For Bolingbrook, now comes the hard part

Writing from Bolingbrook, Illinois

Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Mary Alexander-Basta is the mayor of Bolingbrook. She is not a golfer.

“I do a good job waving from the golf cart,” Alexander-Basta said Tuesday after confirming the village made a deal with LIV Golf to host the upstart circuit’s individual championship from Sept. 13-15 at Bolingbrook Golf Club.

She did not attend either playing of LIV’s Chicago stop at Rich Harvest Farms in Sugar Grove the past two Septembers. She hasn’t watched a LIV tournament on television. She said neither she nor other village officials reached out to Rich Harvest’s management for advice or counsel on how to go about staging the tournament.

“We have what it takes; we’ll figure it out,” Alexander-Basta said. “We lead. We don’t follow. We’re Bolingbrook.”

Such hubris may work when dealing with the routine business of a municipality, but staging a big-time golf tournament – which, protestations from PGA Tour loyalists aside, LIV Golf weekends are – is another level of complication above anything the course has staged since it opened in 2002.

But Bolingbrook has an ace in the hole in KemperSports, which has run the golf course for the village for the beginning. Other Kemper properties have hosted tournament up to the U.S. Open, so LIV’s logistical people will have someone experienced to work with.

“They’re perfectionists at it,” Alexander-Basta said of the LIV logistics department. “We have all the pieces (for village planning), we just have to put them together.”

Specifics were not as numerous as hors d’oeuvres were at the announcement, though it was mentioned that it’s expected 50,000 people would attend over three days and that 7,700 room-nights would be booked for the week of the tournament. The average LIV week is said to have a $32 million economic benefit in the community.

LIV Golf approached Bolingbrook around the start of the year, the mayor explained. A party of LIV brass visited the course in mid-winter and decided the 7,104-yard par-72 course would be a good place for the circuit’s penultimate tournament of the season, the individual championship.

Alexander-Basta would not reveal the fee Bolingbrook will receive for hosting LIV, though she characterized it covering “A to Z.” Basta said the fee is tiered, and that she wasn’t sure of the total.

“We have different fee structures in terms of club usage, food and beverage usage,” Alexander-Basta said. “I can’t put a dollar amount on it. I wouldn’t want to speculate about it.

“The one thing I’m very excited about is the give-back to our non-profits that LIV will be giving back. That’s something I’m very excited about, and probably the highlight of all this, other than having top-name golfers on our course.”

Alexander-Basta said that portion of the deal was not yet finalized.

“We’re still talking about it,” Alexander-Basta said. “I don’t want to recite numbers in our contracts I don’t have memorized.”

The deal was hammered out over several weeks, with attorney Burt Odelson, a veteran of decades working for southwest and south suburban municipalities, handling the village’s side.

LIV was said to pay Rich Harvest Farms $3 million to host in 2022, and again in 2023, when Bryson DeChambeau won. Cameron Smith took the 2022 title.

Tickets go on sale May 8.

Bolingbrook is public, as opposed to ultra-private Rich Harvest. It’s the third public course to host LIV in the United States. Orange County National, a 45-hole facility in Winter Garden, Fla., near Orlando, and Pumpkin Ridge, a 36-hole facility near Portland, Ore., are the others.

As for the Saudi Arabia connection – the country’s Public Investment Fund is the backer of LIV Golf – and the attendant human rights issues with that country, Alexander-Basta said she’s not worried.

“Absolutely not,” she said.

Illinois Golfer reported LIV and Bolingbrook had reached an agreement on April 11, confirming an X/Twitter report on April 4.

– Tim Cronin