Check in every week for the unfiltered opinions of our writers and editors as they break down the hottest topics in the sport, and join the conversation by tweeting us at @golf_com. This week, our writers discuss LIV Golf’s future after the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund announced it will cut funding for the rebel league after the 2026 season.

In a press release Thursday, LIV Golf announced new board members as it transitions from “a foundational launch phase to a diversified, multi-partner investment model.” Hours later, its bankroller, the Saudi PIF, released its own statement saying the “PIF has made the decision to fund LIV Golf only for the remainder of the 2026 season. The substantial investment required by LIV Golf over a longer term is no longer consistent with the current phase of PIF’s investment strategy.” Now that you’ve had a few days to digest this bombshell — and after a rollercoaster April for LIV Golf — what thought has lingered with you?

Josh Sens, senior writer (@joshsens): That for all the tumult, not much changed, aside from some players getting a whole lot richer. I suppose you could say LIV’s birth shook the Tour out of its complacency, which led to (ongoing) schedule changes and even fatter purses for already extravagantly paid golfers. Beyond that, though, what? Is there now an insatiable demand for team golf? There is not. Is professional golf itself a better product now for fans? I don’t see a ton of evidence of that. 

Josh Schrock, associate news editor (@Schrock_And_Awe): I think Sens pretty much nailed it. What will stick with me long after LIV either morphs into something else or goes away entirely is that money couldn’t buy the parts of professional golf that actually resonate with fans: the tradition, the history and the meaning of the results. Billions of dollars can do a lot, but they can’t speed up time. It takes decades for sports leagues to resonate with fans and to develop a connection. LIV Golf was never going to be able to achieve that goal in a short time frame. As our Michael Bamberger wrote, LIV Golf changed the PGA Tour, but not for the better. And I feel like a reckoning is coming now that the Tour’s great opponent is teetering. 

James Colgan, news and features editor (@jamescolgan26): Good points, gents. My lingering thought was this: We never heard the “don” of LIV Golf, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, say a single word. However golf history remembers LIV’s most powerful Saudi benefactor, it will NOT remember him for saying a single word about the sport. “His Excellency” left golf as he entered it: Without a peep.

At Trump Doral for this week’s Cadillac Championship, several players were asked if LIV members should be welcomed back to the PGA Tour, and what types of penalties they should face. If you werePGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, how would you handle players’ reintegration? Is it different for everyone? Would you not allow certain players at all?

Sens: Open a pathway for guys to play their way back on, with a point system that has some kind of reward for past performance. So that maybe the likes of Bryson and Rahm and Smith can compete in regular Tour events but not elevated events, which they’d still have to play their way into. The less relevant LIV guys would probably just retire rather than face that grind. And the younger guys would be left to try to earn their cards, which is what they’d probably be doing anyway. 

Schrock: It’s going to have to be a case-by-case basis. As Rolapp and Jordan Spieth have noted, the PGA Tour extended an offer to Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith earlier this year and it wasn’t accepted. The next deal shouldn’t be as forgiving. Both Spieth and Rolapp also subtly mentioned the lawsuit that DeChambeau was a key plaintiff in after LIV launched in 2022. That’s a lawsuit that PGA Tour players had to pay to defend, and the road back for those who signed on to sue the Tour should be harsher than those who went to LIV quietly, like Brooks Koepka, and didn’t rock the boat. Rahm will be the interesting case. His exodus came at a time when LIV was floundering, and it gave the rebel league juice and calcified the two sides’ stances in golf’s civil conflict. That rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. I’m not sure there’s an easy way to bring either of the big names back without upsetting a big portion of Tour membership, but the Tour would certainly benefit economically from reintegrating them quickly. As for the rest of LIV’s roster, some who resigned their membership, like Patrick Reed, can try to play their way back via the DP World Tour or KFT. Many will disappear with their millions and not even knock on the door at the global home. In all honesty, we’re probably talking about 15-20 players in total that decisions need to be made on.

Colgan: I’d give Bryson a path back. His presence would single-handedly change the PGA Tour’s economics, and he’s probably the only LIV player for whom that is true (Jon Rahm probably deserves consideration here as well). Everyone else would be subject to a lengthy (and expensive) return process through the Tour’s strategic partners at the DP World Tour and the KFT, or a short-term retirement.

Even if LIV Golf receives alternative funding, with the substantial PIF coffers no longer available, does this end any sort of competition that was remaining with the PGA Tour?

Sens: I think so. If LIV taught us anything, it’s that the world does not need more professional golf. At least not for the money these guys think they deserve to be making. Ironically, the Tour’s real competition for eyeballs these days doesn’t come from LIV. It comes from a bunch of YouTube bros producing their own content. 

