LIV Long and Prosper: Dispatches from the End of an Era

INDIANAPOLIS—Flash mobs and the Rhino Jive, bomber jackets and HyFlyers capes, NFTs and positive EBITDA, Iron Heads and Niblicks, Chainsmokers and the Swedish House Mafia, “scary motherfuckers” and Andrew Waterman…surely you jest!

For four and a half years, LIV Golf has felt like a fever dream. Ambitious and ridiculous, daring and disastrous, it changed the game in spite of itself. This week, at a nondescript golf course set in a housing project in Indiana, the music finally stopped, quite literally. The woebegone 2026 season—replete with canceled events, lawsuits over unpaid vendors and a giddy death watch among the many haters in the golf media and on Twitter—ground to a merciless end at LIV Indianapolis. The tension was evident from the very first round, when Tyrrell Hatton set tongues wagging by choosing for his walkout song Queen’s “I Want To Break Free.”

When I asked the usually jovial Laurie Canter if he would answer a couple of questions, he sputtered, “Absolutely not. No way! You know I love you but I’m not going to say a single word. There is no scenario where that could happen. But that’s a nice shirt you’re wearing, I like it.”

Bryson DeChambeau was more succinct calling me “a PGA Tour shill.” When I asked if he would consent to an interview, he said, “Why, so you can tear us down?” LIV assigned a staffer to shadow my every move and eavesdrop on every interview; it felt like being a political reporter being hosted by the North Korea.

Somewhere, Greg Norman smiled wanly.

On Sunday, the players competed like there’s no tomorrow, which might actually be the case. LIV’s two biggest stars put on a helluva show: Jon Rahm made nine birdies to storm up the leaderboard while DeChambeau shot a bogeyless 64 to match Rahm shot-for-shot. But they were trumped on the 72nd hole by Michael La Sasso, the swaggy 2025 NCAA champion and now LIV’s youngest ever winner at 22. La Sasso favors a deep vee on his polos, the better to show off the gold rope around his neck. His swing is loaded with personality, just like the kid himself. He had struggled mightily throughout his rookie year on LIV but on Sunday played with zero fear. “He was joking and messing about all day,” Canter, La Sasso’s final round playing partner later told me. “He asked me on 17 if I was nervous and I said a little bit. He called me a pussy!”

La Sasso iced the win with a gorgeous pitch on the par-5 18th hole. The swollen gallery roared as he tapped in the winning birdie putt and then La Sasso was drenched in champagne by his joyous HyFlyers teammates. It was a delightful scene if you like underdogs, or competition, or golf. For one afternoon, at least, LIV was undeniably “additive,” to use a favorite word of its founding commissioner, Greg Norman.

And yet the strain was still discernible. Rahm’s Legion XIII won the concurrent team title, and the champs displayed all the enthusiasm of a scramble squad that had claimed $25 in pro shop credit, not $8.4 million. An annoyed Hatton said all he was thinking about was catching his flight to next week’s British Masters. Rahm mused bizarrely about how much he was looking forward to getting a haircut the next morning. Mostly they just looked relieved that this meat grinder of a season was finally over. In years past, the winning team was gifted gaudy, Super Bowl style championship rings. Legion XIII received no such baubles this year, reportedly because LIV did not pay the jeweler that makes the rings.

LIV now heads into the unknown, stripped of its gluttonous Saudi petrodollars and forced to fight for its survival. There may yet be a bare bones LIV 2.0 in 2027, but LIV Golf as we know it—an uppity, noisy, decadent disruptor hell-bent on upending an entire sport—is now kaput. On Sunday, I asked Sergio if he was nostalgic for the old days. “What old days?” he said with a frown. “We’re still here. Unless you know something I don’t.”

This is not destined to enter the pantheon of unforgettable LIV quotes, alongside "I've never played a Ryder Cup or Presidents Cup, but I can't imagine there's a whole lot of difference” (Talor Gooch).... “If the majors decide not to have our players play? I will celebrate. I will create my own majors for my players” (Majed Al-Sorour).... “Look, we all make mistakes” (Norman referring to the Saudi government’s assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi)... “If Rory McIlroy goes and completes his Grand Slam without some of the best players in the world, there’s just going to be an asterisk” (Gooch, again!). Oh gawd, we could go on forever about all of the funny and outrageous gifts that LIV bestowed upon us. Remember when Ian Poulter, a grown man, whined via Twitter that the DP World Tour didn’t wish Garcia a happy birthday? When Gooch, having decamped to LIV, sued the PGA Tour (along with other LIV players) to crash a Tour playoff event and then was forced to sit in his car outside the gates of TPC Southwind in Memphis, waiting for a temporary restraining order to be adjudicated in a courtroom in California? (When the TRO was denied by a federal judge, Gooch drove home to Oklahoma City, seven hours away.) How about Norman trying to bamboozle the OWGR by aligning LIV with the podunk MENA Tour, a micro-mini with $75,000 purses that hadn’t played a tournament in two full years? Or when a weather delay pushed the finish at 2023’s LIV Tulsa outside the CW’s broadcast window? Affiliates across the country switched to regularly scheduled reruns just as a juicy playoff among Dustin Johnson, Cam Smith, and Branden Grace was about to begin. That meant Magnum, P.I. in Philadelphia; Family Feud in Boston; Penn & Teller: Fool Us in Brooklyn; The Goldbergs in Miami; S.W.A.T. in Phoenix; a Nutrisystem infomercial in Palm Beach County; a mattress infomercial in San Francisco.

