LIV Golf chief executive Scott O’Neil on how the league plans to evolve beyond disruption into a global powerhouse, investing in youth pathways, expanding its international footprint and future pathways.
Scott O’Neil is a self-confessed hugger. At the end of our round-table interview inside the temporary-yet-plush chief executive’s suite within the grandstand behind the 18th green at LIV Golf Adelaide, and as we prepared to say goodbye via handshakes, O’Neil leaned in for a hug. With each of us.
It wasn’t a ploy to disarm members of the media. The interview was over, so there was no need for that. Instead it added a personal footnote to a serious discussion, one that showed why O’Neil was sought for LIV’s CEO role as a successor to Greg Norman.
LIV hits differently, which means the man at the helm needs to reflect that stance. O’Neil, with his inherently American roots and professional history in US sports and team franchises, doesn’t claim to know everything. When our conversation turned to cricket, he knew who Kerry Packer was but didn’t pretend to know everything about the various Twenty20 leagues. If he owns any sense of hubris, he shields it with humility. When you converse with O’Neil, you don’t get the scripted responses of so many sports executives. You get real. With a hug.
Here’s what transpired between our opening handshakes in Adelaide and our departing embraces.
Australian Golf Digest: Because we love sport as a nation, but also sports generally, do you think by bringing LIV here it gives young Australians golfers a window into a pathway for their future careers?
Scott O’Neil: I don’t know the history – you all know the history of golf [in Australia] a lot better than I will, but presumably at some moment in time, the best golfers in the world were in the UK and the US, right? And at some point, that changed dramatically. So, you have players from 20 countries in our fields today. Out of 57 [players], 20 countries are represented. I just have the sense that that’s part of who we are. What we’re all about is, can you take some of the greatest players in the world – the biggest stars in the game – and take them to the world? It’s wonderful.
Effectively, to your point, of the 44 biggest events in the world, you’d argue that 43 of them were in the US and the other one was in the UK. And yet you have golf-starved fans in Australia, in Japan, in Korea, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in South Africa, and we hope to fill that gap.
I was just on the first tee with a bunch of little kids, and I was asking, “Who’s your favourite golfer? What’s your favourite club in your bag?” I’d say 40 percent are like, “Cam Smith,” 25 percent, “Elvis Smylie,” and then the rest said Bryson DeChambeau, of course. So, how wonderful – because you do want to look up and see someone that looks like you or that you think you can be, and then you mix that with Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson, it’s a pretty good mix. It’s pretty special.
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You stepped into big shoes – Greg Norman is an icon for many Aussies.
Yes, he is. And then some.
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How do you define your mandate moving forward and where do you see LIV Golf in five, 10, 15 years?
I believe in five, 10 years – whatever that number is – that the PGA Tour will continue to be the dominant force for the global game in the US and we will be the dominant force and top of the pyramid in the global game. And I believe that LIV will sit there and there’ll be 10 to 12 national opens that sit on the next rung. And you’ve started to see it with Augusta providing open qualifiers, the R&A providing open qualifiers. You may see some more of that.
I feel like the national opens, they have everything we look for in golf. They have the history and tradition, 80-year-old tournaments, 100-year-old tournaments. It’s pretty amazing. You have the history and tradition. You have this national pride, which is exploding all over the world.
We just need to increase the prize pools. We need to increase the talent pool and strength of field. Then I think we’re going to build something pretty special on that second rung of the ladder, and it’s something we’re spending a lot of time on. You’ll see more announcements coming out in the next several weeks, but currently, the Hong Kong Open and Singapore Open are two amazing examples that you should expect to see a lot more from in terms of LIV and the ecosystem we’re building.
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What’s the biggest thing you’ve learned about LIV since joining – or about professional golf in general?
It might not be what you think it’s going to be, but one of the things I’ve learned is that golf is the greatest business-development tool in the history of the world. And that’s for executives, it’s for companies, countries, political leaders. There’s nothing like golf and what it attracts. When we travel the world, we go to Korea and there are 50 chairmen of the 50 biggest companies in Korea in a room when you entertain them. You can’t assemble this group in any other sport, in any other fashion, in any other way. And we do it in every single market we go into.
Having players as business partners, how incredible their insights are, how hard they work, how focused they are on building businesses – I’d never seen that coming. And probably the last thing is that these guys are athletes, which I know sounds really cynical, but these guys are unbelievable. I had John Daly in my head. And that’s probably not right from my perspective, but to come here and see finely tuned machines, guys who focus on mind, body, soul. They’re in the gym, they’re on the range, working on their bodies, working on their mental capacity, working on their swing constantly, because this is the toughest sport in the world, and it has very little joy in that. It’s lonely.
Yet LIV saw some of that, which maybe is related to the previous point, but I just have the sense that travelling together and living together on the road and being able to support each other in good and bad and celebrating a podium finish and spraying the champions, all that stuff that builds team and community. It takes some of the angst out of this game.
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From where you sit now, what are the biggest operational and reputational challenges you’re facing?
Where do I begin?
It’s the fifth year of the business. I’ve been here just over a year. If you’d have told me that we’re this far ahead after a year, I would’ve been pleasantly surprised. So, that’s the good news. I feel like we’ve made dramatic strides in format, going to 72 holes. By the way, it’s not popular with everybody. And I feel like sometimes leaders have to make decisions that are best for the overall long term of this group.
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Is there unification down track or a division of players being able to go between tours?
