On a mild April afternoon in 2022, day three of LIV Adelaide at The Grange, the enigmatic, cosmopolitan final group of Talor Gooch, Pat Perez and Charl Schwartzel were followed down the 18th fairway by what looked like everybody on the property. It was a triumph for organisers. Greg Norman was vindicated. Because LIV Golf had arrived.
On a bluebird afternoon in late November 1978, an Australia XI, captained by Ian Chappell, and a West Indies XI, captained by Clive Lloyd, warmed up at the Sydney Cricket Ground nets before the first game of the second season of the disruptive renegade World Series Cricket.
While WSC’s first year had been underwhelming – a sparse crowd at one game was described in The Times as “confetti at a graveyard” – this game at the SCG would be the relatively new and exciting “one-day cricket” and the first to be played under the ground’s newly-installed giant floodlights. And the light was on for the people of Sydney, who were drawn to Moore Park like migratory moths to your Mazda’s high beam.
And yet, with 20 minutes until the scheduled start of the game, many among the teeming hordes had yet to enter the ground, with long and thick queues at the turnstiles. Some may have thought, ‘Well, it will photograph well for publicity’. Not Kerry Packer. The Great Goanna wanted them in. He ordered the gates flung open. And into the grand old ground the people streamed.
And when Dennis Lillee thundered into Gordon Greenidge, there were upwards of 50,000 fans in the ground. And they were roaring. And the Goanna raised a smile with those famous full lips and toasted his sub-lieutenant, Richie Benaud, and said words to the effect of: “We’ve got the bastards”.
Packer knew the power of optics. He knew the power of the people. The power in people. World Series Cricket had arrived. And cricket changed forever.
LIV Golf turned up in Adelaide in April of 2023 and curious folk lined fairways and greens at The Grange, craning for a peak at Open Champion Cameron Smith, and the Famous Americans, and other exotic internationals Australia had been so long starved.
The nascent and controversial league had been in the news for a year or so, and the recruitment of Smith had tipped the greater public sporting hive-mind from hostility through ambivalence to curiosity. People wanted to see what the fuss was about. Mainly, they wanted to see world class golf.
Yet LIV Golf truly arrived, at least in Australia, on day three when the enigmatic, cosmopolitan final group of Talor Gooch, Pat Perez and Charl Schwartzel were followed down the 18th fairway by what looked like everybody on the property. In terms of optics, the value was massive.
It doesn’t appear to be any one person’s idea to let the fans stream onto the fairways – Greg Norman didn’t raise his arms and declare, “Let my people go!” (more's the pity, because how funny). Rather, security types, with knowledge of scenes from major championships, did apparently prepare for the eventuality.
In quotes forwarded to Golf Australia magazine and attributed to “LIV Golf Adelaide security officials”, event organisers had "pre-empted this would happen in operational planning meetings leading up to and during the tournament.”
“Accordingly, organisers put in plans with Volunteer and Security Marshalls on the course that the rope line may be broken and be prepared to follow the final group on the 18th hole.
"It was challenging given that some of the crowd gathered closely around the playing group, but the friendly and positive nature of the fans made it a well-managed process,” LIV Golf Adelaide security officials said.
Whatever. In terms of optics, it was a very good idea. For it looked like they’d emptied the MA Noble Stand on day three of the Sydney Test; and allowed the multitudes to wander down 18 behind the last group. It looked like the event was massively popular. It photographed a treat.
A year later, they did it again. And, better again, there was a teams play-off featuring the local boys. And the images of Smith and Marc Leishman, out among the thick, teeming hordes, taking on the South African Stingers, well. As the kids would say, there were scenes.
LIV Adelaide is a series of scenes. Each year at The Grange, on that pseudo-Sandbelt region where the bunkers appear cleaved from red clay, where Stimpmeter numbers are high, where the ball runs far on hard-baked Santa Ana couch, the troubadours of the LIV golf league entertain legions of pissed-up party people like Daryl Braithwaite singing “Horses” after race 10 at Flemington on Derby Day.
This happens for three straight days. And it’s all a bit of a Thing.
LIV Adelaide isn’t so much a golf tournament as a fever dream of colour and smoke and noise and booze, where big bass beats pump around the course and T-shirt waving half-nude Americans compete for attention with spiky-haired dudes named DJ Fish Dick (or something), the pair sculling beer from expensive white trainers to the roars of jacked-up multitudes.
Oh, yes, and there’s quite good golf played there, too. You know, if you’re curious.
LIV is not for everyone. Isn’t trying to be. And, truth be told, Norman and South Australia’s Premier Peter Malinauskas would not be overly fussed that the jowls of Sir Archibob and other members of Royal Devon are quivering like so many bowls of Aeroplane Jelly.
Because, like Packer’s “pyjama cricket”, the light is on and burning for the masses. Norman is feted like a returning king, Smith is everyone’s best mate, and Malinauskas is so popular he’s being touted as future Prime Minister.
And all because of a golf tournament that’s about entertaining people, and bringing them along for the ride, and giving them what they want – music and booze, bread and circuses.
And, in the ways of muscular American capitalism, reaming them for every single shekel.
And yet, everyone’s happy with that. Or at least they appear to be. The corporates paying corporate prices with their corporation’s credit card appear pleased with the 2019 Barossa Valley grenache and the dukka-dusted lamb cutlets with tzatziki dip. And the punters, the people, the greater rank and file of mullet-toting Hawaain shirt-wearers, are lining up for $25 smoky barbecue burgers, $12 tins of pale ale and all the merch they can eat.
Merch? Sweet Sam Snead’s ghost, the merch. The lines snake out of the big tent like its bag drop on a busy day at Tullamarine Domestic. And all to purchase a bucket hat festooned with cartoons of kangaroos and “shucked” oysters that retails for $75 of our not-so-muscular Australian roubles. When you’re paying 75 bucks for a bucket hat, you’re all in like Errol Flynn.
Release your people again, Sharky.
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