In Alan Shipnuck's delightfully dishy 2023 account of golf’s recent civil war, LIV and Let Die, there is an off-the-record quote credited to a "longtime agent" that reads as follows: "What you have to understand about professional golfers, is that they are all whores. That is the starting point."
Well, you have to start somewhere.
For those not embedded in the day-to-day hothouse of the professional golf ecosystem, the sport on the men’s side has spent most of the past half decade steeped in battle. The PGA Tour, long the gold standard for the finest players in the world, faced an insurgent challenge starting in 2022, when a new league underwritten by Saudi Arabia’s controversial Public Investment Fund made its intentions to act as a disrupter known. Long-simmering player resentments regarding everything from purse sizes to NIL rights were brought to a boil; first slowly, and then with increasing momentum, LIV began siphoning off some of the PGA Tour’s biggest names. Phil Mickelson jumped first, but considering his well-publicized gambling problems and the fact that his best competitive days were behind him, the hire felt deeply transactional at best. LIV’s big ideas were strange and anathema to most golf watchers: three-day tournaments, some impenetrable team golf concept, shotgun starts, wearing shorts. Literally no one was asking for this, and Mickelson seemed like a silly little mascot.
But soon the Saudi threat to the PGA ramped up. Poaching Mickelson was one thing, but grabbing its frontline stars was a true body blow. Money in metric tons was thrown around. Brooks Koepka was the first domino to fall. A four-time major winner by then, Koepka agreed in 2022 to a multiyear contract with a signing bonus reportedly over $100 million. Koepka had long been one of the most fascinating great players of his generation—a nervy, swaggering character who was often injured but clearly still in the prime of his career. To wit, Koepka managed to win a fifth major at the 2023 PGA Championship while in exile. His bête noire Bryson DeChambeau followed him to LIV on a four-and-a-half-year contract for even more money, and after answering his true call as a YouTuber, DeChambeau managed to outduel Rory McIlroy at the 2024 U.S. Open. Then there was the case of the great and charismatic multi-time major winner Jon Rahm, a nominal PGA Tour loyalist who jumped ship for an amount of money so obscene I feel reluctant to type it. If the entire point of LIV was to prove that everybody has their price, then it’s clearly demonstrated that. If its goal was to stage the sport in a remotely intriguing way, then its failure has been comprehensive.
In the meantime, lives went on—but none of us have won, exactly. McIlroy sacrificed himself at Tour commissioner Jay Monahan’s altar, only to see his loyalty discarded when the PGA entered into merger negotiations with the PIF. On the LIV side, only DeChambeau’s game steadied or improved, while the play of nearly every other defector took a step back as LMFAO blared on the tee box. Meanwhile, here’s what is whispered in golf circles about the particular dominance of Scottie Scheffler these past few years: He’s not Nicklaus or Tiger crushing all comers. A few of those defectors would have beaten him. Is there a Koepka-Rahm-Bryson asterisk for Scheffler in victories where these horses might have been stalking?
The distortions are like the fog of war. But every war has a turning point. And Monday’s announcement of Koepka’s repatriation to the PGA Tour feels like a leading indicator that the LIV project is nearing a logical end point. Not that logic has ever entered into it.
On Monday, the PGA Tour, in its psychedelically bureaucratic way, issued a decree that let Koepka tee up for this month's Farmers Insurance Open, with further rationales to follow, including some purse forfeiture, some incredible charity gambit—hell, I’ll just quote the press release:
Designed to provide an alternative path back to PGA Tour competition for past members who have achieved the highest accomplishments in the game, the Returning Member Program mandates heavy and appropriate limitations to both tournament access and potential earnings that we believe properly holds returning members accountable for substantial compensation earned elsewhere. It also includes elite performance-based criteria that requires winning the Players Championship, Masters Tournament, PGA Championship, U.S. Open or The Open Championship between 2022 and 2025.
The crucial thing to register is that the PGA Tour, having first tried to reportedly intimidate players into remaining loyal and then functionally giving up and engaging in long-running and utterly opaque merger conversations with LIV, has resumed a posture of straight-up antagonism under new Tour CEO Brian Rolapp. It is right to sense weakness. Koepka's departure—with DeChambeau rumored to be right behind, should he not decide to just go full Mr. Beast—is a brutal symbolic blow as well as a talent drain for LIV. None of the rationales for the disrupter league have borne out. It did not "grow the game"; it contracted it, relegating some of the sport's best players to the obscure patchwork of LIV's idiosyncratic schedule. It did not galvanize a heretofore underserved mass of fans who really want golf tournaments to feature live music and garish spectacle. It never got real traction with a media rights deal, and to the extent LIV’s tournaments are televised, nobody watches them. The players themselves appear fatigued by the "nontraditional" approach, and LIV's recent decision to capitulate to four-round tournaments (instead of three) to allow its players to qualify for points in the Official World Golf Ranking further undermined any fleeting claim to novel innovation. If the format is more or less exactly the same, why, precisely, would anyone choose to watch something clearly inferior? On top of all that, the original point that LIV defectors wanted to play a less grueling schedule has been rendered preposterous by the tour bouncing around from Australia to America to South Korea. Whatever it set out to do in the sport of golf, all the PIF's nearly $5 billion outlay has succeeded in is luring a few great players into a short-term cash grab. But it turns out that there are limits to what money can do.
A Timeline of Liv Golf’s Insurgence
You know that scene in McCabe and Mrs. Miller when McCabe finally realizes that he is playing a losing hand against the land barons attempting to purchase his business? He goes to appeal to the company thugs who have been sent to remove him as an impediment and says he has reconsidered and will sell. But it's too late. The main thug tells him, "I don't make deals," and the town shudders with impending violence. Following all of the shadowy and inconclusive discussions between the PGA Tour and LIV, the former entity has apparently reached the "I don't make deals" phase. The negotiation portion of this story appears to be over. The terms of Koepka's reentry, as enumerated in the hilariously Maoist-sounding "Returning Member Program," are notably unequivocal. They have basically laid out an ultimatum that lasts for just three weeks and the criteria of which apply to just four players: Koepka, DeChambeau, Rahm, and 2022 Open Champion Cameron Smith. Come home or get bent is more or less the message. And figure it out fast. As for less bankable or competitive one-time PGA Tour members—say, Pat Perez or Phil—there doesn’t appear to be any road back at all. The PGA Tour has the better product, the goodwill of the general public, and what passes for moral high ground in a sport where "scrupulous" is a seldom used descriptor. It’s been a very weird four years since LIV entered the scene, but Koepka’s retreat is the surest sign yet that the fever is breaking. It seems to have turned out this way: The Public Investment Fund had all the money, but the PGA Tour had all the time.
