BY SCOTT MICHAUX
Seeing all the LIV Golf survival-mode trauma unfolding over the last few weeks, the “bring out your dead” scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” leaps to mind.
He says he’s not dead.
Yes, he is
I’m not!
Well, he will be soon. …
I feel happy!
You’re not fooling anyone.
Whatever state of unhealth the soon-to-be Saudi-orphaned league is lurching toward in its zombie march of the LIV-ing dead, it will never be the same existential threat it once was to the fabric of professional golf. It may still exist in some form going forward, but the coming months are sure to see assets getting parceled out to the traditional tours and liabilities left for scrap.
In a special LIV liquidation sale edition of Birdies & Bogeys, we judge some of the winners and losers over the last five seasons of relative turbulence and change:
BIRDIE: PGA Tour. It won, but all wars have casualties. Its players benefitted from juiced purses designed to hold the line against poachers, but it comes at the cost of pretty dramatic reductions to its exemption structure and soon-to-be-reduced playing opportunities. Signature sponsors benefitted from stronger fields but steeper financial commitments, while smaller events suffered and may get shoved aside. Its essential reach toward private-equity investment led to C-suite and rank-and-file downsizing to boost returns. More market corrections are surely coming. Winning didn’t come cheap.
BOGEY: The Kingdom. Saudi Arabia spent more than $5 billion in an attempt to sportswash its human rights reputation and all it got for it was a constant stream of journalists and golf fans around the world pointing out its human rights violations such as murdering The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi. Now it proves itself untrustworthy as a business partner despite its deep pockets. Doesn’t take a math genius to add that up as a poor investment.
BIRDIE: Brooks Koepka. The first season of the Netflix series “Full Swing” detailed Koepka’s valid reasoning for joining LIV, believing injuries might end his relevance. Instead, he won a fifth major the next year and raised the early bar with five LIV wins in its first three seasons. But he never sued his former tour, never wore LIV-branded clothes at majors and when he decided to break his LIV contract a year early, the PGA Tour was all too happy to accommodate his accelerated return.
Brooks Koepka
Logan Whitton, augusta national golf club
DQ: Phil Mickelson. A personal family crisis has sidelined the lefthander for all but one week this season, but there’s no future for him if and when LIV is done. On top of the world after winning the 2021 PGA at age 50, Mickelson burned all of his capital and bridges on behalf of the Saudi league. A lucrative TV career, Ryder Cup captaincy, Masters honorary starter spot and cherished role as a lifetime tour elder statesman all seemingly washed away in the transaction. It’s a shame.
BIRDIE: Patrick Reed. The erstwhile Captain America seems to enjoy playing the villain and fit nicely with LIV. Not long after Koepka, however, the 2018 Masters champ decided not to re-up his contract just weeks ahead of the 2026 season opener. Did he sniff out trouble or was his timing just fortuitous? Reed didn’t get the same welcome mat Koepka got, but instead he parlayed his suspension into a leading spot on the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai and will rejoin the PGA Tour as soon as this fall but full-time in 2027. Buckle up.
BOGEY: Jon Rahm. Perhaps the then-reigning Masters champ was too confident that his stature would force a resolution to golf’s rift when he took the reported $300 million deal to join LIV at the end of 2023. Perhaps he’s not as miserable as he looks contending every week against inferior depth in shotgun-start events with music playing. Having settled his differences with the DP World Tour and ensured his eligibility for the 2027 Ryder Cup at Adare Manor, perhaps he’ll come back and be the ascending star he was and win more majors and this detour will only be a blip on his road to the hall of fame. Perhaps.
Jon Rahm
David Paul Morris, augusta national golf club
BIRDIE: Scottie, Rory, et al. The superstars who resisted temptation to take nine-figure paydays are the biggest winners in all of this. Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele and a few other marquee stars got rich anyway off the signature-event and bonus windfalls the PGA Tour delivered in defensive response. Plus, they got to burgeon their hall-of-fame résumés with victories that really matter. And they will keep rolling without any Saudi stains on their reputations.
BOGEY: Greg Norman. The ringleader for the breakaway circuit, Norman fulfilled his long dream of creating a global competitor to the established tours. At what cost? The Great White Shark was never the cuddliest superstar, but he wasn’t a pariah until he brushed off the Saudi murder of Khashoggi by saying “Look, we’ve all made mistakes,” locked himself into bitter rivalry with the PGA Tour and overpromised things like world ranking points for guys who joined him. We all make mistakes. He still has two claret jugs, a brand and lots of money.
BIRDIE: Jay Monahan and Co. The outgoing PGA Tour commissioner, as well as his loyal deputies Ed Herlihy and Jimmy Dunne who brokered the much-maligned “framework agreement” between the tour, the DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in 2023, look a lot smarter now than they were given credit for then. They ended the money pit of litigation and ultimately never gave up a thing when the so-called deal died under the weight of Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s stubborn ego trip. History will remember them well.
Jay Monahan
Tracy Wilcox, PGA TOUR via Getty Images
BOGEY: Yasir Al-Rumayyan. The governor of the trillion-dollar Saudi PIF couldn’t buy or bully his way to a green jacket or a seat on the PGA Tour board. He was hell-bent on making his team format work despite its failures to gain any commercial traction with TV audiences and he was so offended by the tour’s valuation of LIV’s worth that he eighty-sixed the deal negotiations.
BIRDIE: Eamon Lynch and Brandel Chamblee. The top two LIV bashers in the media caught plenty of heat from LIV bots and grievance peddlers in the last four years over their strong and relentless stances. But the sharply witty Golfweek columnist and undeterred Golf Channel analyst will savor the last laugh on this subject.