There’s so much opportunity for us as an industry to provide opportunities for players to move. [Imagine if] Adam Scott grabs three Aussies and comes and plays this weekend. By the way, he’s welcome by our standards. How wonderful would that be? How great for the country would that be? How great for his brand would that be? How great for sponsors would that be? Can we grow the game bigger, faster, stronger? Does that make sense? It makes sense to me.
We believe there are all sorts of opportunities, that being one – more free agency with players over time. We believe there’s content that needs some refresh. Having and creating some new events that come onto the scene together would be of real value. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess what those might be, but they’re certainly out there. There’s certainly an opportunity, I believe, for some incredible collaboration. And as we build up our National Open Strategy, they’re going to be open for everybody – assuming you qualify, of course.
That represents more of the future of what we might expect in golf. How do we collaborate in the future? We’ll see. This is an ecosystem in a bit of a blender right now, and that’s OK. There are a lot of new leaders, there are a lot of new executives and I believe, for the first time in quite some time, everybody wants the same thing. Can you imagine if there’s a global golf calendar, how much simpler that would be? It would probably mean more opportunities for players.
That’d take a lot of co-operation. And the question is: at some point we have to think as an industry to ask, “How are we going to optimise for media? How are we going to optimise for sponsors? How are we going to optimise for fans? Are we truly committed to growing the game for fans?” If we are, the systems get pretty simple. And if you believe that more fans over time will grow the business, we come from an abundance mindset, not a scarcity mindset. If you come from an abundance mindset, all you think about every day is how to grow the pie. If you come from a scarcity mindset, you think about, Why is your piece the same as mine? It’s a very different philosophy and I think we’re seeing more and more of that permeate through golf, which bodes really well for us in the short term.
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Does it feel like we’re on the road to that, though? The PGA Tour is talking about maybe a February-to-August window rather than being 11 months of the year. Does it feel like there’s now an opportunity for other circuits around the world to get a piece of the calendar?
I think there’s opportunity around every corner. We need courage, we need leadership, we need partnership and we need an abundant-mindset approach. And I hope we get there sooner rather than later.
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Beyond Australia, which markets do you see as showing promise?
I feel like we’re starting to get hold of a lot of anchors, and that’s what you’re looking for in each of the continents. And so you clearly have this flagship event [in Adelaide]. It’s a world-class event. And then South Africa will quickly become a 1b to this 1a. In the UK, we’ve got a good anchor. I think we had 60,000 fans or so, and I know we had 60,000 in Indianapolis.
The US was my biggest surprise. Will people come because that’s one market? Every other market we go to, I feel like there’s rose petals at our feet. Government officials are hugging us and sponsors are helping us and it’s really good. Then we go to the US and have 60,000 in Indy and 50,000 in Dallas and 45,000 in Chicago. I was like, We’ve got something here in the US.”
It’s just a matter of where we should be. China’s an obvious market. Japan’s an obvious market. There are obvious markets. Whether we can get there or not [is another question]. It takes a leader in government to say, “This is where we want you to be.” It takes a title sponsor. It takes a world-class golf course. It takes fans. This is not rocket science. It’s this really simple model, but there are big markets. Could India be a market that we explore at some point? I would like to.
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We asked Ben Campbell, “What do you think New Zealand would make of this?” And he said, “Oh, they’d love this. It’d be fantastic.”
You could swing through New Zealand, maybe. Europe needs another event. And so the next question is: where do you want to take from? Because I don’t think we can do more than 14 events. Would we do fewer than 14? Maybe. This is our fifth year. We cannot be stuck in cement. We have to be agile, mobile and be able to respond and react and get to the best places. If it’s going to be 14 [LIV Golf Adelaides]? Sign me up for that.
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In terms of players, there’s a distinct blend of older names and up-and-comers on LIV Golf for this year.
It’s pretty fun, huh? It’s not an accident.
One of the things I heard when I took the job, even from dear friends of mine, they’re like, “Oh, that’s where the old guys are.” I said, “No, we have legends.” I call them legends. We have legends here, for sure. Quite frankly, for me as a golf fan, seeing Phil Mickelson play, his is always the third or fourth biggest gallery every time he plays. Bubba Watson? People flock to him.
I don’t think we should run from [older players]. I think we should celebrate them, and they’ve earned respect, love and adoration. And then you have this set of stars – Bryson DeChambeau, Cam Smith, Jon Rahm, DJ – that group has enough star power. Then we have this group of core players who I would call “underrated” just because of the way the system works currently, but Carlos Ortiz, Seb Munoz, Dean Burmester. That group, that’s world-class golf. And the group that makes me smile almost is Josele Ballester, Tom McKibbin, Caleb Surratt, Michael La Sasso, Elvis Smylie, David Puig. I didn’t even mention Joaquin [Niemann]. You can count him in the young group or the star group – pick one – and you think, Man, oh man, these 20-somethings are special.
What’s different about [this group is], they’re not here just to participate. They want to win and they want to win now, and they believe they should win now. And I like that. Every one of our young guys walks with tremendous confidence. They believe that they are on a stage that they have earned and deserve, and they’re ready to compete and win. And Elvis was the first one to show it.
Josele won the Saudi International and McKibbin won Hong Kong. You’re like, OK, these guys can play. So it’s pretty exciting. That is the future of
LIV Golf.
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Photos by getty images/mike egerton; johan rynners; jBrenton Edwards
