It began in December 2023 with a declaration of war delivered in a letterman jacket. It ended Wednesday with his lawyer waving a white flag, informing a bankruptcy judge that Jon Rahm would no longer participate in LIV Golf. To whom he surrendered remains unclear, since surrender implies victory and no one is walking away from this feeling like a winner. There were skirmishes won along the way, but Rahm’s 33-month odyssey with LIV brings him back to a shore he left in flames.
The PGA Tour survived, which is the closest this fight came to producing a victor, and under Brian Rolapp it’s sturdier than it has been for some time while LIV wheezes through whatever breaths remain. But the present sands down how close defeat once felt, and Rahm’s departure was one of the tour’s gravest failures of the schism. It was partly the consequence of the secretly negotiated June 6, 2023 framework agreement, tour executives demanding loyalty from their members only to negotiate behind their backs with the people it had compelled them to despise. In the aftermath, Rahm was the reigning Masters champion surveying what the tour could offer and deciding it was not enough. His departure chilled the talks between the tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and a civil war that might have ended at the negotiating table dragged on. It also left the tour exposed; if Rahm could be bought, anyone could, and everyone in the game knew it.
The fans lost, too. One of the pleasures of loving a sport is following a player across the length of his career. You discover him young, take on his heartbreaks as your own and wait to see how it all shakes out. After winning the Masters, Rahm appeared headed toward something historic, with two majors and 20 worldwide victories before his 29th birthday, the first European to own a green jacket and a U.S. Open title, a player entering his prime with no obvious ceiling. He carried the burden of being cast as Seve Ballesteros’ spiritual heir, an inheritance heavy with expectations no golfer reasonably could meet, except Rahm made it look as though he might. Instead, he cashed in a decade of that goodwill to become a centerpiece of a Saudi soft-power campaign.
LIV Golf got exactly what it wanted when Rahm defected and managed to lose anyway. Entering its third season in 2024, the league was appearing more and more guilty of being little more than what its critics said it was: a refuge for fading stars, interchangeable middle-class pros and players carrying enough baggage to make their motives easy to see. There were famous golfers but none who made the results feel consequential. Rahm was supposed to change that, a bona fide superstar still in the thick of his prime. His signing did more for the league’s legitimacy than any boast about what it might eventually become. Dismissing LIV became harder, and at last it had a player whose career demanded attention wherever he chose to play.
LIV proceeded to waste him.
No second wave of superstars followed, and Rahm’s arrival produced no meaningful jump in viewership or attendance. When he began struggling in the majors, it strengthened the suspicion that LIV dulled a player’s competitive edge and made the exhibition label harder to shake. The league remained an expensive curiosity rather than a sporting entity people felt compelled to watch.
And now were at this particular crossroads: the PIF funding is gone, Rahm is leaving and LIV is fighting for its life in bankruptcy court. Its greatest signing stands as its clearest indictment. If LIV could not make itself matter with Jon Rahm, it was never going to matter at all.
Needless to say, the biggest loser in all of this is Rahm. Phil Mickelson aside, no one in golf over the past five years has done more damage to his own standing. Granted, Rahm was never beloved on the PGA Tour, but he was respected almost without exception. He surrendered much of that in one decision then spent three years giving people little reason to reconsider. Yes, he had grievances behind the scenes. Sources have told Golf Digest that Rahm was upset after learning what other players were making at TGL before it launched, believing he deserved more. He also felt the PGA Tour did not market him as aggressively as it did other stars and resented that lesser players had a greater say in its direction. Truth be told, Rahm probably had a point.
Whatever the merits of those complaints, they could not reconcile his decision with everything he had said publicly. Rahm denied interest in LIV repeatedly and emphatically, then took its money anyway. Even accounting for the tour’s role in changing the circumstances with the surprise framework agreement, the move made him look like a hypocrite, and there is no gentler word for it. The public can live with a player chasing a fortune—even with all the things attached to that Saudi fortune—but it has far less patience for one who insisted he would never do such a thing.
Rahm handled the aftermath no better. He believed his defection might force the tour and the PIF to finish a deal, yet never seemed to appreciate that it had driven them further apart. Then came the pointless fight with the DP World Tour, which already had bent its rules to preserve his Ryder Cup eligibility. The quarrel gained him nothing and made him appear entitled to the loyalty he had refused to show anyone else. For a player who prided himself on knowing the game’s history and understanding what lasts, Rahm seemed remarkably blind to how his own choices would be remembered.
Maybe it was a coincidence that Rahm finally reappeared at the PGA Championship this May just as Saudi Arabia stopped funding LIV and the league’s future began to collapse. Believing that requires overlooking what had been visible since the day he left, which was a man playing beneath the weight of a decision he kept trying to justify and how freely he swung once there was nothing left to defend.
Rahm will not be welcomed back to the PGA Tour, at least not immediately. The door was left open earlier this year when Brooks Koepka returned and Rahm slammed it shut. That leaves Europe, meaning Rahm—who has never enjoyed straying far from his Scottsdale home—may have to make his living an ocean away from his own bed. There are harsher exiles, but it is an exile all the same. His chance at redemption will come, because sports usually offers one. Koepka asked for his and received it. Patrick Reed, for all the turbulence he created, bet on himself and played his way back. Golf fans can overlook almost anything, though that does not erase the memory of what happened.
And the lasting memory of Rahm’s LIV tenure is this: Whatever Rahm builds from here, he will build on the same grounds he set alight on his way out, and none of it had to burn.