The Athletic’s Brody Miller went to Mexico City this weekend to cover LIV Golf’s event at Club de Golf Chapultepec. LIV Golf had other ideas.
In a piece published Monday in The Athletic, Miller described being stopped on Friday by a LIV security worker who pulled out his phone and showed him a company chat with a large photo of Miller’s Athletic headshot. There had been a security alert issued for him on Thursday, the guard said. When Miller asked multiple LIV executives about the alert, they denied knowing anything about it or even knowing he was in Mexico City on Thursday.
But as I walked the property Friday, I was stopped by a LIV security worker. He pulled out his phone and showed me a company chat with a large photo of my The Athletic headshot and said I needed to come with him. I asked if there was some sort of security alert sent out on me, and he said yes, there was on Thursday. I don’t know how they even knew I was on the property Thursday, but I certainly wasn’t sneaking, as my goal was primarily to run into a LIV official and talk. I explained I was just given a credential that morning, which greatly surprised him. He made two calls to ask, and I overheard him say, “Oh, he’s OK now?” before he let me go.
When I asked multiple LIV executives about this, they adamantly denied knowing anything about it or even knowing I was in Mexico City on Thursday.
Miller’s offense, as best as anyone can piece together, was breaking the news that LIV executives were being shown the door.
The Athletic reported last Tuesday that the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, which has bankrolled LIV Golf since its launch, was preparing to pull its funding, and that members of the league’s leadership team had been told, following the Masters, that they would soon lose their positions. That story — reported by Miller alongside Gabby Herzig, Brendan Quinn, and Adam Crafton — touched off a week of chaos around a league that was simultaneously trying to run a tournament in Mexico. At the same time, its own executives were summoned to an emergency meeting in Manhattan.
The league’s public response to the reporting was, to put it generously, fragmented. Since then, Bret Baier and Rex Hoggard both reported that while PIF would not support the league beyond 2026, the current season would be completed. On Thursday’s broadcast, LIV announcers Arlo White and David Feherty pushed back aggressively against the reporting, with Feherty dismissing those behind the shutdown stories as “fast typists that consider themselves to be experts.”
The league, in other words, was contesting the reporting publicly while — by Miller’s account — flagging the reporter who wrote it to security on the same day, all while, in a separate setting, effectively confirming the substance of the reporting.
“The reality is that you’re funded through the season, and then you work like crazy as a business to create a business and a business plan to keep us going,” CEO Scott O’Neil said in a conversation with TNT Sports UK, which has since been deleted and reposted to cut out this answer.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, someone at LIV put Brody Miller’s headshot in a company security chat.
If there was ever any lingering doubt about the relationship between LIV Golf and its Saudi backers — and what that relationship means for anyone who covers the league honestly — Friday at Club de Golf Chapultepec answered it.
