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The full episode, in writing.
LIV Golf is a name that almost nobody outside golf knew in early 2022 and that almost everyone in golf hated by the end of it. The name comes from the Roman numeral for 54, because every event ran 54 holes instead of the traditional 72. The format was a gimmick. The money was not. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — the sovereign wealth fund chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — wrote checks large enough to bend the entire global structure of professional golf, and then, four years later, started writing smaller ones.
The first LIV event teed off June 9, 2022 at the Centurion Club outside St Albans, England. The eight-tournament 2022 series carried $255 million in prize money. There were no cuts, so every player got paid every week. The CEO was Greg Norman, the Australian who spent the 1990s as world number one and the 2010s lobbying for a breakaway tour. Dustin Johnson — a two-time major champion ranked in the top 15 in the world — reportedly took £100 million to defect. Phil Mickelson reportedly took $200 million. Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Patrick Reed, Sergio García all followed. Tiger Woods told Greg Norman no. Norman later said the offer to Tiger was in the range of $700 to $800 million.
The PGA Tour responded by suspending every player who teed it up at Centurion, banning them from Tour events and from the Presidents Cup. That created a problem the Tour did not anticipate. In July 2022 the U.S. Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into the PGA Tour. In August 2022, LIV and a group of players sued the Tour for anticompetitive conduct. Trial was set for January 2024. The discovery process was about to force PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan to sit for depositions about each other.
That trial never happened. On June 6, 2023, with no warning to PGA Tour players or to the U.S. government, Monahan went on CNBC and announced that the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour, and the Public Investment Fund had signed a framework agreement to combine their commercial rights into a single new for-profit entity. Monahan would be CEO. Al-Rumayyan would be chairman. All three pending lawsuits were dropped the same day. PGA Tour players found out on television. Senator Richard Blumenthal opened a Senate subcommittee investigation. Monahan, who eleven months earlier had cited the September 11 victims' families when explaining why the PGA Tour would never align with Saudi money, was now the Saudi money's chief operating partner.
The framework had a closing deadline of December 31, 2023. December 31 came and went. The deal was not closed. There was no signed definitive agreement, no valuation, no governance structure, no antitrust approval. What there was, instead, was Jon Rahm. On December 7, 2023, Rahm — the reigning Masters champion, world number three — signed with LIV for a reported $300 million plus equity in a new expansion team called Legion XIII. A month later Tyrrell Hatton signed for a reported $63 million. The framework was supposedly bringing peace, and PIF was simultaneously buying the next wave of players.
On January 31, 2024, the PGA Tour announced its counter. A consortium led by Strategic Sports Group — anchored by Fenway Sports Group, the owners of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool — put $1.5 billion into a new entity called PGA Tour Enterprises. A second $1.5 billion was contingent on closing the Saudi deal. Active PGA Tour players received equity grants worth, on average, several million dollars each. The Tour had effectively recapitalized itself with American sports-franchise money so that, when the Saudi deal closed, it would not be sold cheap. The Saudi deal still did not close.
Through 2024 and 2025 the framework sat in limbo. Negotiations continued under nondisclosure. The PGA Tour kept running its season. LIV kept running its 14-event schedule with $405 million in annual prize money. Norman was pushed out as CEO on January 15, 2025 and replaced by Scott O'Neil, the former CEO of Madison Square Garden Sports and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. Norman's contract ran out in August 2025 and in September he confirmed he was gone entirely. The Official World Golf Ranking, which had refused LIV points since 2022, finally approved the tour in February 2026 — but only for the top 10 finishers plus ties at any event. LIV announced it would convert to 72 holes for the 2026 season specifically to qualify for those points.
Then, on April 15, 2026, the New York Times reported that the Public Investment Fund was reevaluating its commitments to LIV. PIF was funding World Expo 2030 in Riyadh and the 2034 FIFA World Cup, both awarded to Saudi Arabia, both massively over their initial cost projections. Two weeks later the Wall Street Journal confirmed PIF was pulling funding from LIV. The contracts that brought Rahm, Hatton, DeChambeau, and Niemann to the league were guaranteed for years, but the league that pays them was no longer guaranteed to exist. The PGA Tour, which had spent four years insisting the framework was about reunification, suddenly found that the easiest path to reunification was to simply outlast the funder. Tiger Woods, who had passed on $700 million in 2022, looked, by April 2026, like the most financially literate person in the sport.