Thus far the ongoing battle between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf has only resulted in a fracture in the men’s professional game and disillusioned fans. Now, it will be the centerpiece of a made-for-TV match later this year.
The PGA Tour’s Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler are set to face LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka in a primetime match on TNT. Golfweek first reported the news, but it was confirmed to The Athletic via a person briefed on the agreement, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the match.
Set to be held in Las Vegas in mid-December, the event will naturally utilize the growing tensions between the two leagues to engage an audience for the first time since the emergence of the start-up league in 2022. The “framework agreement,” announced on Jun. 6, 2023, live on CNBC by PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF governor Yassir Al-Rumayyan, vowed to bring the game of golf back together.
Since then, the PGA Tour and the PIF, which funds LIV Golf, have missed their deadline for completing negotiations. They’ve continued to discuss solutions behind closed doors, with no new deadline on the calendar. Monahan met with the media at last week’s Tour Championship and insisted that the PGA Tour and the PIF are in “regular dialogue” despite the lack of updates surrounding the proposed unification of the game.
There have been nine iterations of TNT’s “The Match” — the latest featuring Rory McIlroy, Max Homa, Lexi Thompson and Rose Zhang earlier this year — but it is not yet clear whether the new LIV versus PGA Tour exhibition will be a part of that series.
Koepka and DeChambeau were famously participants in a previous installation of the event as a way to settle their boiling online rivalry. Now they’ll team up as the two most popular representatives of LIV Golf against the world No. 1 and a four-time major champion. McIlroy and DeChambeau are just a few months removed from their tense duel down the stretch of the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2, during which McIlroy missed two short putts to allow DeChambeau to seize his second U.S. Open trophy. Scheffler has not yet been a part of the primetime match series. He is coming off one of the most dominant seasons in golf history.
“Brooks and Scottie are very excited to be a part of this unique event and look forward to sharing more soon,” Blake Smith, the agent for both Koepka and Scheffler, said in a statement.
The PGA Tour declined to comment through a representative.
Required reading
(Top photo of Scottie Scheffler, left, and Brooks Koepka: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5744311/2024/09/04/pga-tour-liv-scheffler-mcilroy-dechambeau-koepka-tv-golf/