Schrock: Yes. Without the $30 million purses and signing bonuses, LIV will cease to be any sort of threat to the PGA Tour. It sounds like it’s close to a wrap, barring an unforeseen bailout.

Colgan: No fat lady is singing. Yet. But it sounds like she’s warming up. 

What’s the best-case scenario for LIV Golf going forward?

Sens: Maybe pivot to crypto?

Schrock: Try to merge with the DP World Tour. LIV can slink along with limited funds, but there will almost certainly be a talent exodus once the money dries up.

Colgan: I think there’s a vision that could exist with significantly smaller purses at LIV’s previously successful golf-crazy venues (Korea, Australia, South Africa). The problem LIV is going to run into is that every sports league needs significant TV revenue to survive, and they’re not anywhere close to that right now.

Sunday’s golf slate featured two blowouts, as Nelly Korda won by four in Mexico and Cameron Young won by six in Florida. Both have had fantastic starts to 2026, but which one are you taking as most likely to continue this success through the summer?

Sens: I think they’ll both keep rolling, but Young’s summer is going to stand out just a bit more boldly when he wins his first major at Shinnecock.

Schrock: It’s Korda for multiple reasons. The first is that she’s the unquestioned best player on her tour. Young has been fantastic but has to deal with Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and the blistering hot Matt Fitzpatrick. Korda changed her mentality after a winless 2025 and has been relentless to start this season. The only thing that can hold her back is a balky putter, but her new putting coach seems to have at least made that a net neutral. I expect her to win at least one more major this year and wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a three-major 2026 for Nelly.

Colgan: Cam! He’s a no-doubt top-5 player in the world right now, and a maiden voyage PGA Championship at Philly looms.

Check in every week for the unfiltered opinions of our writers and editors as they break down the hottest topics in the sport, and join the conversation by tweeting us at @golf_com. This week, we discuss LIV Golf’s chaotic week and uncertain future, Matt Fitzpatrick’s win at RBC Heritage and Rory McIlroy’s career Masters prospects.

Early last week, several news outlets reported uncertainty regarding LIV Golf’s future, indicating the Saudi PIF was on the verge of pulling its funding. LIV CEO Scott O’Neil told his staff via email on Wednesday: “Our season continues exactly as planned, uninterrupted and at full throttle. While the media landscape is often filled with speculation, our reality is defined by the work we do on the grass.” But O’Neil was more specific about the situation on Thursday, when he said in a TV interview, “The reality is 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.” (The clip was deleted but still circulated online.) On Sunday, Jon Rahm won LIV’s sixth event of the season, in Mexico City. What’s your primary takeaway from what was a wild week for the five-year-old league? 

James Colgan, news and features editor (@jamescolgan26): My primary takeaway is simple: The Saudis seem to be getting out of the business of running a golf league, which is a truly momentous takeaway for the entire sport. LIV now enters a period in which it will need to work hard to find a path to survival, and as its CEO, Scott O’Neil, himself said, it seems all options are on the table.

Josh Sens (@joshsens). One takeaway is as old as capitalism: that new businesses — even the disruptive variety — are hard to grow no matter how much money you put into them. That said, for Saudi Arabia, getting out of the business of funding a professional golf tour would not have to mean getting out of golf. A new course just opened in Jura. Others are in the works. The ambition is still to grow the country’s presence in the game, but likely now as a host for golf tourism and tour events. Which, in retrospect, seems like it would have been the better path all along.

Josh Schrock, associate news editor (@Schrock_And_Awe): My main takeaway is that if the PIF pulls out, LIV Golf, as we know it, would need to reinvent itself. O’Neil said he would pursue all avenues to get more funding, but it’s hard to see one or several sponsors willing to bankroll the league at a level that would allow for more nine-figure contracts. O’Neil himself said LIV wouldn’t be profitable for five or 10 years without significant changes.  

To Schrock’s point, can LIV continue in its current form without PIF’s deep pockets? If so, what would need to change?

Colgan: Definitely not in its current form. The league has spent more than $5 billion of Saudi funding to date, and, as Josh noted, O’Neil has already said that the league is several years away from any hope of profitability. Depending upon who steps up to help LIV with funding, I’d say any change is on the table.

Sens: Nope, the league would not be viable in its current form, and I have a tough time imagining what other form it might take. A limited series of world championship events with big overseas dollar sponsorships? But is there really a market for more big-dollar professional golf than we already have? The LIV experiment has shown that certain markets — Australia and South Africa, for example — are hungry for golf star power, but, on a global level, building and drawing eyeballs to a new league is a steep hill to climb.

Schrock: LIV could try and merge with the DP World Tour or reconstruct how it did a lot of things when the PIF spigot was on. But the contracts and purses would have to go down, and, at that point, how many players are going to want to continue when the financial payoff isn’t what it was when they initially signed on? A lot of moving parts to consider, many of which we still have limited to no information on. 

