LIV and learn.
The many well-compensated players who joined the controversial Saudi-backed LIV Golf league since its formation in 2021 have just been stranded on the 15th hole without a cart back, in blazing heat.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is done financing the circuit after this season. According to the report, “The move sounds the death knell for the upstart that sowed chaos in professional golf by plowing billions into the sport and poaching A-list players.” The Saudi pullout, as of Thursday, is now official.
Good riddance. As we editorialized a few years ago, the Arab nation’s terrible human-rights record was overlooked by many in the golfing establishment, while organizers’ high-energy production of league events seemed to take strange inspiration from Happy Gilmore (only to be lampooned in that movie’s sequel).
Sometimes, tradition is worth upholding.
For the glitzy but fledgling LIV, it is unclear whether it might yet survive in some form with help from outside investors. A newly named board is trying to press forward along those lines. But Saudi money was crucial, with $5 billion of it having gone toward LIV’s star players and huge purses and myriad other costs. LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil told the Financial Times earlier this year it would take five to ten years to become profitable, not a very forgiving timeline on which to replace their major funder.
The Saudis, for their part, reportedly made the move as part of a shift in priorities away from sports and other ventures, amid financial and geopolitical challenges. “The substantial investment required by LIV Golf over a longer term is no longer consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy,” PIF said in a statement.
For those golfers lured by the Saudis’ riches and the opportunity to stick it to the PGA Tour for one reason or another, their future is deservedly uncertain now that the prayer rug has been pulled out from under them. But hopefully this development can, in time, lead to repair of the rupture in professional golf that LIV caused. Competition from the league for viewers and players, as well as legal battles, led to a proposed merger with the PGA Tour in 2023, but that later stalled. The PGA Tour weathered the crisis while LIV has faded in significance. Players like Brooks Koepka were welcomed back, and others are now discussing their options, but bad blood remains. Per the Journal, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp said rules were broken, and “with rules comes accountability.”
Written rules, in one form or another, have sustained golf as a gentleman’s game since the “Thirteen Articles” governing play were developed in Scotland in 1744. LIV expats should reacquaint themselves with golf’s honorable precepts, and come home.