Years after PGA Tour left Doral, LIV Golf Team Championship opens at Trump National

Doral was home to a PGA Tour event from 1962 through 2016. This weekend, it’s the site of LIV Golf’s inaugural Team Championship.

The eighth and final event of the controversial Saudi Arabia-funded league’s season kicked off on Friday at Trump National Doral Miami. It’s the first professional golf event at the course since the PGA Tour announced in 2016 that it was moving the World Golf Championship tournament out of Doral because a title sponsor could not be secured amid Donald Trump’s run for president.

“It feels good to be back here,” said Dustin Johnson, who won the second-to-last World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship held in Doral in 2015 and is now the captain of LIV Golf’s top-seeded 4 Aces GC. “I’ve had a lot of success here. I like this golf course. I definitely missed being here, playing events here. Obviously, now I think we’ll be here for a few years at least. It’s a great golf course. It’s a good test of golf. It’s a course I’ve always enjoyed playing.”

LIV’s takeover of Doral looked much different than a typical PGA Tour event, too. That’s because the format LIV is using for its Team Championship is anything but traditional.

Each of the 32 golfers among the eight four-man teams playing Friday began their round simultaneously as part of a shotgun start. The top-four seeded teams — 4 Aces GC, Crushers GC, Fireballs GC and Stinger GC — did not play on Friday because they earned a bye to automatically advance to Saturday’s semifinals.

The four teams that won their matchups on Friday and will join the top-four seeds on the golf course Saturday are Smash GC, Majesticks GC, Cleeks GC and Punch GC. The four matchups on Saturday are between 4 Aces GC and Cleeks GC, Crushers GC and Stinger GC, Fireballs GC and Punch GC, and Smash GC and Majesticks GC, with a shotgun start at 12:15 p.m.

Hundreds of spectators followed the biggest names in action on Friday, a list that included Brooks Koepka (on Smash GC), Cameron Smith (on Punch GC) and Phil Mickelson (on Hy Flyers GC). Koepka dropped his singles match against Harold Varner III, and Smith and Mickelson faced off in a competitive singles match that ended with Smith clinching the win with a birdie on their final hole of the day.

“This is a golf course that I always loved coming to play when the Cadillac was here,” said Louis Oosthuizen, who finished in the top 10 at the 2015 World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship in Doral and is now the captain of LIV Golf’s Stinger GC. “It’s a pity that we don’t get to play it, or didn’t get to play it for quite a few years. It’s nice getting back here and playing it. It’s an unbelievable golf course. Once the wind picked up a little bit, it is truly the Blue Monster.”

The Doral course is known as the “Blue Monster” because of the various challenges it presents through its combination of water hazards and swirling winds.

“The course sets up very differently because of the demandingness — the precision and how demanding it is,” Mickelson said. “It requires some incredible ball-striking.”

It began in 1962 as the Doral Country Club Invitational, with the tournament changing names through the decades until it became the World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship in 2011. But that run ended in 2016, when the PGA Tour moved the event to Mexico.

“They never wanted to go to Mexico,” Trump said Thursday after playing in the LIV Golf tournament’s pro-am held on his course. “The pros didn’t want to go to Mexico and they went and that didn’t work out. They wanted to be here and the tour wants to be here, too. The tour wants to be here badly.”

This weekend’s LIV Golf Team Championship includes a $50 million purse. The winning team will be awarded $16 million ($4 million for each player), and the teams that were eliminated following Friday’s opening round still came away with $1 million ($250,000 for each player).

“I think the course is great, the players love it,” Trump said. “The Blue Monster is always tough, but it’s in the greatest shape that it’s ever been in.”