LIV Golf, the extravagantly funded breakaway circuit, is known for spending lavishly on player contracts, purses and promotions. But it casts itself as a populist’s tour: golf for the masses.
Those apparent contradictions will find common ground this week in the Chicago suburbs, when, for the first time, the big-money league brings its show to a muni.
Bolingbrook Golf Club, where the final leg of LIV’s individual championship gets underway Friday, is a tax-payer owned track in the village of Bolingbrook, a bedroom community of some 73,000 people, roughly 30 miles south of O’Hare International Airport.
“We’ve had some pretty good-size events out here,” Bolingbrook Mayor Mary Alexander-Basta told GOLF.com. “But this will be the biggest.”
How a tournament with a $25 million purse wound up at a little-known municipal layout where green fees max out at $110 (and dip to $65 at twilight) is a reasonable question. The short answer is that LIV was looking for a new venue near the Windy City, and Bolingbrook leaders were keen to give their community an economic boost. But the backstory is slightly more involved.
In both 2022 and 2023, LIV Golf Chicago was held at the same course: Rich Harvest Farms, a private club that has hosted such events as the Western Amateur and the Solheim Cup. By early this year, though, that arrangement had come to an end. Which side initiated the break-up is hard to say. LIV executives have declined to discuss the matter. The closest thing to an explanation came this past spring in a prepared statement from Rich Harvest Farms, which said, in the vague passive voice, that it had “been decided” that the “club’s membership will not have any disruptions to its play this year.”
Whatever the case, the split left LIV executives surveying the Chicago area for other options. Their gaze soon settled on Bolingbrook GC.
Designed by Arthur Hills and Steve Forrest, and opened for play in 2002, Bolingbrook GC is a well-kept course on rolling terrain, but not the type that sends the hearts of architecture nerds aflutter. Nor is it a storied championship test. The highest-level tournament it has held was a 2021 stop on the Forme Tour, a now-defunct developmental circuit that provided a path to the Korn Ferry Tour.
Big golf events, though, depend on infrastructure, too, and Bolingbrook offers that that in spades, including expansive practice grounds; a three-story, 75,000-square-foot clubhouse; and ample acreage for erecting grandstands. The property has proven it can handle large gatherings, as it does every year at Bolingbrook’s Fourth of July celebration, which attracts upward of 9,000 attendees.
Mayor Alexander-Basta says that LIV executives first reached out about the course “in February or March,” and scheduled a site visit shortly after.
“I’d love to say we had them at ‘hello,’” Alexander-Basta says. “But I shouldn’t say that. What I can say is that they liked us.”
