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By Sandy Dunlop, Better Game Golf
Why LIV Golf failed is, for me, simple. It was a fatally flawed concept right from the start, and one of the fundamental reasons is that they never understood storytelling. They never understood golf as live storytelling. They came up with a few interesting innovations, music, a more laid back entertainment oriented atmosphere, the concept of teams, and we all know, golf followers know, how incredibly compelling team golf can be. But the biggest failing was the shotgun start, because what that does is it takes away the drama that's inherent in storytelling. You didn't see the team drama unfold. You didn't see the setup. No good guy, no bad guy, no reversals, no emotional roller coaster. And without those, there is no story. Live had nothing of that, and that is why it was doomed.
One of the first ingredients of storytelling is you've got to have a good guy and a bad guy. Modern storytelling makes that a little bit more complex and ambiguous, but basically as a viewer you've got to have someone you want to win, and by definition everyone else you don't want to win. And it becomes particularly dramatic if there's one golfer you really want to win and one you really dislike, because you then have the classic dramatic situation which is right at the core of storytelling.
Think about how you actually watch a Sunday afternoon. You are not watching golf shots. You are watching a protagonist. You've picked your man or your woman, often before the first tee shot, and from that moment every other name on the leaderboard becomes an obstacle to the ending you want. That is not a casual preference. That is emotional investment, and it is the engine of everything that follows.
By having the shotgun start, you don't see that setup. You didn't see that setup. Groups finish on the 4th, the 11th, the 17th, all at once. There is no last nine. There's no accumulation of who is chasing whom. The architecture that lets a viewer choose a hero and an antagonist was removed before the first ball was struck.
For the golfer watching, this matters more than you'd think. The way you watch shapes the way you think about your own game. When you follow a player through reversals, you are rehearsing resilience. You're watching someone make a 6 and keep going. That's a lesson you take to your own card, and it's the same territory I cover in The Art of Minimising Bad: How to Win by Losing Less.
The second thing that makes golf a drama is the emotional roller coaster you go on, because what you are concerned about is your hero or heroine. Every time there's a setback, your emotional amotometer, as it were, goes down. They make a birdie, you go up. So it's reversals. Up down, up down. But if you've taken away the possibility of knowing what that is, there's no drama. There's none of that emotional investment in the character. And if there's no emotional investment in the character, there's no visible reversals.
It's that which makes the ritual within which the drama unfolds, the last nine holes in a tournament, so dramatic. And one of the reasons it can be so dramatic is because there's often a tiny gap between a fantastic shot and a disaster. Between a pond and a birdie. A pond and an eagle. A bunker and a birdie. At Augusta, over the last nine, every single hole, the gap between failure and success is tiny. Take a hole like the 13th if you're hitting a long shot in.
So one of the great dramas of the last few years in golf was Rory on the last nine. If you wanted him to win, well, right from the beginning of the day he has a 6. Then he gets it back. Up and down, the 13th, the 15th, the 18th, and then the playoff. You're taken on an emotional roller coaster. And if you're emotionally involved, it's got to hurt if your hero or heroine loses, because if it didn't hurt, there wouldn't be the joy when they win. I wrote about what was happening inside Rory's head that week in The Victory You Couldn't See: How Rory McIlroy's Brain Won the Masters.
People underestimate this. Even in a tournament, it's the drama of the cut. Will someone make it, will someone not make it. That is drama even halfway through the tournament. The cut is a threshold, and thresholds are what turn a sequence of events into a narrative. Somebody stands on the 18th tee on Friday afternoon needing a par to play the weekend, and suddenly a routine hole carries the weight of a season.
Live had no cut. Guaranteed money, guaranteed starts, 54 holes, everybody plays. You can argue that's fairer to the players. You cannot argue it's better television, because you have removed one of the two or three moments in a golf week where consequence is visible, immediate and shared.
And here's what I'd say to the club golfer watching at home. You know this feeling in your own game. You've stood over a putt to break 90 for the first time, or a drive on the last to win your match. That's your cut. That's your threshold. The reason tournament golf grips us is that it dramatises something we already live, in miniature, every time we play. When you watch someone survive their threshold, you learn something about surviving yours, which is why the dread you feel on the first tee is worth understanding rather than avoiding. I go into that in How to Play Your Best Golf When You're Dreading the Round.
What also makes a difference is the place and the time. If it's Augusta, you have a backstory. As you watch it, the familiarity. You know the place at which the unknown will unfold. So there's a brilliant juxtaposition between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
This is why we love it. We love it because it's a familiar unfamiliar story. It's both consistent with the known and the unknown. In a world where so much is uncertain and so much is turbulent, golf viewing gives us something where we know what the game is, we know what the ritual is, and we kind of know what the story is, but we don't know what the story is.
Clearly something like Live had no tradition. But it didn't create any tradition. Didn't even begin to. I don't know any of the team names, and I couldn't care, I wasn't interested.
