GAJTKA: LIV’s Innovative Team Championship Additive to Pro Golf Sphere

PLYMOUTH, Mich. — The two primary competing men’s professional golf tours have a problem.

Due to the traditions of the pro game, neither the PGA Tour nor LIV has ownership in the four most prominent events of the year. Actually, make that the top five in a year like this one, with next month’s Ryder Cup still pending.

So what’s a tour to do?

The PGA Tour has made inroads over the past few decades with the rising stature of its Players Championship, to the point it doesn’t get much of an argument when it dubs itself as the fifth major. (Although, due to LIV defections, it can no longer lay claim to ‘the best field in golf’ label.)

LIV doesn’t have a counter to the Players, but what it does have is a more compelling finish to its season.

While the PGA Tour once again is sticking to its FedEx Cup Playoffs format that isn’t really a playoff at all, LIV’s team championship remains its most viable selling point, at least to this commentator.

Taking place this year in the Ann Arbor suburbs at Saint John’s Resort, the LIV team championship provides a unique capper to the circuit’s 13 stroke-play events. This weekend’s tournament, held at the resort’s new Cardinal course, features 12 four-man teams going head-to-head in match play over the first two days, followed by a final-day cumulative stroke play for the three squads still alive.

While the higher-seeded team has no tangible advantage in these matches — which consist of two one-on-one matchups plus a two-on-two alternate-shot battle — the team that finished higher in the regular season can both a) choose its opponent, and b) see the opponent’s lineup first so it can make individual matchup decisions.

Friday’s first round saw six teams advance, with Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII, Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers, Phil Mickelson’s HyFlyers, Brooks Koepka’s Smash, Joaquín Niemann’s Torque and Louis Oosthuizen’s Stinger all surviving to see Saturday.

Match play is notorious for upsets due to the volatility that can occur over a small sample of a single round of golf, but only Sergio Garcia’s Fireballs suffered what would be truly considered a surprising result, falling 3-0 to Mickelson’s squad. Tyrrell Hatton prevented another surprise when he outlasted the Cleeks’ Richard Bland in 19 holes to win the rubber match for Rahm’s top-seeded squad.

“I think that’s kind of the beauty of match play,” Hatton said after the clinching up-and-down. “On the day, anyone beats anyone. Yeah, you just have to go out there and try your best, fight on every shot. Generally they’re always close matches. It doesn’t take much to swing it one way or the other. Yeah, they can be stressful.”

Although match play is as old as St Andrews itself, LIV’s team-oriented twist on it represents rare actual competitive innovation in the golf sphere. This is in stark contrast to this week’s Tour Championship in Atlanta, which has reverted back to straight-up stroke play for 72 holes; the PGA Tour continues to resist any change to the norm in its season finale.

Frankly, I’d like to see LIV lean into more of this type of match-play focus throughout its schedule, an opinion shared by none other than arguably the tour’s biggest draw in DeChambeau.

“At least from my perspective, I’ve certainly enjoyed everything about the team aspect,” the two-time U.S. Open champ said Thursday. “I mean, we get to do this (tournament), which is not normal. It’s not what we used to do.

“As it comes down to it, having something different from stroke play is fun as well, and something we don’t do enough of, I personally think. So I love it.”

For all of the differences in on-site atmosphere and media presentation between LIV and the PGA Tour, in my mind the two tours aren’t different enough during the competition to give golf fans a substantive choice. At least for one week, LIV has the more compelling product when it comes to the actual birdies and bogeys.

In recent years, men’s pro golf has been quite timid about infringing upon the territory of American football, with both LIV and the PGA Tour bumping all action of significance from September back into August. But at least the new guys aren’t afraid of closing their season with something fresh.

“There’s a lot of great players out here, and I think it’s fun getting these (fans) seeing a new product, especially the team championship,” DeChambeau said Friday. “Seeing the team atmosphere, and what it really means to us to be competing and playing as a team.

“It’s fun individually to play, but the reason that we’re out here as well is because of the team aspect.”

LIV entered the sports entertainment scene intending to be a major disruptor. The team championship is where it delivers on its promise the most.

Keep it here on PGN this weekend as I’ll be on site for more coverage of LIV’s closest stop to the Pittsburgh area.