You can’t make this shit up.

And yet—despite all the institutional bombast, press conference bitchiness and the highly-remunerated players’ collective martyr complex—LIV has been an undeniable force. It made the sport more global, bringing big-time golf to markets starved for it, from Australia to Singapore, South Africa to Seoul, Tokyo to Mexico City. It attracted the coveted younger demographic, as LIV’s internal data showed that nearly half of tournament attendees in 2025 were under 45. LIV nurtured promising young talents like La Sasso, David Puig, Elvis Smylie, Josele Ballester, Caleb Surratt and Eugenio Chacarra (though Chacarra bolted two years ago, saying, “I see what it’s like to win on the PGA Tour and how your life changes. How you get major access and [World Ranking] points. On LIV, nothing changes, there is only money.”) LIV’s $300 million investment made the Asian Tour an important part of golf’s ecosystem. (Alas, the Asian Tour’s stewards, sensing which way the wind was blowing, last month cut a deal to become a feeder to the PGA Tour, damaging LIV’s long-term prospects.) LIV gave us a comeback story for the ages by letting Anthony Kim flail for two full seasons but ultimately providing the stage for his breakthrough victory in February 2026.

But LIV’s most long-lasting influence will be how it forced the evolution of PGA Tour, and thus the larger golf ecosystem. The Tour had been a business without competition and the complacency showed in its bloated, unimaginative product. Now, thanks to changes made to combat LIV, the Tour has, or will have next year, a tighter schedule, more gatherings of the top players, expanded pathways for young talent, an embrace of proud old national opens, and global partnerships that include the European as well as the Asian tours.

For the players, LIV has brought previously unimaginable riches. Forbes estimated that Rahm earned a whopping $107 million in 2025, making him the seventh highest-paid athlete in the world, one notch below Steph Curry and ahead of any NFL quarterback or F1 driver. Scottie Scheffler vacuumed up $84.6 to rank 16th on the Forbes list, as the PGA Tour has been forced to match its rival league dollar-for-dollar. The best players in any sport are always going to make big bucks but the trickle down on LIV has been mind-bending. Gooch earned $9.3 million in 5.5 seasons on the PGA Tour; at LIV Indy he surpassed $68 million in career on-course earnings with LIV, even though he has only one individual win over the last three seasons. (And that largesse does not include Gooch’s $30 million signing bonus or his team winnings over the last three seasons, which went into the team coffers and then were paid out in different ways to the players.)

Thanks to LIV, golfers became the most overpaid athletes on the planet, if the metric is dollars earned to eyeballs delivered. Rory McIlroy accurately diagnosed this as a “false economy.” By January 2025, LIV had burned through $5 billion and its founding father at the Saudi Public Investment Fund, His Excellency Yasir Al-Rumayyan, had grown wary of the bottomless patronage. The freewheeling and free spending Norman was replaced by a buttoned-down new CEO, Scott O’Neil, who was charged with building a real business. O’Neil brought a new discipline to corporate spending and messaging, and he generated actual revenue, luring blue-chip sponsors like HSBC, Rolex, Salesforce, Qualcomm, PING, Callaway and Under Armour. LIV has always had success with its overseas tournaments—100K+ fans annually in Adelaide, Australia!—but it finally began to make a dent in the domestic market, setting a single-day attendance record in Dallas (nearly 20,000 tickets sold) and attracting more than 50,000 fans in Indianapolis (for what was then a three-day event; the league’s tournament format would be expanded to 72 holes this season.)

These were meaningful gains for LIV but the PGA Tour delivered more juice, with its headliner Rory McIlroy reaching a new level of superstardom by winning his first Masters and Scottie Scheffler cementing his status as the game’s most dominant player since Tiger Woods with six wins, including the PGA and Open Championships.

At the end of 2025, LIV failed to land any marquee players for the second straight off-season. Worse still, it lost two headliners in Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed when they bolted. As a sign of the killer instinct of Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour’s new CEO, Koepka was welcomed back to the Tour with open arms, having only to pay a tax-deductible fine that went to charity and make a few other minor concessions. Reed decamped to the Euro Tour, where his excellent play will earn him a promotion to the PGA Tour in ‘27. These were bad bellwethers for LIV, but Al-Rumayyan still made a bold pledge during a player meeting in February 2026 at the Riyadh event: LIV would be fully funded through 2032. The entire organization exhaled.

