Michael La Sasso
Chris Trotman, LIV Golf
If this was the truncated end of LIV Golf’s 2026 season, it was awkward – at best. If this was the end of LIV Golf period, it was a sad farewell without much sorrow.
Michael La Sasso – the 2025 NCAA champion who forfeited a spot in the Masters and opted to join LIV Golf as a rookie this year – lifted himself from the relegation zone with his inaugural professional victory at the Club at Chatham Hills near Indianapolis, edging out LIV heavyweight Jon Rahm with a tap-in birdie at the last when his 50-yard pitch nestled close to the hole. Rahm bogeyed his final hole (the first) from the fairway to settle for his fourth runner-up finish on LIV this season.
“I’m shaking if I’m being honest. It was unbelievable,” said the 22-year-old La Sasso. “I thought I played great all day and just kind of waited for my moment, and it finally came on the last. … I told our social media guy last night, I said, I’ll be honest, this is going to be the one I win. I spoke it into existence well before this week. The fact that it’s actually come true, it’s unbelievable.”
Rahm’s Legion XIII rallied on the weekend to claim the makeshift team title by six shots over the Phil Mickelson-less HyFlyers club that had languished all season in ninth place in the 13-team standings but rode strong weeks in Indy from La Sasso and Scott Vincent to a second-place finish.
The week started with the official reveal of the worst-kept secret in golf, that LIV’s scheduled season-ending Team Championship in Michigan that was to have been played this week was cancelled. Everyone knew for weeks that would be the case, as the host venue hadn’t done any of the necessary buildout and was booking tee times for that week while Fox Sports had quietly removed it from its TV schedule. But LIV – which finally halted ticket sales just more than a week ago – kept waiting to make any announcement to avoid raising “media flags” which were already flapping furiously.
“It’s a very complex transaction we’ll have to deliver. But man, I wouldn’t bet against us.”
Scott O’Neil
The cancellation of the team finale forced the last-minute alteration of the Indianapolis event into a “hybrid” finale for both individual and team play. While Rahm had already secured the season-long individual title and the $6 million bonus that came with it ($12 million less than last year’s) after the previous tournament in Bedminster, New Jersey, there was still the matter of filling the rest of the podium and determining who would end up in the potentially meaningless relegation zone outside the top 46 in the standings.
So the 72-hole medal event played on with a reduced $10.1 million purse for the individual portion ($2.02 million for the winner instead of the usual $4 million) and the remaining $30 million in the purse divvied up by the 13 teams based entirely on the cumulative score order of finish in Indianapolis. There was no bracketed match play like previous years and no value whatsoever put on the rest of the season, when the 4 Aces Golf Club built a narrow points lead over the other three teams – Ripper, Legion XIII and Crushers – that had separated themselves significantly from the weaker franchises. Legion XIII claimed the crown and $8.2 million share of the pot – down from the $14 million it got for winning last year.
On Tuesday, when news of the hybrid finale came out, so too did a LIV Golf promo on social media that prominently featured pictures of Bryson DeChambeau, Joaquin Niemann, Dustin Johnson and Sebastian Muñoz, the 2025 winner in Indianapolis. Conspicuously missing was three-time season champion Rahm, which immediately prompted social-media sleuths citing dubious sources to suggest that Rahm had struck a deal to return to the PGA Tour. Golf Digest quickly cited sources saying those rumors were “inaccurate/premature.”
Several damning reports cited various vendors suing LIV and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – its presumed financial backer through 2026 – for nonpayment for services rendered, none of it reflective of the Saudis as reliable partners or LIV as good stewards of its previous largesse. LIV CEO Scott O’Neil said LIV officials are doing “everything we can to make sure we can do right by them.”
There was even word that players had not yet been paid for their performances in the previous event at LIV Golf New York, prompting chatter about some players potentially refusing to tee it up in Indy. The checks, however, arrived safely before play started Thursday.
In the face of it all, including a likelihood that LIV files for bankruptcy, O’Neil maintained his relentless optimism about the league’s future with a new investor – which multiple reports have identified as BC Partners, a London-based private-equity firm – that the CEO claims will bankroll the venture moving forward. “It’s a very complex transaction we’ll have to deliver. But man, I wouldn’t bet against us,” he said last week.
After coming up two shots short in the finale, DeChambeau was more guardedly optimistic as he reflected on the last five seasons of LIV and whatever comes next.
“I think there’s a lot of potential moving forward,” he said. “It’s been an interesting ride, that’s for sure. You know just as much as I have everything that we’ve gone through and the tough moments that we’ve had. But it’s made us stronger.
“As much as we’re transitioning from LIV 1.0 to 2.0, I have great thoughts about what could happen next year. I wish I could be more up front about it, but ultimately I’m proud of the fact of what we’ve done – you know, the good and some of the bad that we’ve unfortunately had, things that have occurred. I’m going to be real with it. You know, not everything was perfect, but for the most part we’ve done a solid job. And if there’s one thing that I could say is, we did something different in the game of golf and I’m proud of that.”
Scott Michaux
