Trey Wingo was offered the lead voice role for LIV Golf. He turned it down.
The former ESPN personality and SportsCenter anchor revealed this during a recent appearance on Please Let Us Golf, explaining that some of his former colleagues at the Worldwide Leader, who ended up running LIV, approached him about hosting all their coverage.
“Some of the people that ran LIV were folks that worked with me at ESPN, and they asked me to be the voice of LIV,” Wingo said. “They asked me to be the host of all their coverage. And I was like, ‘No, I can’t do that.'”
It wasn’t about money, either. Wingo acknowledged it was a “big number.” It was about the optics, sure, but also the product.
And it’s not like broadcasting golf is foreign territory for Wingo. He currently hosts Peacock’s Open Championship All Access show and has regularly appeared on ESPN’s golf coverage during his tenure. In 2021, he called PGA Tour Live for the Farmers Insurance Open. So he knows what good golf television looks like.
LIV isn’t it.
“Here’s the thing I can say about LIV: there’s no denying they have great golfers,” Wingo continued. “Their product is terrible. It’s terrible. Let’s just be honest. Because if it wasn’t terrible, you know what people would be doing? They’d be watching it.”
That viewership argument is hard to dispute. LIV has world-class golfers and seemingly unlimited financial backing, but the ratings tell a different story. And Wingo’s criticism of LIV goes beyond just the television product, as he made clear when the league recently revoked credentials from a reporter who asked questions about Saudi funding.
An absolute 🤡 show https://t.co/fkW0VWObuw
— trey wingo (@wingoz) August 20, 2025
If rejecting their money is one thing, calling LIV a “clown show” is another. But it’s all in the same vein. Wingo putting it out in the open goes to show that LIV was hunting for credibility from day one. They’re still hunting for it.
The Saudi-funded league just revoked credentials from popular Michigan-based golf personality Bill Hobson for LIV’s upcoming Detroit event. His crime was publishing a podcast interview with former LIV golfer Pat Perez in which he asked about the tour’s Saudi funding.
The same golf entity that was throwing money at players was also trying to buy legitimacy from established broadcasting voices, too. Getting someone with Wingo’s resume would have provided precisely the kind of credibility they needed. Instead, they were publicly dismissed by someone who had recognized their product’s problems from the start.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.