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How Adelaide keeps the fun going at an event envied around the globe One of the world’s best DJs, flown in for an eye-watering sum to play a set before jetting straight back out, is striding down the middle of a golf hole daring Cameron Smith to do a shoey.
Smith loves a good time as much as the next bloke, but this was inside the ropes and in the middle of battle, during a tournament in which Smith has never played for more money.
He laughed it off, gave DJ Fisher a high five and kept walking up to his ball on the “watering hole”, no doubt wondering: did that really just happen?
Needless to say, The Fish, well, drank out of the shoe like a fish. Welcome to LIV Golf in Australia.
Next week, DJ Fisher and Smith will be back at the Grange Golf Club for the third edition of LIV Golf Adelaide.
It’s predicted more than 100,000 people will surge through the gates over three days.
The Australian leg of the rebel tour – in which Greg Norman spent billions of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly bottomless wealth, known as its Public Investment Fund, to recruit some of the world’s best golfers such as Smith, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson – is already LIV Golf’s flagship event. It’s an eclectic mix of birdies, beers and the odd boorish behaviour (both editions of LIV Adelaide have been voted best tournament at the World Golf Awards).
While the upstart league still struggles for relevance in the US, albeit it has just signed its most significant television deal with America’s Fox Sports for 2025, tournament organisers have no other way to fit more people into its Australian event other than to go up. They have built more elevated corporate areas and public grandstands to cater for demand.
So, why has LIV Golf been such a hit in Australia when...