If LIV doesn’t survive past 2026, would you expect the PGA Tour to offer LIV’s top players — Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, etc. — a path back to the Tour by way of a similar agreement that Brooks Koepka accepted?

Sens: For the big LIV names, absolutely. If the Tour wants to be a showcase for the world’s best talent, and it does, it will work out a deal with Rahm and DeChambeau and maybe a small handful of others. The rest, I suspect, will have to play their way back in through other smaller tours.

Colgan: In that theoretical, I’d think the Tour can afford to offer a “Koepka Deal” to Bryson and Rahm … and probably leave the rest of the LIV contingent to serve out their suspensions on the DP World Tour. 

Schrock: From a pure cost-benefit analysis, Tour CEO Brian Rolapp would probably love to add Bryson and Rahm back in the fold just as he did with Brooks. But things are not always that easy when you’re dealing with two players who already turned down an opportunity to come back, who might not be as well-liked by the current membership as Brooks, who kept his head down after he left and didn’t take any swipes or recruit other players. The feelings might not be the same toward Bryson, who was a named plaintiff in LIV’s antitrust suit against the PGA Tour and its members, or Rahm, whose departure post-framework agreement rubbed many players the wrong way. Would they immediately add value to the Tour? Yes. But for Rolapp to sell that vision, it’ll be a tricky high-wire act.

Matt Fitzpatrick won the RBC Heritage in a playoff over Scottie Scheffler, who started the day three shots off the lead but caught Fitzpatrick late. Is your Hilton Head takeaway more focused on Fitzpatrick’s second win in the last month, or Scheffler’s second straight runner-up finish?

Colgan: How quickly we forget that Scottie Scheffler remains a U.S. Open victory away from the career grand slam? Kudos to Fitz for another win, and for continuing to reestablish himself as one of the premier players in the sport … but my eyes are already peeking ahead to Shinnecock.

Sens: Like Woods before him, Scheffler has twisted our expectations so wildly out of proportion that a second-place finish somehow gets cast as a failure. Fitzpatrick is on a great run of golf. Scheffler is operating in a different dimension. Whatever “struggles” he went through earlier seem to be behind him. So yeah, as James said, eyes on Shinnecock. But also on Aronimink before that. And frankly, anywhere Scheffler tees it up.

Schrock: The Scheffler “struggles” were blown out of proportion as we tend to do when an elite athlete dips below the level at which we’ve become accustomed to seeing them operate. Scheffler almost erased a 12-shot weekend deficit at the Masters with an ice-cold putter. He’s the best in the world, and I expect him to contend every time he tees it up. To me, this was more about Fitzpatrick. A year ago, he was in a bad spot. His game was “rubbish,” and he was ranked 79th in the world. A year later, he has three worldwide wins and has beaten both Rory and Scottie in separate playoffs. His rise back is impressive, and I think he’s a much better player now than what we thought his ceiling was when he won the 2022 U.S. Open. Expect him to threaten at Aronimink and the Open. 

Speaking ahead of the Senior PGA Championship, major champ Padraig Harrington made one bold claim regarding how many more Masters Rory McIlroy could win given his success at Augusta, comfortability there and the fact that the course allows some players to stay competitive into their 50s. “Rory could win 10 [Masters] at this stage, or five of them, anyway.” While 10 seems lofty, what say you? How many Masters titles will Rory end his career with?

Colgan: I think we do this a lot with star players: we see them win a little, and we immediately assume they can win a lot. It’s so, so hard to win a Masters. I believe Rory could get to three, like fellow late-Augusta-bloomer Phil Mickelson, but I’ll probably hold off before adding any more to the list.

Sens: When Tiger won the Masters by a staggering 12 shots, I remember the talk being that he would never lose that tournament again. He got to five. Impressive. But yeah, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Things happen. Life happens. Four green jackets for Rory doesn’t seem entirely outlandish. Maybe five if all the stars align? But 10 is preposterous. Ain’t gonna happen.

Schrock: We quickly forget that Rory went 10 years without winning a major of any kind. Golf is a fickle, weird game. I think he can win a third jacket and maybe, maybe you can talk me into a fourth at the end of his career. But the real question is how many majors does Rory win? I feel like I want to say nine, but again, we like to be prisoners of the moment with these things.

Will Zalatoris can act. 

He says he couldn’t — “never been in a drama class in my life” — but there he was over the summer, the ball-and-stick golfer doing slapstick in a cameo for the “Happy Gilmore” sequel. He had a few lines. He choked a guy. He got tackled. Forget the green jacket. Give him the Golden Globe. 

But did you see him in the 2022 U.S. Open?