BIRDIE: YouTube golf. Bryson DeChambeau turned himself into a one-man global brand with his popular social-media presence. Hitting a hole-in-one over his house isn’t the same as winning a U.S. Open trophy, but it’s bankable and makes Bryson a commodity somebody is going to want if LIV can’t afford him anymore. Will his joining the original lawsuit against the PGA Tour complicate his path back should he want to return? We’ll see. He passed on the easy ticket home Koepka got.
Bryson DeChambeau
Leckie Wong, augusta national golf club
BOGEY: David Feherty and Jerry Foltz. Longtime broadcasters with high profiles, they leaned hard into being the partisan mouthpieces for LIV Golf. While few ever heard them on the air, those who matter did and probably won’t be inclined to ever bring them back. Feherty’s rapier wit, in particular, is missed. But he probably cut too deep to be given another chance.
PAR: Tyrrell Hatton. Aside from his lone LIV win in Nashville back in 2024, the 34-year-old Englishman has been rather meh on his new tour. But he’s been pretty good elsewhere, maintaining his OWGR top-25 status with limited at-bats in DP World Tour events and majors before LIV finally started collecting points this year. The rogue many enjoy will land safely somewhere when the dust settles.
BOGEY: Chain of command. Sure-thing European Ryder Cup captains Sergio García, Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Graeme McDowell and, of course, Henrik Stenson all got blackballed from serving in golf’s most revered role. Was it worth it?
BIRDIE: Luke Donald. Their loss was the Englishman’s – and Europe’s – gain as the replacement pick for Stenson. Donald, who might have been overlooked like Larry Nelson had Stenson stayed, became arguably the continent’s best skipper with back-to-back wins in Rome and Bethpage and a strong chance to three-peat in Ireland. What was a marginal World Golf Hall of Fame résumé has become a CV very likely to earn enshrinement.
Luke Donald
Maddie Meyer, PGA of America
BIRDIE: Golden parachutes. Some of the early LIV adopters of a certain vintage like Paul Casey, Charles Howell III, Pat Perez, Harold Varner III and Richard Bland as well as approaching or past sell-by date major winners like Bubba Watson, Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel and Martin Kaymer got supplemental early-retirement bonuses before they faded into irrelevance anyway. LIV made the most sense for this tier of tour players.
BIRDIE: Justin Rose. In his 40s and mired in a slump when LIV formed, the 2013 U.S. Open winner seemed like the perfect candidate to take the money and run. But Rose stayed and rekindled his game, threatened to win more majors, won more Ryder Cups and climbed all the way up to as high as No. 3 in the world again this year at age 45. The odds-on choice as Europe’s next Ryder Cup captain in 2029 bet on himself and won.
PAR: Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith. Two major winners with star power seem to have slipped into contentment and lost their fire to be great. Both have won three times on LIV and amassed generational wealth, but they have been non-factors in majors ever since joining the league and show no real signs of stepping that up as their major exemptions have or will run out. Maybe these developments will light a fire under them, but don’t hold your breath.
BIRDIE: Anthony Kim. Every drama deserves a memorable conclusion, and after 12 years of mysterious exile and two years of rather embarrassing performances in his comeback, Kim got to rewrite his own ending with an inspired victory over LIV’s two biggest stars on its biggest stage in Australia. No one will ever accuse AK of being the classiest character in golf, but he is a character. And we’ll always have Adelaide.
BIRDIE: DP World Tour. The European circuit is not in the business of telling quality players they can’t play there anymore, so letting LIV guys who paid their fines (or endlessly appealed) to tee it up proved good for business. It’s serving as the transfer portal for ex-LIVsters like Reed and Eugenio Chacarra to work their way toward the PGA Tour soon. And with LIV’s uncertain future, the DPWT might be the landing spot (at least temporarily) for a lot of name guys transitioning back to the meritocracy.
Patrick Reed with caddie Kessler Karain during the 2025 DP World Tour Championship
Richard Heathcote, Getty Images
BOGEY: Young guns. A lot of emerging twentysomething international talents like Joaquin Niemann, David Puig, Tom McKibbin, Elvis Smylie and Josele Ballester tied their fortunes to LIV before fully establishing themselves on the legacy tours. These are players the golf ecosystem needs back to see what they can do. Maybe the DPWT can provide a soft landing. Will there be room for young Americans like Michael La Sasso and Caleb Surratt to land on their more streamlined home tour? The road will be harder than it might have been.
BIRDIE: Asian Tour. The PIF pumped $20 million a year into a tour few outside Asia paid much attention to before its International Series was created to offer a place for LIV guys to get some much-needed world ranking points. It got some better fields and bigger purses and helped lift a few players to another level.
WD: Talor Gooch. Being the poster child for LIV grievance, LIV delusion and LIV apathy is not a great legacy. Choosing to whine about not getting into majors instead of trying to qualify for them was where he lost the plot.
BIRDIE: International hotspots. Places like Australia, South Africa, Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea embraced the opportunity to see golf stars who might otherwise never show up to compete in their countries. Is it a coincidence that national opens in three of those markets (as well as Spain and Scotland where LIV also has played) got granted automatic invitations to the 2026 Masters? Maybe, but it certainly illustrated the hunger and growth potential in these underserved markets.
BIRDIE: The leftovers. On the assumption LIV manages to cobble together enough investment to keep going, a restructured concept of hybrid team golf in international markets without all the excesses, more reasonable purses or the stigma of its Saudi overlords could establish itself as a viable alternative to the traditional tours. Reduce the event load. Start cooperating with legacy tour schedules. Go back to 54 holes. Get away from multi-year contracts. Lean into having more qualifiers to create local market wild-card teams. Stand out by being truly different. That’s the best way to salvage a save.