Then the trifling unimportance of a little golf tour was thrown into sharp relief by macro events. Bombs started falling at the end of February as the U.S. launched a war with Iran. In March, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps twice targeted Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure with missile and drone attacks. Production dipped and exporting oil became problematic, imperiling the Saudi economy. On April 15, the PIF released a new 5-year plan, focused on reducing spending and leaning into domestic initiatives.

That week, O’Neil got a call from one of Al-Rumayyan’s lieutenants: “Shut it down. You’re not getting another dollar.” His Excellency ran for the hills; O’Neil didn’t hear directly from Al-Rumayyan for over two months. O’Neil’s brinkmanship got the PIF to (mostly) fund the rest of the season but it was consumed in chaos, including the cancellation of what was supposed to be this week’s glitzy team championship in Michigan with a $40 million purse that already feels like a cartoonish reminder of a bygone era. There were times that poor O’Neil sounded like a latter-day Baghdad Bob, insisting that everything’s fine while the world burned around him.

But two weeks ago, O’Neil announced that LIV had a potential new investor, the New York-based private equity firm BC Partners, which could give LIV a lifeline for 2027 and beyond. On Tuesday afternoon in Indianapolis, Ted Goldthorpe of BC Partners met with the players to sell them on his vision of the future. The message was well received. Players such as Richard Bland and Brendan Steele pledged to ride with LIV till the bitter end. Others, such as Sergio Garcia and Martin Kaymer, were more circumspect, saying they need to see the entire process play out before making a decision. O’Neil strained to be optimistic in his state of the union on the eve of LIV Indy but once again was light on details. It remains a closely guarded secret if the investment will be an actual cash infusion or just a line of credit, and whether or not the whole thing remains contingent on top players like Rahm and DeChambeau continuing to spend their prime years on LIV.

The best case for LIV in 2027 is a ten-tournament schedule with purses in the $6-10 million range. (Signature events on the PGA Tour pay out $20 million, the Players Championship purse is up to $25 million, and this week’s Tour Championship is worth $40 million.) Committing to LIV in 2027 will leave players with very few other places to play, given the DP World Tour’s recent, ruthless announcement that it would be reinstating hefty fines for any member who tries to moonlight on the rival tour. O’Neil has been telling folks that he has already lined up venues for ‘27, with seven international events likely among the ten. There is also talk of partnering with existing lower-level tournaments to add seven “feeder” tournaments so the LIV loyalists can stay tournament-sharp and LIV can still claim to have pathways on and off the tour, which is crucial to maintaining World Ranking points. O’Neil has said that “most” of the players in the Indy field are committed to moving forward with LIV. Players are being offered equity in the reconstituted tour in exchange for pledging their fealty.

The deal with BC Capital right now exists only as a signed term sheet; the PIF remains the controlling interest of LIV. Rahm is owed well into nine figures for the remainder of his contract, and PIF bean-counters recently cooked up a buyout offer; O’Neil found the number so insultingly low he refused to deliver the paperwork to Rahm. The negotiations continue. A bankruptcy filing would erase LIV’s various debts but create more messiness and hard feelings as players are trying to decide their career paths. Give the indefatigable O’Neil credit—he’s not going down without a fight. “We have work to do,” he says. “There are hurdles we have to jump over. It’s a very complex transaction we’ll have to deliver. But man, I wouldn’t bet against us.”

And so the feeling in the air all week in Indianapolis was hope tinged with melancholy. “It’s hard not to think about what we used to have,” said a day-one team manager. “You had to be there to understand how much fun it was.”

Chartered 747s; company parties on which Al-Sorour (the one-time managing director of LIV) spent six figures just on wine; the seemingly endless supply of funny money; the subversive thrill of breaking rules and norms…it was an intoxicating mix. At the season-ending soiree in 2022, Gooch passed out hats he had created for the occasion, emblazoned with FEA. That was LIV’s unofficial motto back then: Fuck ’Em All.

“We were a family,” Greg Norman told me last week in a wide-ranging interview. “We were united by the feeling that we were doing something new and exciting for the game of golf. It took an unbelievable amount of effort, and there were constant headwinds, but we did it because we believed in the vision.”

Now, Norman says, “I’m sad, disappointed, gutted to be honest. I hate to see it wither away. I would rather just see it end.”

Shark, it already has. What comes next, nobody knows. It’s too soon to write an obituary, and impossible to pen a love letter. But loathe it or love it, LIV was a gift from the content gods, taking a sleepy sport from the sports page to the business page to the front page. Lives were changed, fortunes amassed, legacies elevated and reputations shattered. It all came to an unceremonious end on Sunday night in Indianapolis.

Long after the final putt dropped, two workers were dismantling the oversized letters of a LIV GOLF sign near the clubhouse. I asked them what they were going to do with the signage. “Not sure,” one of the men replied. “They said they don’t need it anymore.”