LIV Golf is going ahead with this weekend’s tournament at the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C. This, despite the fact that the tour nobody has ever watched or cared about is getting unmoored from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which kept LIV afloat for all these years with ludicrous amounts of financing. The yokels left in charge of this ghost ship are putting on a brave face about the tour’s future, but some of the players aren’t so willing to express optimism. That shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone, given that their only reason for joining LIV Golf in the first place was access to the Saudi money hose.
The tour made a few players from Legion XIII—pause here to chuckle and remember that one of LIV’s big innovations was putting golfers on teams with stupid names—available to reporters on Tuesday. Team captain Jon Rahm, one of the more famous and well-compensated players who defected to LIV from the PGA, more or less admitted that he’s only still playing because he is being held prisoner by his contract. From ESPN:
“Right now, I have several years in my contract left,” Rahm said. “I’m pretty sure they did a pretty good job when they drafted that, so I don’t see many ways out. Right now, I’m not really thinking about it because we still have a season to play and majors to compete for. It’s not something I want to think about just yet.”
Certainly nothing gets potential investors, of which LIV is now in desperate need of, fired up to back a money-deleting sports concern quite like one of the marquee players talking like a wide receiver who is about to start an offseason holdout.
Rahm’s comments were somehow less embarrassing than those given by supreme golf dolt Bryson DeChambeau during his practice round on Tuesday. DeChambeau is already making plans for life after LIV. “I think, from my perspective, I’d love to grow my YouTube channel three times, maybe even more,” DeChambeau told ESPN. “I would love to. I’d love to do a bunch of dubbing in different languages, giving the world more reason to watch YouTube.”
This is what I imagine today’s 11-year-olds are telling their aunts and uncles when asked what they want to be when they grow up.
DeChambeau did eventually get around to sharing his thoughts about the future of golf, and how LIV and the PGA might now have an opportunity to reconcile and bring men’s professional golf back under one umbrella. Or, at least, he tried to share some thoughts along those lines, before getting back to the YouTube thing:
“The egos need to get dropped,” DeChambeau said. “Everybody needs to come in with a level-headed playing field, with an opportunistic mindset to grow the game of golf. That’s why I came over here. That’s why I do what I do on YouTube.”
Sounds good, brother. Say, do your parents know you’re out here all by yourself?
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