Writing from Town and Country, Missouri
Sunday, August 23, 2026
The idea was interesting to start with. A new series of golf tournaments combining individual and team play, ideally co-existing with the PGA Tour and European (now DPWorld) Tour. The Premier Golf League, it was dubbed.
Cooked up by some Londoners, all they needed was cash and players – and deals with the existing tours to squeeze into the calendar – to get it off the ground.
They almost got the cash. The Saudis were interested, then decided to steal the idea for themselves. Cash would be no problem as long as the world needed oil.
Players? They brought in Greg Norman, who a generation earlier floated the idea of a world tour, nearly got fellow Australian Rupert Murdoch to buy in, and then was shot down cold by Arnold Palmer in a meeting at the Shark Shootout. This time, Norman would be the front man, the recruiter.
Norman did reasonably well. Phil Mickelson was the first to jump, followed by Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Bryson DeChambeau and a host of other lesser lights. The last big get was Jon Rahm. Name players, major winners, but not all of them, and a Saudi study early on concluded that the new golf league would only stand a chance of succeeding if the top 12 in the world all signed up.
Rory McIlroy did not. Nor Scottie Scheffler. Neither did Tiger Woods, whose beat-up body has prevented him from playing just about anywhere in the 2020s anyway.
Deals with the existing tours? Well, Jay Monahan never returned the phone calls to Ponte Vedra Beach.
Undeterred, the Saudis took the LIV Golf League to the fairways anyway, with lavish hospitality construction on each course, eye-popping purses and a roster of players notable and not who signed for bonuses, some mere advances against purses, some nine figures and directly deposited in advance, some in installments.
The people responded. By yawning. Oh, on site, some tournaments drew good galleries. The opener in London was well-attended. The four years in Chicago – two at quirky Rich Harvest Farms, two at pedestrian Bolingbrook Golf Club – brought out golf-starved crowds large enough to look good on television. The first Saturday at Bolingbrook, 15,000 showed up, the second time, 18,000. There was fun to be had.
Many other weeks, you could fire a shotgun down the gallery ropes and not hit anyone. (Maybe that’s why there were shotgun starts.) The home tournament in Saudi Arabia didn’t pack in the locals, even played in the evening, out of the searing sun. Stops in Florida were greeted with indifference, whether at Doral, a Dick Wilson-Joe Lee layout outside of Miami that has had more facelifts than a Palm Beach dowager, or Orange County near Orlando, where a productive orange grove was sacrificed to create 18 uncreative holes.
At those stops, there wasn’t a need for crowd control, because there was no crowd.
There was also no television money to speak of.
Television, especially American television, you may have heard, is the mother’s milk of sport. It finances the Olympics, the NFL, every other alphabet league, professional and collegiate, you can think of, and golf – the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the LPGA, that is.
If you don’t have American TV money, you don’t have a chance. In 2022, LIV’s first year, it had exactly one station in North America carrying the action: CHCH-TV, good ol’ Channel 11 in Hamilton, Ont. A two-year deal with the CW followed, and the last two years, Fox and its cable networks have picked up the LIV world feed.
But what didn’t follow was the big money. As best as can be determined, this was a revenue sharing deal. If Fox sold commercial time and people watched, LIV would get a cut.
Judging by the number of ads and the ratings, it was a pretty thin slice.
Even with format changes – four rounds instead of three, limited season qualifying – and some feel-good stories, notably the return of Anthony Kim to the game, and in Adelaide, Australia, to the winner’s circle, LIV just didn’t move the needle. Talor Gooch won four times and is still a household name only in his own household. The same goes for Branden Grace, Eugeni Chacarra and Dean Bermester, each a winner once.
And the team golf? If you can name the four members of Stinger, call the producers of Jeopardy! and see if you can play.
LIV has about five guys people want to see, and one is Rahm, who appears to be pulling the ripcord on this golf Hindenburg before it hits the ground. Given the Saudi financial pullout, which prompted the cancellation of a stop in New Orleans and next week’s original team finale in Michigan, maybe those five guys should open a burger joint. But the name has been taken.
Rahm, along with Bryson DeChambeau, is tied for 10th going into the final round of LIV’s stop near Indianapolis this weekend, three strokes behind leader Michael La Sasso, who won the 2025 NCAA Championship and has since faded into obscurity.
In contrast, Sunday’s final round of the BMW Championship at Bellerive Country Club features current (and two-time) U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark being chased by current (and twice-consecutive) Masters champion and career Grand Slammer Rory McIlroy, neither of whom are obscure.
McIlroy, against LIV from the start, said this when asked if the potential return of LIV’s star players to the Tour would enhance the Tour’s standing: “I would argue, have they brought value to LIV?”
Ouch.
And then this: “This is the best platform for the top professional golfers in the world.
“Were there some things at the start of LIV that the PGA Tour could have done better? Sure. You think back to the start with Phil unhappy with some stuff or whatever it was. Like, surely that just warranted a conversation instead of blowing the entire professional game up and doing something else. I've always felt like this is the best place to play professional golf. And I'm pretty sure if the PGA Tour were handed six billion dollars it would have done a better job with it.”
LIV boss Scott O’Neil has been showing around potential financial savior Ted Goldthorpe this week at LIV’s dance at The Club at Chatham Hills. Presumably their ride didn’t get lost, like a media bus did on Thursday. But if Goldthorpe, who heads venture capital outlet BC Partners, looks around, then looks again at the balance sheet, he’ll be smart if he tells O’Neil to get lost. As expected, the term sheet Goldthorpe signed isn’t a contract but a window of exclusive financial data access and negotiating time.
The guess here is when the final putt falls at Chatham Hills this afternoon, the curtain will soon follow. LIV will have lasted LXII tournaments – 62 if you’re not into Roman numerals.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour rolls on, at Bellerive this week where the BMW will bring in millions for the Evans Scholars Foundation and where the weekend was sold out. The Tour has a new driver in CEO Brian Rolapp and now has the burden of turning a profit for the outside investors brought on at the height of the conflict to help match the LIV purses. If LIV has a legacy, that will be it, of overturning the old ways of the PGA Tour by threatening it with competition.
How the Tour can untangle itself from the complicated process of running non-profit tournaments with for-profit investors expecting a return on their $1.5 billion investment, we know not. But Rolapp is a crafty one and may figure it out. He comes from the NFL, where the perennially-popular Green Bay Packers are a community non-profit enterprise.
No matter what, even with the revamped multi-tier schedule coming in 2028, the Tour will be here, and on your television screen. LIV, probably not. The word when it started was the Saudis would give their experiment five years to break even. It didn’t.
To quote an old pal, Bob Verdi, who said it first about the World Hockey Association: LIV Golf, 2022-2026. May it rest in pieces.
– Tim Cronin
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