There's a direct parallel in your own golf, and it's one I work with constantly. The familiar is your habit. The unfamiliar is the shot in front of you, which has never been played before and never will be again. Good golf lives in the overlap. You need a stable ritual, your pre-shot routine, your breathing, your setup, so that the unknown shot has somewhere to land. Without ritual, the unknown is just chaos. Build the familiar deliberately and the unfamiliar becomes interesting instead of terrifying. (Try: Three Compartment Breathing — available in the Training section of the app)
They did not understand storytelling. They did not understand golf storytelling. They did not understand the world within which the storytelling unfolds, which needs archetypal characters who we invest good and bad in, the reversals, the ritual unfolding in place and time, with all that goes around it. The iconic artifacts. The cup, a symbol of something that has deep meaning. The putting on of the blazer in the Butler Cabin. The prize giving.
These are not decoration. They are the physical anchors of the story. An artifact carries meaning the way a wedding ring carries meaning. It compresses years of accumulated significance into an object you can hold. That is why the Claret Jug makes grown men cry, and why nobody cried over a Live trophy. I wrote about exactly that kind of meaning-carrying moment in The Wily Fox: How Ryan Fox Felt His Way to the Claret Jug.
The archetypal bit matters too. We don't just want good players, we want characters, the stoic, the showman, the wounded genius, the quiet grinder. We cast them whether they like it or not. Live gave us no roles because it gave us no stage on which roles could be played. Fifty-four holes, no cut, shotgun start, music, and a team name you can't remember.
Golfers can use this. Who are you on the course? Most people have never asked. And in my experience, the golfer who knows their own character plays with more coherence than the one trying to be whoever last week's tip said they should be.
Why Live was never gonna succeed is it was creating no story, because every event, every major, adds to years and years of story. There's a tradition, there's a backstory. The players are a backstory. The event is a backstory. The career is a backstory.
So what happens in particularly the majors is all the ingredients come together. You have a sacred place and a sacred time, the major, not sacred meant in a religious context. You have the ritual, we all know what the format is, the four rounds. You have the story that's unfolding. But the story is connected to the characters that you're involved in, and you've got to have an emotional investment in them.
You've got to have an emotional investment in the hero or in the team, and that builds over time through the backstory, through involvement with the player, through the fact that you've been with them through the ups and the downs. Even if it's the downs, you can stay with them.
That accumulation cannot be bought. Money can buy players, courses, cameras and a sound system. It cannot buy fifteen years of you watching a man fail at Augusta. Your own golf works the same way. A season is a story. Last winter's work is a backstory. The round you played in the rain when nobody saw it is part of your character. This is why I'm so insistent that improvement is a journey of 30 to 90 days for a deep journey, not a weekend fix, and why Golf Consistency: Why Getting Better Is a Mountain Worth Climbing frames it the way it does.
They did come up with a few interesting innovations, and one of them obviously was to address the stuffiness that there can be around golf. So music created a more laid back entertainment oriented atmosphere. I'll give them that. Golf has long had a problem with self-seriousness, with dress codes and silences and an air of membership-committee disapproval that keeps younger people and new people away.
The atmosphere experiment was genuinely worth running. Crowds standing closer, noise, a sense of occasion that isn't hushed reverence. There is nothing in the laws of the game that requires a golf tournament to feel like a library.
But here's the thing about atmosphere. Atmosphere is the lighting in a theatre. It is not the play. You can light a stage beautifully and if no story unfolds on it, people leave. Live confused the production values with the production.
And for the golfer, there's a lesson here about state of mind. A relaxed, laid back atmosphere really does help performance. The nervous system plays better when it isn't braced. Anyone who has done the relaxation work knows how much tension they carry without noticing. But relaxation on its own isn't a game. You still need something to play for, something at stake, a story you're inside. Relaxation without meaning is just indifference, and indifferent golfers don't improve. (Try: Total Body Relaxation — available in the Training section of the app)
They also applied the concept of teams, and golf followers know how incredibly compelling team golf can be, as we know from the Ryder Cup and the Solheim Cup and the President's Cup and the Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup. It's riveting, and when you watch it on television, it's incredibly riveting.
But in a way they undermined that, because you didn't see the team drama unfold.
Think about what makes the Ryder Cup unbearable to watch in the best possible way. You see the board. You see blue turning red. You see a man standing on the 16th knowing his partner is one down behind him. You see the captain on a buggy, grey-faced. The team is visible as a living thing, shifting minute by minute.
Live had teams in the way a spreadsheet has teams. Scores were added up somewhere and announced afterwards. With the shotgun start you couldn't track the shape of it in real time, so the one genuinely great idea they borrowed was neutered by the one format decision they insisted on.
There's a practical point here for anyone who plays team golf at club level. The emotional reversals of a fourball are real and they hit the nervous system hard. Your partner's bad shot can tighten you up faster than your own. Knowing how to reset inside that is a skill, and it's the one I set out in The 4-Step Reset Every Golfer Needs After a Bad Shot.
In a way, if it created a story, it was almost to make a villain out of everyone who joined. So if you're watching the majors, the villain could quite often, and for many people was, the Live golfer. Bryson DeChambeau. Brooks Koepka. Because in a way they would have been seen to be buyable. There was a price at which they would go. And yet for the ones that stayed loyal to what we love, they didn't take the millions. And so there was a good guy and a bad guy.
