Golf Fandom since the Creation of LIV Golf and Announced Merger with the PGA Tour

Abstract

According to Davis et al. (2023), golf fans needed to be researched to understand the impact of LIV Golf’s creation and the announced merger between the PGA Tour, LIV Golf, and the DP World Tour. As a result, the purpose of the research was to understand how PGA Tour fans were influenced by the creation of LIV Golf and the announced merger with the PGA Tour. To fulfill this purpose, an interpretive approach to semi-structured interviews was undertaken. Ultimately, 20 interviews were conducted with adult highly identified fans of the PGA Tour, in which 19 qualified for analysis. With this open-ended approach, greater complexity and nuance of factors influencing fandom can be captured. Ultimately, the findings were situated within literature around the sacred and profane (Belk et al. 1989; Schindler & Minton, 2022) and communitas (Turner, 1969). These theories helped to explain how golf was formed and grew as a social group through participation first, indoctrinating those within the group to perform certain behaviours. As the norms surrounding participation transferred to fandom through contagion (Belk et al., 1989), fans were plotted into the Sacred Conditions of Sport, a conceptual model to illustrate a group’s conception of communitas and structure. Before LIV’s creation, most fans desired for strict behaviours associated with normative communitas and the structure as other-worldly, making the group’s norms collectively moral. Through LIV Golf and the announced merger, fans often shifted their perspective and saw the group as a manufactured structure and, therefore, unimportant to uphold beyond personal preference. Fans also often tended to desire more lenient behaviours associated with ideological communitas after LIV and the announced merger. While many desired this, few transcended to view the structure of the group as other-worldly, limiting the collective morality of the lenient norms. These findings add to literature and practice around sport fans and social groups primarily through the applicability of the Sacred Conditions of Sport to conceptualize the perception of a given groups’ norms. The present research is also relevant to illustrate how professional sport may operate in the modern, commercialized world, illustrating the impacts of commercialization on sport.