial TV audience (and that many of its most-online fans say they only watch it while streaming on the LIV Golf app or The CW website).
Meanwhile, a little later on in Napa, California, Patton Kizzire won the Procore Championship out at Silverado Resort for his first PGA Tour win in nearly seven years. It was a runaway in the end, as Kizzire played consistently excellent golf throughout the week.
And that tournament drew even fewer people than LIV Golf, coming in at an average of 69,000 people on Golf Channel. Yes, people are dropping cable left and right, but that's a 77 percent drop from last year's then-Fortinet Championship, when Sahith Theegala earned his first PGA Tour title. Pain.
Probably more painful for the new event title sponsor, Procore, who stepped into that role in July.
However, Procore probably also felt better about it than Fortinet would have, as Procore negotiated a contract that saw the event's purse drop from $8.3 million in 2023 to $6 million in 2024. Were it not for the new Black Desert Championship in Utah on the FedEx Cup Fall schedule, total prize money for the fall slate would appear to be in minor free fall -- especially for a sport where the prize money almost always just goes up.
Men's professional golf has a big problem, and the markets for viewers and sponsors are making that very clear.
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