That’s a tournament, of course. But Zalatoris’ best work came there. Entering the final day tied for the lead, he received the entering-the-final-day-tied-for-the-lead intro, where, to set the mood, at-home viewers watch contenders wheeling cars into parking spaces, contenders unloading trunks and contenders swaggering to the clubhouse as music plays and analysts analyze. And there was Zalatoris. 

Masking a limp. Pretending he was OK. 

“The second your car pulls in, you have a camera right there once you get out,” he said. “And I remember trying to hide kind of my limp heading into the last round. Just because of how stiff I was and how locked up my back was. 

“And I was still able to go out and possibly win a major.”

Four years ago, he nearly did, but a 15-footer that would’ve tied him for the 72nd-hole lead brushed past the cup’s left side, and Matt Fitzpatrick was your winner. But what if Zalatoris hadn’t been hurt? What if his back cooperated? Or at least not crippled him? We obviously can’t know that. But we could learn soon what a healthy Zalatoris could look like. The ’22 Open foreshadowed more pain to come. There’ve been surgeries. Plural. There’ve been withdrawals. Plural. There’ve been returns. Plural. The latest comes Thursday, when Zalatoris tees off at the American Express tournament, his second start since undergoing a procedure last May, and his first on the PGA Tour. 

He’s hopeful, as he had been previously, but this time feels different, since it physically is. His surgery seven months ago was a full disc replacement; a 2023 procedure was a microdiscectomy after he’d herniated two discs. Put another way, Zalatoris said he believes the latest work solves all of his issues, rather than taking away only some of them. But new discs? Sounds unsettling. He’s just 29, too. That seems like a lot of opening and closing to be performed before 30. But Zalatoris said he knew the operation had been done on others — “finally I said, look, let’s go for it, we’ve got the technology, we’ve been putting it in long-drive guys, we’ve been putting it in hockey players, it’s been saving guys’ careers,” he said — and a week after he missed the cut last May at the PGA Championship, the work was done. 

Eight weeks later, he was putting. 

A couple weeks after that, he was chipping.

Fifteen weeks in, his doctor told him to play. 

Now, Zalatoris can’t stop. Thirty-six? Back-to-back days of 36? Gym work? All of the above. And all good.  

“I’m able to do the things that I haven’t been able to do for years,” he said. “So I know that’s kind of a weird thing to say at 29 years old, but obviously you know what I’ve been through for the last three, four, five years.”

By no means was his play poor over that stretch, though. Over 10 majors from 2020 through 2022, Zalatoris was a player, securing six top 10 finishes, including the ’22 U.S. Open runner-up and two others. He was the 2021 PGA Tour rookie of the year. Then, in August of 2022, he won his first PGA Tour event, and he led both the PGA Tour’s season-long points race and the DP World Tour’s. But stops-and-gos followed. “Everything kind of from there turned into, can you play, can you get by?” he said. A week after his victory, he withdrew from the BMW Championship because of his back, then he WD’d at the 2023 Masters and underwent his microdiscectomy before returning at the end of that year — and playing about a year and a half until he underwent his latest procedure.  

Doubt came at that point, he said. 

He wondered whether he could continue. 

“Is this something — even though the surgeon says, hey, I’m not going to see you for 20 years — is this true?” Zalatoris said. “The little things that of course always creep into your mind. …

“The mental side of it was very tough. Leaving the PGA not knowing if that was going to be my last professional golf tournament, given all the issues that I had had. But I would say that it only just gives you more appreciation when you come back out here.”

In his latest time away, he said he’s reworked his swing. (“A lot of it is actually trying to understand my body a little bit better in terms of just how I rotate around my body,” he said. “A lot of people always were pretty critical of my posture, how much I was kind of diving at the ball. The difference was is that I would say over the last year I did a very good job of managing it, but this time around there’s no management.”) He said he watched only some golf. The Ryder Cup. The majors. When friends were in contention. He played, though. One- and two-dollar games. He explored, too. “Last fall I made a conscious effort of, once I was able to play 18,” he said, “go play a bunch of new golf courses, go have some fun.”

But it’s what he didn’t do that has him most optimistic. 

“I’m not at home hitting a million golf balls, trying to figure out my golf swing,” Zalatoris said, “when in reality I had a compromised back.”

So what can you expect come Thursday?

Patience will be required. Backs are more fickle than even golf. Pain in that area is a bit like a shank — it comes seemingly out of nowhere, it hurts and it lingers. So things may take some time. Maybe Zalatoris contends. Maybe he makes the cut. Maybe he gears toward April and Augusta. That’d be symbolic. Three years ago, he withdrew from there. 

Or maybe we see him again contend at the U.S. Open. Where his acting career started. 

That give him some finality. He’d take a win this time, though. 

“I still am that same kid from 2022,” he said. 

“I just have a lot more appreciation for where I’m at.”