Monday Leaderboard: LIV Golf's Big Win, Rory McIlroy's Legend Grows

Welcome to Monday's Leaderboard. Here are the weekend's top news from the great world of golf. Grab Arnold Palmer, pull up a chair, and gather your crew…

1. The best moments of LIV golf

The LIV Golf was a very expensive punchline for most of its life. Many of the world's best players compete for millions of dollars while almost no one watches in person or on screen.

Leave it to Australia to turn the whole company upside down. LIV Golf is incredibly popular Down Under, with an estimated 94,000 golf fans flocking to Adelaide to watch home country hero Cam Smith and his Rippers win the team event. . (Brendan Steele won the individual award ahead of Louis Oosthuizen and Charles Schwartzel.) The entire event was everything the PGA Tour can currently produce and could go head-to-head in terms of energy. There is a gender.

This is the problem with golf. Americans tend to think of golf as an American game. This is mainly because we are Americans and think the world revolves around us. But more than that, three of the four majors are held in America, and most of golf's immortals (Nicklaus, Palmer, Woods) are as American as the Fourth of July.

But golf is an international game, exploding in popularity in Australia, the Middle East and especially Asia. LIV Golf is poised to leverage that advantage in a way that few domestic PGA Tours can, and that is LIV's path to success.

Will LIV Golf be able to establish a viable long-term position in the golf world? The decision remains to be made. But events like Adelaide show there is an interest out there in golf that has nothing to do with the PGA Tour, and the tour should take notice.

2. Rory McIlroy's legend grows

Rory McIlroy reminds us that not only was and will be the face of the PGA Tour, but he's also a pretty decent player. At the Zurich Classic in New Orleans, he won a playoff with his partner Shane Lowry, giving McIlroy his 25th tour victory. (Whether team events should count as individual wins is another discussion entirely.) McIlroy now has as many total tour wins as Johnny Miller and more than Gary Player or Raymond Floyd. Contains. Plus, as he later demonstrated, he can tear up “Don't Stop Believin'” and destroy the stage.

Everyone was surprised at McIlroy's acting that he had such pipes, but hey, this guy grew up in pubs. It is an essential skill to develop.

3. Team golf has its moment.

Every few years, the Ryder Cup is held and the golf world gets excited about the concept of team golf. Imagine the greatest players in the world together! How amazing would that be? Outside of the Ryder Cup context, it's usually not that great. Golf is an individual sport, and pushing a bunch of loners into a team format often results in something as awkward as a wedding dance floor with the “Cupid Shuffle.”

It's still possible though. LIV players often talk about how the team format reminds them of the camaraderie they had in college. The first-ever team golf play-off in LIV's history took place in Adelaide on Sunday, with the all-Australian Ripper GC defeating the all-South African Stinger GC on the second play-off hole.

The best non-rider team golf, like Sunday's in Zurich, can be fascinating and fascinating. (Poor Martin Trainor, if he won he would have gotten a two-year exemption, but two sudden death misses cost him the playoffs to McIlroy and Lowry.) Team golf costs a lot of money. ing–. LIV, as well as the yet-to-be-debuted TGL Indoor Golf League, will need more buy-in from both players and fans to keep it afloat.

4. Hannah Green makes back-to-back appearances in Los Angeles

Nellie Korda has this week off while the rest of the field heads to the LPGA's JM Eagle LA Championship at Wilshire Country Club… where Hannah Greene steps up and wins her second consecutive title in the tournament. . Unlike last year, when he had to win in the playoffs, Green easily won by three strokes this time. Wilshire is green territory. She finished T3 in 2021, took solo second place in 2022, and was the winner the past two years. Green joins Korda as the second multiple-time winner on the LPGA Tour this season.

5. Tim Widing talks about how he started his career

What does it mean to have multiple winners in golf these days? While Korda and Scotty Scheffler are wrecking shops at the highest level, Tim Widing is currently doing the same thing on the Korn Ferry Tour. Widing won the Vertex Banking Championship in Arlington, Texas last week, giving him his second straight win on the Development Tour. At Veritex, he finished at an astonishing 31 under par, setting a new Korn Ferry Tour record for par. Widding is on pace to qualify for the PGA Tour at the end of the season, but Korn Ferry's “three-win promotion” rule means he will be promoted immediately with one more win. Before long, Scheffler, Weiding, Korda, and Green would be winning every tournament.

Mulligan: Calm down, Australia.

We all welcome a vibrant golf scene, but it seems Australians aren't as good at containing themselves as the WM Phoenix Open gallery. At last weekend's LIV event, someone fired a full bottle of water and nailed it into the head of Lucas Herbert's caddy as he was exchanging pins.

ah. Liv: It's golf, but it's wilder.

My friends, I wish you all the best this week. See you here next Monday!