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As golf events go, “The Match” — which pits celebrities and/or golf stars against each other in a made-for-TV competition — doesn’t exactly hold the status of a major. Previous matches that have featured everyone from Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson to Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers have been long on star power, short on actual golf drama.
Say this for The Match, though: At least someone is trying to reunite golf’s divided stars.
The latest installment of the event, teeing off this December in Las Vegas, will pit PGA Tour stars Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy against LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. In other words, The Match has done what the PGA Tour and LIV Golf couldn’t: bring together the stars of the game once again.
Men’s professional golf has splintered into two distinct camps ever since LIV Golf began play in 2022. While the PGA Tour has the legacy and the biggest names — Woods and McIlroy — LIV Golf has managed to lure most of the most interesting characters in the golf universe. Players like DeChambeau, Koepka, Mickelson and Jon Rahm now play on the LIV tour, and the only time they cross paths with their former PGA Tour mates is at majors and the occasional non-PGA Tour event like the Olympics.
What makes all this so maddening is that the best LIV players clearly still have the competitive juice to hang with their Tour counterparts. This year’s U.S. Open at Pinehurst was one of the best tournaments — not just majors, but tournaments of any stripe — in recent golf history, and DeChambeau’s victory over McIlroy came down to the final shots of the final hole. Olympic golf at Le Golf National in Paris looked like Le Rahm Spectacle right up until Rahm imploded and Scheffler swiped the gold from around his neck.
There certainly doesn’t appear to be any visible urgency behind the scenes for any kind of reunification. The Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the financial backer of LIV Golf, announced their surprising end of hostilities back in June 2023, and since then, there’s been almost nothing in the way of concrete movement forward.
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan doesn’t often address the media (and, by association, the Tour’s fans), but he did so last week prior to the Tour Championship in Atlanta. While he was asked about the status of the PIF negotiations and LIV Golf five separate times, he declined to give any specifics.
“These conversations are complex. They’re going to take time. They have taken time, and they will continue to take time,” Monahan said, and then repeated a variant of the same line that so many involved with the agreement have said so many times: “I’m not going to negotiate details in public or disclose details or specifics. All I can say is that conversations continue, and they’re productive.”
The greatest enemy of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf isn’t each other, it’s indifference. The longer these “productive” negotiations drag on, the more fans find something else to do with their time.
“I just think that it’s gone on long enough,” McIlroy said last week of the never-ending negotiations to unify, adding, “I think if it doesn’t happen soon, then honestly, I think the PIF and the Saudies are going to have to look at alternative options, right?”
Now that the PGA Tour season has ended, the LIV tour is winding down, and football has begun, golf will recede in the public’s mind even further than it already has. That’s not the pathway to a sustainable future for men’s golf, no matter how many corporate sponsors each side lines up.
So now comes The Match, stepping into the void that the Tour and LIV have left. The storylines abound. There’s the Pinehurst Rematch, Koepka trying to get his game back, McIlroy eating his words about not wanting to have anything to do with LIV, Koepka and DeChambeau getting along, Scheffler just dominating everyone in sight … every hole should have enough drama to inspire a million Golf Twitter reactions. Sure, it’s manufactured drama, but at this point, we’ve got to be happy with what we get.
“This isn’t just a contest between some of golf’s major champions; it’s an event designed to energize the fans,” McIlroy said in a text to Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch. “We’re all here to put on a great show and contribute to a goodwill event that brings the best together again.”
McIlroy has been one of LIV’s strongest critics, but he’s also one of the few on the PGA Tour side who has publicly taken a game-first approach. He understands that golf is, at its heart, a show — and when golf stops being a “good show,” the fans go elsewhere.
The Match won’t solve golf’s problems. But it’s at least proof that reunification is possible … even if we have to put up with some awkward banter and forced jokes to get there.