Weekend: Clark Wins BMW, LIV’s Swan Song?

Tough weekend for the golf manosphere. Great weekend for competition.

LIV went out the way a lavish-spending circus should go: brats players expressing relief at no longer tied down to a league that made them richer than they deserved. And after its CEO did the circuit no favors by suggesting there is “a real desire across the leadership of the game to come together and start building for the next 25 years.”

A) No, there is not.

B) They already have been given every opportunity to succeed by various organizations, but the business model never made any sense.

Headlines from a lively Financial Times story on LIV last week briefly distracted from the league’s problems. For a solid five to six hours before the golf world started remembering the absurd spending, poor disruptor-driven decisions, various tacky choices and scheduling struggles, the story ended up shining the spotlight on LIV’s head and visionary His Excellency. Or H.E. Or Andrew Waterman. Or, Yasir.

These days he’s just Yasir Al-Rumayyan, and he was nowhere to be seen near LIV’s Chatham Hills. It’s too bad. Whenever LIV is referenced going forward, the league’s demise will always be tied to ridiculous spending by the Public Investment Fund and its impure reasons for stealing the PGL concept to sportwash Saudi Arabia’s image.

On LIV’s way out of minds and memories, backers at the PIF handed a beauty to the Financial Times to distract the world from horrendous decisions made primarily by Al-Rumayyan. It’s the type of fun anecdote that enough idiots will gobble up and, in the PIF’s mind, briefly forget that a sovereign wealth fund is supposed to be good with money. The PIF will be doing everything possible to make the business world forget they spent $6 billion with zero return on investment.

So they blame Sergio!

The anecdote given to the FT would be believable if the PIF had not already been signaling a major overhaul of its spending on the ridiculous NEOM development or other professional sports. We also knew early on that Al-Rumayyan’s LIV goals included gaining access to American money interests and their control of memberships to places like Augusta National. But as the Saudis are prone, His Excellency had a funny way of showing his affinity for the clubs he apparently craved memberships at. Wanting to see Masters Chairman Fred Ridley deposed is really not the way to get a Green Jacket (so I hear).

Al-Rumayyan’s attorney, Amanda Staley, even reportedly demanded such a membership of the PGA Tour in negotiations, further highlighting how little the PIF folks understood the basics of golf.

In last week’s FT story by Sujeet Indap and Samuel Agini, they reported that LIV was ultimately done in by Sergio Garcia’s embarrassing second tee tirade at the 2026 Masters.

“People familiar with the matter say Rumayyan’s embarrassment at the sequence of events helped lead to his decision to pull the plug on PIF’s financing of the rival tour, as the fund focuses more on its huge domestic commitments in the kingdom.”

It should be noted that the FT tracks PIF closely and has been the first to report on the wealth fund’s thinking about several huge stories. And the idea that Al-Rumayyan was embarrassed and saw his non-existent Green Jacket membership dreams vanishing might be true. But as reflected in the golf world’s reaction to the Garcia revelation, no one is buying that (A) the Augusta folks thought, “oh Sergio’s acting out in the final round of the Masters and he never did anything like that before he went to LIV, so it’s all Yasir’s fault, and (B) the PIF had $6 billion reasons to pull the plug.

And I can’t believe I’m defending Sergio.

There are so many chapters to the PIF-LIF fiasco already documented. The league’s demise will be studied and lamented now that the sovereign wealth fund is doing what Saudi Arabia does when it pulls the plug on one of its many failed projects: stiffing the little guy. Not paying bills to bit players will tarnish the PIF far more than some cranky manbrat breaking his driver and denting some tee box turf in Georgia.