Don’t Blink: LIV Golf broadcast appears to miss Jon Rahm albatross

Credit: Katie Goodale-Imagn Images

Things are going from very bad to whatever is worse than very bad for LIV Golf.

The rogue golf tour soon to be de-funded by its Saudi benefactors played the final round of its tournament from Trump National Golf Course outside Washington, D.C. on Sunday. But it seems the broadcast missed one of its biggest stars hitting one of the rarest shots in all of golf.

As noted by the prominent golf account NUCLR GOLF, LIV Golf star Jon Rahm carded an albatross on the Par-5 17th hole on Sunday, but the shot was never shown on the Fox Sports broadcast of the event, nor was it available to view on the LIV Golf website at the time of this writing. A subsequent search conducted by Awful Announcing found neither a replay nor a mention of the albatross on the LIV broadcast.

The apparent botch is dripping in irony amid the complete uncertainty facing LIV Golf following this season, the last of which to be funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

One of the main selling points for LIV Golf when it launched in 2022 was that it would be a fast-paced telecast. The mission statement was to show more golf shots in less time, cutting down on much of the dead air that is common throughout a golf broadcast. One initiative introduced to meet this goal was the “Don’t Blink” segment that would take viewers through a series of golf shots in quick succession that otherwise would not be shown. Typically, these shots would be shown because they were of exceptional quality, or they were relevant to the team competition but not the individual leaderboard.

Rahm’s albatross would presumably exceed the requirements to be featured in a “Don’t Blink” segment, and would typically be shown throughout the normal course of the broadcast. After all, an albatross is one of the rarest shots in golf, and there’s only been five in LIV Golf history, according to the league’s own stats and data account.

But apparently it still wasn’t fit for television. Or, more likely, the LIV Golf cameras somehow missed the shot altogether. So far, there’s no video evidence that it actually happened.

If that’s the case, it’d be emblematic of the dysfunction that has been part and parcel with LIV since its launch. We’ll wait and see if the video exists. But as of now, it’s looking unlikely.