The end is never as triumphant as the beginning. Beginnings have hope and promise and excitement and, in some cases, champagne sprayed into the sky.
On Thursday, years after turning the professional golf landscape on its head, LIV Golf had its coffin sealed with nails. The court hearing lasted eight minutes. There is more time to play a par-4.
In short, BC Partners backed out of its $300 million investment after LIV’s big-name players failed to sign for the next edition of the league, sending LIV 2.0 into a liquidation phase. You can also turn it this way: when the money ran out, the headliners were no longer interested in the vision they had supported before.
No matter how you felt about LIV, it still seems strange how drastically different the world of golf will be next year. It seemed like yesterday that the news flashed on my phone: Dustin Johnson was gone. So was Brooks Koepka. The same for Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter and other players, who, like most of the original LIV signees, were in the top nine of their careers. Phil Mickelson was announced as the LIV headliner shortly thereafter. He was the kingpin. Bryson DeChambeau, love him or loathe him, was next.
In the coming years, LIV spent lavishly – about the players and the entertainment and the musicians and the stages and the choreographed flash mobs that everyone should make an appearance golf but stronger. And there was a moment, if it was brief, when it felt like he might actually be transformed somethingwhen LIV removed the reigning Masters champion, Jon Rahm.
Rahm competed non-stop in LIV – and was paid well for it – but never won a major championship while under the LIV banner. It’s been a complex few years, though there’s no doubt that for dollars and cents, he’s emerging as one of the biggest winners of the era.
Rahm was signed to a huge contract (he did not receive everything but it can also allow several helicopters), left when the building was on fire and played on the DP World Tour for a year before probably rejoining the PGA Tour as if nothing ever happened. It’s an impressive maneuver, even if a population of golf fans might think otherwise; for them he will always be remembered as a star who turned his back on the Tour and took the money on the legacy. (There were dollars available on both sides, since Scottie Scheffler was on the PGA Tour and earned $53 million last season).
You can find other winners in the death of LIV. The DP World Tour is certainly among them. She was intimidated by LIV, who he wanted to destroy the league, but stepped down last month and said that LIV players are no longer allowed to be part of their league. The stars bowing out of LIV 2.0 might have been the final blow to LIV Golf, but the DP World Tour rejection of LIV players might have been the blow that tripped the league. Now the DP World Tour becomes a landing spot for some of LIV’s best players, arguably giving the league its strongest group of stars in years. Sounds like a win.
Pro golfers, in general, probably win. The stock markets are now out of control. Rory McIlroy thinks they might come back down to Earth, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Unfortunately, the list of losers could exceed the list of winners. LIV, as sputtering in recent months, has laid off most of its employees. There are unpaid vendors, small business owners among them, who will likely never recover what they are owed. There are class LIV players, who have banked some financial cushion, but could struggle to find a landing spot as easily as the Rahms and Hattons and DeChambeau. There is the average level of the PGA Tour, the guys who 2027 will be dedicated to play well and earn spots on the most lucrative Championship Series come 2028; they might have more competition now.
But the biggest losers over the past five years have been you, the golf fans. It doesn’t matter if you prefer LIV to the Tour or you’ve never seen a second of the escape league; golf’s fracturing has diluted the sport. It divided the fans. Patrick Mahomes playing in the XFL will make the NFL worse.
At any time in the last five years, you could of course have opened Twitter (X, whatever) and gotten a feel for the general fan vibe – but mostly you would have found division and grandstanding. It became the PGA Tour vs. LIV, and LIV vs. the PGA Tour, and few were allowed to stand with one foot on either line.
But the end of LIV comes with good news: Most golf fans want to watch the best golfers in the world play together as often as possible, so they can see who are the best golfers in the world. Now we can have it more often.
That is something worth celebrating.
You can reach the author at joshua.berhow@golf.com.
