Even with the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announcing plans to merge, stories about the rivalries between players on the respective sides are still simmering.
As the Saudi-backed LIV tour was amping up, a number of golfers, including Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, were given nine-figure deals to jump ship for the upstart league.
In an excerpt of golf writer Alan Shipnuck’s new book “LIV and Let Die” published on Fire Pit Collective, Koepka was said to have been perturbed at PGA Tour loyalists like Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, who grew up in families with means, for judging him over accepting the payday.
Shipnuck described a scene in the summer of 2022 in which Koepka, Johnson and his wife, Paulina Gretzky, and Pat Perez and his wife, Ashley, were partying at a private bar at Adare Manor in Ireland, around the JP McManus Pro-Am.
Perez reportedly thanked Johnson profusely for recruiting him to LIV, the implication being that it changed his life financially, while Koepka chimed in with a chip on his shoulder.
“F–k all of those country club kids who talk s–t about me,” the book attributes Koepka, referring to golfers like Spieth and Thomas who criticized him for the move.
“You think I give a f–k what they think? You think I care what people say about me? I just had three surgeries, and I’m supposed to turn down $130 million? I grew up with nothing. After signing that contract, the first person I called was my mom. We both cried.”
LIV Golf and the PGA Tour announced plans to merge in June, stunning everyone who had witnessed the divisive rhetoric between the tours’ leaders and players over the previous two years.
However, there has been some regulatory scrutiny around the proposed merger, and other bidders for the PGA Tour including Endeavor and Fenway Sports Group have reportedly emerged, so it remains to be seen what the golf landscape will look like going forward.
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