Takeaways from Opening Round of Inaugural LIV Golf Event
The opening round of the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational in London is in the books.
The controversial tour kicked off on Thursday morning and could be found on YouTube, Facebook and their website.
After the first round, Charl Schwartzel is in the lead at five-under, while Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson are one-under respectively.
The tournament resumes tomorrow and concludes on Saturday.
Here are a few takeaways on the event, the broadcast and everything else in between:
– The tournament did more than 100K streams on YouTube on Thursday. That’s a pretty good number, obviously. Will be interesting to see what the numbers are going forward once the newness of it and curiosity of it settles down.
– As has been well documented, the tournaments go off in shotgun format, so everyone is on the course at the same time. It takes some getting used to, but the entire tournament was over by around 2 p.m. eastern time.
– Their leaderboard (on the stream) did not have full names on it. It was first initial and then the first three letters of the last name. So that made it hard to follow. Some players you can figure out, but many of them you can’t.
– Instead of telling you how many holes they are through, the leaderboard told you how many they had left, which was interesting. It’s easy to do that with a shotgun start as everyone had around the same number of holes left.
– The commentators were former NBC Sports soccer guy Arlo White, former Golf Channel analyst Jerry Foltz and Dom Boulet. Su-Ann Heng and Troy Mullins served as on course reporters.
– They must have said “don’t blink” 50 times in the broadcast, which got a little tiresome, but other than that they were pretty good overall.
– The actual broadcast itself was as good as any other golf broadcast. Same type of camera shots, cutaways and things. There were no commercials.
- Phil Mickelson was wearing a vest with a blacked out Augusta National logo.