So to the extent that there was any ritual, any story, any emotional involvement, it was to make a villain out of the Live people when they played in what we know and love.
That's the irony I keep coming back to. The only narrative energy Live generated was borrowed, and it was borrowed from the very tours it was trying to replace. Its players became interesting again the moment they walked onto a major championship stage, inside a ritual with a backstory and a cut and a last nine. The story lived in the old world. Live was just the thing that made some men into antagonists.
So it's going to disappear, along with, god knows how much money. Was it a billion? Two billion? Who cares. Are there even any memories? I don't think so. I don't have any.
Here's why I think this matters beyond the politics of professional golf. The way you understand story is the way you understand your own game. My whole approach rests on the idea that golfers play scenarios, narratives they're running without knowing it, and that changing the story changes the shot. That's the ground covered in Golf Scenarios: How Stories Can Change the Way You Play, and it's at the heart of all my mental game articles.
Live's failure is a vivid, expensive demonstration of what happens when you strip the story out and keep the mechanics. Four rounds becomes three. Sequence becomes simultaneity. Threshold becomes nothing. You still have golf shots. You just have no reason to care about them.
Your own golf is the same. If you reduce your game to mechanics, swing thoughts, numbers, tips, with no sense of who you are, where you're going, or what you're building, you may still hit shots but you'll feel strangely empty doing it. You will also play worse, because an undivided self plays better than a collection of parts. The aim of all of this is being better than you ever thought you could be, self-authored, your story, not anyone else's. If you want to work out where yours is going, come and talk to Sandy.
Money buys assets. It does not buy accumulated meaning. Why LIV Golf failed is that they never understood golf as live storytelling. Every major, every tour event, adds to years and years of story. There's a tradition, a backstory. The players are a backstory, the event is a backstory, the career is a backstory. You cannot write a cheque for that. Live bought players and production but created no story, because the format removed the three things story needs: a visible good guy and bad guy, reversals you can see unfold, and a ritual of place and time. I don't know any of the team names, and I couldn't care, I wasn't interested. That reaction, from someone who loves golf deeply, tells you everything about where the money went.
The biggest failing was the shotgun start, because what that does is it takes away the drama that's inherent in storytelling. Drama needs sequence. It needs a last nine, where you can see one player closing and another cracking, where the gap between a pond and an eagle, a bunker and a birdie, is tiny and visible to everyone at the same moment. With a shotgun start, groups finish on different holes at the same time. There is no shared climax. You can't follow your hero through an emotional roller coaster because the roller coaster has no track. It also killed their best idea, teams, because you didn't see the team drama unfold the way you do at the Ryder Cup, where blue turns red in front of your eyes and the whole thing becomes riveting.
Because that's what you're actually watching. You're not watching golf shots, you're watching your hero or heroine. Every time there's a setback your emotional amotometer goes down. They make a birdie, you go up. Reversals. Up down, up down. Rory at Augusta is the perfect example: a 6 right at the beginning of the day, then he gets it back, the 13th, the 15th, the 18th, the playoff. If you're emotionally involved, it's got to hurt if they lose, because if it didn't hurt there wouldn't be the joy when they win. Remove the ability to see those reversals and you remove the investment. No investment, no reversals, no drama. Live removed exactly that.
It's the brilliant juxtaposition at the heart of why we love major championships. If it's Augusta, you have a backstory, you know the place at which the unknown will unfold. It's both consistent with the known and the unknown. In a world where so much is uncertain and turbulent, golf viewing gives us something where we know the game and the ritual but not the story. In your own golf, the familiar is your ritual, your breathing, your setup, your pre-shot routine. The unfamiliar is the shot in front of you, which has never been played before. Build the familiar deliberately and the unfamiliar becomes interesting rather than frightening. Golfers with no ritual meet every shot as pure chaos, and the nervous system reacts accordingly.
You need an antagonist of some kind, even if modern storytelling makes it more complex and ambiguous. Basically as a viewer you've got to have someone you want to win, and by definition everyone else you don't want to win. It becomes particularly dramatic if there's one golfer you really want to win and one you really dislike. Interestingly, the only story Live ever generated was villainy, and it was aimed at its own players. The Live golfer became the villain for many people watching the majors, because there was a price at which they would go, while others stayed loyal and didn't take the millions. That's a good guy and a bad guy, but it only worked inside the tours Live was trying to replace. The story lived in the old world.
It helps because you are already running a story, you just haven't chosen it. Golfers play scenarios, and the scenario running in your head shapes your swing before you start it. If your internal story is "I always block it right on this hole", your body obliges. If your story is "I'm two months into a journey and this is one shot in a long season", you respond differently to the same bad lie. I'm not promising you a score or a handicap move. What I will say is that golfers who understand their own narrative tend to recover faster, carry less tension, and find the good states more available to them. The outcome I work towards is being better than you ever thought you could be, and that is always self-authored.
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