We are now a little over a month away from the first made for television showdown between stars from LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. And personalities from both of golf’s rival tours will be involved in the broadcast, not just on the golf course.
The match on December 17th will be televised on TNT. It will feature arguably the four biggest stars in golf with Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler representing the PGA Tour and Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau representing LIV Golf.
And according to a new report, LIV Golf analyst David Feherty and player Bubba Watson will join CBS Sports PGA Tour analyst Trevor Immelman as part of the TNT Sports broadcast team alongside WBD mainstays Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley.
Via Josh Carpenter at Sports Business Journal:
Sources said David Feherty, Trevor Immelman, Bubba Watson, Charles Barkley and Ernie Johnson are expected to be part of the commentary team for the match that includes LIV players Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka facing off against the PGA Tour’s Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler.
Though the “Showdown” is separate from “The Match” series, the commentary team has a similar makeup to the latter’s most recent edition. That series, which aired its latest iteration last week on WBD’s TNT, also featured Johnson, Immelman, Barkley and Watson. The outlier is Feherty, the longtime CBS and NBC golf announcer who joined LIV Golf in 2022.
It will be good to see Feherty on a broadcast of some significance again. He has long been a popular figure in the game, although he’s fallen off the radar after taking the money from LIV for their lightly watched telecasts on The CW.
It will be very interesting to see if the broadcast team openly talks about the issues that remain in golf ever since the Saudi Arabian government used their unlimited wealth to fracture the sport in their latest sportswashing endeavor. Negotiations between the two tours about a reunification of the tours have dragged on for months with seemingly little tangible progress being made, although it seems almost everyone in golf has softened their stances about finding a way to work together.
With Barkley making his feelings known about both sides being “idiotic” in their inability to get a deal done, expect the topic not to be swept under the rug. And who knows, maybe a little public pressure and the success of this cross-tour showdown will be enough to get the PGA Tour and LIV Golf to speed things up a little bit in the best interests of the game.
