Endings are never quite as triumphant as beginnings. 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. It takes longer to play a par-4.
In short, BC Partners backed out of its $300 million investment after LIV’s big-name players did not sign up for the league’s next edition, sending LIV 2.0 into a liquidation phase. You can also spin it this way: when the money ran out, the headliners were no longer interested in the vision they’d previously championed.
No matter how you’ve felt about LIV Golf, it’s bizarre that the golf world will look so drastically different next year. It seemed like just yesterday that news flashed across my phone: Dustin Johnson was gone. So was Brooks Koepka. Same for Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter and other players, who, like the majority of LIV’s original signees, were on the back nines of their career. Phil Mickelson was announced as the LIV headliner a short time later. He was the kingpin. Bryson DeChambeau, love him or loathe him, was next.
In the coming years, LIV spent lavishly — on players and entertainment and musicians and stages and choreographed flash mobs that were all supposed to make it seem like golf but louder. And there was a moment, if brief, when it felt like it could have really turned into something, when LIV lured away the reigning Masters champion, Jon Rahm.
Rahm contended nonstop on LIV — and was paid handsomely 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 by dollars and cents, he’s emerging as one of the era’s biggest winners.
Still, it’s been a complex few years. Rahm was signed to a huge contract (sure, he didn’t receive all of it but can still afford several helicopters), left when the building was on fire and will play on the DP World Tour for a year before likely rejoining the PGA Tour like nothing ever happened. By some measures that impressive maneuvering, though a population of golf fans might think otherwise; to them he’ll always be remembered as a star who turned his back on the Tour and picked dollar signs over legacy. (Though there were dollars available on both sides, as Scottie Scheffler stayed on the PGA Tour and won $53 million last season.)
You can find other winners in LIV’s demise. The DP World Tour is certainly among them. It was bullied by LIV, which wanted to destroy the league, but it put its foot down last month and said LIV players were no longer allowed to be a part of its league. Stars bowing out of LIV 2.0 might have been the final blow to LIV Golf, but the DP World Tour’s rejection of LIV players might have been the jab that made the league stumble. Now the DP World Tour becomes a landing spot for some of LIV’s top players, likely giving the league it strongest group of stars in years. That seems like a win.
Pro golfers, in general, probably won. The purses 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 might surpass the list of winners. LIV, as it was sputtering over the last several months, laid off most of its emplyees. There are unpaid vendors, small business owners among them, who will likely never recoup what they’re owed. There are the rank-and-file LIV players, who banked some financial cushion but might struggle to find a landing spot as easily as the Rahms and Hattons and DeChambeaus. There’s the middle tier of the PGA Tour, guys whose 2027s will be devoted to playing well and earning spots on the more lucrative Championship Series come 2028; they might have more competition now.
But the biggest losers over the last five years have been you, the golf fans. It doesn’t matter if you preferred LIV over the Tour or never watched a second of the breakaway league; golf’s fracture diluted the sport. It divided the fans. Patrick Mahomes playing in the XFL would make the NFL worse.
At any point in the last five years you could of course have opened Twitter (X, whatever) and gotten a feel for the general vibe of fans — 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 a foot across each line.
But the end of LIV comes with good news: Most golf fans have wanted to watch the best golfers in the world play together as often as possible, so they can see who the best golfers in the world actually are. Now we might actually get that more often.
That’s something worth celebrating.
You can reach the author at joshua.berhow@golf.com.
