DORAL, Fla. — It was just more than a year ago when LIV Golf League visited this place. On Thursday the PGA Tour took center stage at Doral for the first time in 10 years.
When LIV had their turn in 2025, it was the week prior to the Masters and several LIV players who were in the Augusta field discussed their plans for the upcoming major. President Trump even made a quick visit to his resort on the eve of the tournament to dine with several LIV players and staff.
Back then, this week’s golf news would have been difficult to envision.
The Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia—after two weeks of foreshadowing—made public that it was going to no longer back the golf league that disrupted golf for the past four years while becoming one of the biggest stories in the game.
The PIF, a $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, has reprioritized and LIV is not part of the future plans, meaning after this year millions in funding will be gone.
LIV Golf leadership has pledged to move ahead, announcing plans for a new independent board of directors while also forging a different direction for the league. But how that plays out is unclear, and in the meantime there will be plenty of conjecture about the future of LIV and its players.
And that latter part remains dicey. LIV Golf, for now, is not going anywhere. But that didn’t stop players and their representatives from exploring their options just in case, regardless of when the time might come for them to rejoin the PGA Tour.
So much will go into that, including which players have eligibility, under what circumstances they left the Tour and if LIV still exists.
Jordan Spieth, who was on the PGA Tour Policy Board when it was negotiating with the PIF to become an investor but came off of it last year, acknowledged all the various factors involved.
“I’m not sure if it should be the same for everyone,” said Spieth on Thursday after 7-under-par 65 saw him finish a stroke back of Cam Young during the first round of the Cadillac Championship, a new PGA Tour signature event at Trump National Doral.
“I know olive branches were given out a couple months ago. Brooks (Koepka) took them up on it. So I’m not sure what would now change. And I don’t even know, that doesn’t necessarily mean that LIV’s not going to still move on, too.
“I think there’s just too many unknowns for me to have a good gauge on what would happen there. But I think, if there’s a system for Brooks and a system for Patrick Reed, does that stay the same for guys in the same category as those two coming back or does it change now? Does it change for guys who sued and dropped their membership? There’s just a lot of different things that happened over the last four years for that. I’m kind of glad I’m not in that room, and I trust the guys that are in that room to make the right decision.”
Spieth pretty much covered all the angles.
Koepka, shown here at the recent Masters, returned to the PGA Tour earlier this year. | Bill Streicher-Imagn Images
Koepka came back to the PGA Tour this year under a one-time plan called the Returning Member Program that was hatched when he asked out of his LIV contract. Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau and Cam Smith were offered the same deal because they had won major championships since joining LIV.
Reed also decided to leave LIV and was offered a different plan that doesn’t allow him to play on the PGA Tour until September as a non-member, with an opportunity to regain his membership in January. Reed currently leads the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai standings and a top-10 finish on that circuit would give him exempt status on the PGA Tour next year.
Players who resigned their PGA Tour membership before they played in a LIV Golf effort are subject to fewer sanctions than those who remained members. DeChambeau joined a group of players who filed a class-action lawsuit against the Tour over their suspensions. And that could cause him to be treated differently than a player who did not take part.
As CEO Brian Rolapp said to the Wall Street Journal in an interview earlier this week: “I don’t necessarily have scar tissue, but there are plenty of people around our Tour who do. It has to be accounted for in some shape or form.”
And Rolapp didn’t sound as if the path back would be smooth for all.
“There were rules, and they were broken,” he said. “With rules comes accountability.”
But Rolapp has said he’s interested in doing what’s best for the PGA Tour. If DeChambeau or Rahm wants to come back, isn’t that a good thing?
Bryson DeChambeau’s return to the PGA Tour could be complicated by his participation in a previous lawsuit against the Tour. | Katie Goodale-Imagn Images
“Seems like they’re treating them all as a case-by-case basis,” said Brian Harman. “I would think that the fans want everyone to be playing together and time heals all wounds. There’s still some sentiment out here, especially with all the lawsuit stuff, that stuff’s going to be tough to get past. We play with all those guys in the majors, so, yeah, I think there should be a path back.”
But Harman wasn’t ready to write off LIV quite yet
“The funding’s drying up,” he said. “They could secure funding from somewhere else and keep going. They have got a lot of big name players over there, guys that move the needle. Until it’s all done, until you’ve got guys that are actually calling and trying to come back to the Tour, it’s not really a problem that we’re dealing with currently.”
Lucas Glover, who will join the PGA Tour Policy Board in January, said he is unclear how it will play out but has no animosity toward anyone who left and wants to come back.
“I have respect for people and golfers because they’re people first and my peers second,” he said. “I will never begrudge anybody for making a decision for the betterment of their career, their life, whatever that may be. But do I think they should abide by the pathways back and pay the same penalties that the previous people have paid, absolutely.”
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