LIV Golf and Looking Back in Anger

I was there the week LIV Golf was born. It was June of 2022, and only a handful of American media had traveled to the London suburb of St. Albans for LIV’s first tournament at Centurion Club, back when the Saudi-backed golf league was just getting off the ground. I was fortunate enough to be one of them.

It had been a strange, surreal week, watching an emotionally lobotomized Phil Mickelson say (repeatedly) he didn’t condone human rights violations, and listening to Graeme McDowell say that even though Jamal Khashoggi’s torture and murder were “reprehensible,” the golfers in England that week were “proud” to help the Saudis move forward in their evolution as a country. There was champagne and arrogance in abundance, and professional ghoul Ari Fleischer was gleefully on-site as the MC.

"Trust us," said Greg Norman, LIV Golf's newly minted CEO. “This is just the beginning."

One memory from that week, however, stands out above all others. That night, I was writing my story in the lobby of a fancy hotel, which was not far from the course. I had my headphones on, because I often write better when listening to music. I was trying to contextualize Charl Schwartzel’s victory and Norman’s vengeful boasts that golf had been changed forever when I heard a group of men singing with such gusto they drowned out the music in my ears.

The ruckus was coming from the hotel bar. A group of caddies, agents, and a couple of LIV golfers were in a celebratory mood. LIV, in its earliest stages, was happy to pick up the tab for everything and everyone — caddies included — so there was no need to exercise even an ounce of restraint. The people in the bar weren’t ordering drinks, they were ordering entire bottles of the best liquor available. They could not believe how good life suddenly was. Particularly the caddies. After years of sharing rooms at Super 8s and Econo Lodges, the Saudis had come along and blessed them with a better life. They could not resist, in a state of inebriation, belting out lines from one of Oasis’ most memorable songs.

My soul slides away; but don’t look back in anger I heard you say.

The irony of that moment is that so many people involved with LIV were not able to resist looking back in anger. It was, in fact, essential to their brand. LIV was not just a golf league built on the back of a false economy, a public relations exercise by an autocratic regime that wanted Americans and Europeans to forget that they were still torturing women and journalists and LGBTQ citizens in their own country. It was also a golf league driven by grievance and resentment.

Like a powerful magnet, LIV drew in the malcontents, the mercenaries, and the misfits of the golf world, many of them unified by this idea they had been wronged somewhere, and that they deserved the kind of power, influence, and money their talent could not justify in a normal sports economy. This was a chance to not only get rich, but to also get revenge. On whom and for what, exactly, it was never entirely clear. From the beginning, figures like Norman and Mickelson insisted they would have the last laugh, that they could see the entire chessboard. The fact that both men were absent from the scene when LIV unceremoniously died in bankruptcy court Thursday morning is disappointing, but perhaps fitting. Each of them cemented their legacy as a talented-but-manipulative scoundrel, and LIV burning through more than $5 billion before it was shuttered with no true believers left can be held up forever as their pièce de résistance.

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It’s fair to say those of us in the content game benefited markedly from LIV’s brief ascendance. Five years ago, golf was a sleepy sport with limited juice in the media landscape. Just as PGA Tour players got richer with ballooning purses, the world of podcasting, newsletters, and web traffic boomed as LIV created drama and intrigue and rancor. Netflix's one interesting season of “Full Swing” owes a lot to LIV for the intrigue it provided. How everyone in media will fill that void is a legitimate question, and one that may take years to sort out. LIV also demonstrated that countries like South Africa and Australia — which have produced some of the greatest players in the game’s history — are starved for professional golf, and the PGA Tour has done real damage to the game globally by centralizing so much of it in the United States.

But LIV’s ultimate failure was also confirmation that all the media attention billions of dollars can buy has no permanence in the real world if people don’t take your product seriously. LIV golfers got a hell of a deal, and they were happy to boast about it. They were playing for more money without having to work as hard. What they never seemed to grasp is why that would appeal to the people they were asking to tune in. Imagine an NFL player saying the equivalent: “I’m only going to play 10 games, but I’m actually going to get paid more.” It’s no wonder it never found traction with viewers.

Sports can be a lucrative endeavor, but if LIV taught us anything, it’s that they still need to be tethered to some economic reality. Rory McIlroy’s recent dig that LIV was built on a false economy enraged everyone involved with the league, but it had the benefit of being the truth. Lionel Messi and LeBron James and Max Verstappen make a lot of money, but that’s because their talent also generates a lot of money. LIV golfers generated very little. They still expected to be paid like kings.

If I’m a fan sitting on my couch, there is no difference to me between a million dollars in prize money and a billion dollars in prize money. I just want to be entertained and I want to feel like something is at stake beyond your ability to buy a third home, whether that’s in Johannesburg or Oklahoma City. LIV never figured out how to message their argument, mostly because there wasn’t a good one. “Watch us to own the libs!” might have garnered some minor traction online, but it’s hard to build a league on the back of such a pathetic sales pitch.

Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and Joaquin Niemann are still young and talented enough that LIV might, a couple decades from now, end up being little more than an entertaining footnote in their careers. They insisted it was never about the money, but as soon as the money went away, it suddenly seemed less enticing. The verdict delivered by its biggest evangelists was obvious.

Details will fade, resentment will soften, and grace will eventually be extended. But real ones will remember the ride — the letterman’s jacket, the gallery rope to the face, the shoeys, the flash mobs, the Rhino Jive, the HyFlyers capes, the assertion that Talor Gooch was the greatest iron player in the world, the Chainsmokers playing both sides of the divide, the 9/11 tug-of-war, and the framework agreement with scary motherfuckers. But all that sound and fury, in the end, signified nothing.

It would be a struggle to write a more fitting epitaph.