Pablo Torre Finds Out - It's the End of LIV Golf as We Knew It (and Trump Feels Fine)

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

The president may have ended his favorite sport's civil war — by waging a war of his own. But what did we really learn from Saudi Arabia's multibillion-dollar golf experiment? Journalist Alan Shipnuck explains what insiders are texting about but won't say out loud: that golfers are the most overpaid athletes on Earth, that peacetime is suddenly more complicated for the PGA Tour... and that sportswashing is insidious because it works.• Read "LIV and Let Die" by Alan Shipnuck• Previously on PTFO: Phil Mickelson, the Pipeline and Trump's (Alleged) 14-Inch Pipe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is. It's interesting to think that Trump helps save LiveGalph, and then him waging war in Iran may end LiveGolf. Right after this ad. I have a small problem here. I was going to say, a bleeding Alan Shipnuck given the topic we're here to discuss, is something that raises questions immediately as your neck.

Your neck is... Can you see this? I can. We can also. See, who did this to you, Alan? Let's start there. Are we recording? We are recording.

Who did this to you? I demand answers. I demand accountability. It's not Greg Norman, although he probably would have loved to have taken a knife to my throat at some point. I don't know how many more convenient segues you can give me as you clutch a piece of toilet paper to a wound right at your Adams apple. This is ridiculous.

This is a public service announcement. Do not shave in a hurry before, you know, the most important podcast appeared in your entire career. That's right. Huge mistake. I'm going to, should I put a turtleneck on? Like, I'll legit put a turlneck on. I had no idea if fucking Alan was going to be bleeding from his neck. Hold on.

I'm going to a turtle neck. So now that you have your turtleneck on, you no longer have to staunch the bleeding. I do want to get to the bleeding in the world of golf. I just regard you as one of the most plugged in people. that I know, certainly into this sport, certainly into the world of Live. So just give me a sense, just behind the scenes,

as the collapse, as the bleeding has been happening, steadily, into public view now. How would you explain this to someone who's not getting the texts and calls and the messages that you have been navigating over the last month now?

I mean, Liv has been chaotic from day one. I remember one of their executives telling me back in 2022, We're building the plane as we fly it. And now the plane is crashing all around them. The wings just fell off. There's one engine left.

It's smoking. Some of the windows have popped out and people are getting sucked out of the plane. Like any number of metaphors we could come up with. But Liv has been chaos merchants this whole way through. And it could only end this way. It would just total messiness, uncertainty, the information war between the tours, the players, the agents, everyone trying to carve out the future while they're trying to figure out what that's going to be in real time. It's just a perfect ending to this era of disruption and bullsh-shouldery.

Livgold's CEO has been trying to quell the speculation that the league is in deep financial trouble. Scott O'Neill sent a memo to his staff yesterday in which he insists the 2026 season of the controversial tour will continue as planned and uninterrupted. The Financial Times, among others, has reported that Saudi Arabia's public investment Fund is on the verge of cutting its financial backing. Is there a warning to the world from golf? All that Saudi cash that's been lavished on sport, are we seeing the end of vanity investment?

Start with huge breaking news that Live Golf, as we know it, is over. As expected, the tour has just confirmed that Saudi Arabia's public investment fund will no longer provide financial backing with Chairman Yasser Al-Romyan also set to leave. Well, it looks like it's the end of the road, but as far as liver concerned, the show must go on. I want to remind people of the decadence, of the sales pitch, right? Because so much of what's happening, the Schadenfreude,

that everyone is hearing around sports around the collapse and the wounds, live when it was born in 2022. For those who don't remember, what did it look and sound like? It was like if Louis XIV, you got into golf and sponsored a turn. When you think of a golf tournament, you likely think of silence when the players are hitting their shots, but that is not how it works on the LiveGolf tour. Golf, but louder. That's how LiveGolf wants to be known. Our approach is to treat it like an NBA game or an NHL game or an NFL game where the entire course is integrated like an arena.

You know, they were chartering the 747s to fly players from A to B. they had their own personal drivers and they had their own chefs and they just took it to the illogical extreme and you know shopping trips for the wives and you name it because they were trying to create a culture they were trying to give players on the pgit tour a reason to jump and of course when live arrived there were only four tournaments on the pGA tour that had a purse of more than nine million dollars that doesn't count the majors those are not conducted by the pGA

tour and all of a sudden live showed up with twenty $25 million persons. The scale of the money was unheard of. And then those were for the weekly tournaments. Then they were signing these guaranteed deals. And, you know, Brooks Kepka's swing coach had a quote, you know, that Brooks deserves to be paid like an NFL quarterback. And he was.

He got that contract. Right. I mean, so John Rahm gets $300 million. Phil Mickelson, your boy, gets $200 million. Brooks Kepka $130 million, as you just referenced, Dustin Johnson, $125 million. The flaw in that thinking was, and actually it was Roy McElroyo who pointed this out, and he's one of the guys who said no to live money. There was a tour event that was on the same day as like the AFC championship game.

And the ratings for the AFC championship game were 50 times what the PJ Tour event pulled. So you can't pay guys on the scale of Patrick Mahomes if they only deliver 2% of the eyeballs. Right now, professional golfers are the most overpaid athletes in any sport on a per eyeball basis. And that's because Liv just pump. the number's up to a completely unsustainable level. But the estimations of how much the PIF has lost on Liv, is there a back of the envelope math that you feel like makes sense?

Oh, yeah. I mean, $5 billion is a very solid number of what they've lost in less than five years. So the reason I wanted to bring Alan Shepnuck, our journalist friend, back on the show, is not to just throw dirt on the apparent grave of Liv Golf. the subject Alan literally wrote the book about and is covered as closely as anybody. I wanted to have Alan back on because by understanding how boring old golf became this geopolitical soap opera, I suspect that we might find something out about the future of sports in general. Because when Liv first launched, the premise of spending $5 billion in less than five years was not an indictment.

It was an advertisement. This is what Saudi Arabia can do. That was what was so eye-opening as much as anything. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, the public investment fund, at the discretion of Yasser al-Ramayan, who was the head of it. But above him, of course, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, deploying their sum total of about $900 billion that they had to distribute. And they chose the PGA tour, the most country club traditionalist sports.

organization in America, arguably, as their first big project. You know, Liv was never really about golf. It was about soft power. And it was a chance for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to buy access to the Western world, to its thought leaders, his political leaders, who all love golf. In Washington, D.C., all the politicians hang out at Burning Tree Golf Club. But at some point late last year, it began to look like Saudi Arabia's unlimited budget, which had reportedly also guaranteed $125 million to Bryson DeCambo, for instance,

might actually have limits after all. It really goes back to December when Brooks Kepka announced he was returning to the PGA tour. That was a Christmas surprise. And that was the first crack in the wall that things were happening behind the scenes and not everybody was privy to. And then Patrick Reed followed. So at that point, you know, things are happening from a business standpoint, things are not going well at Liv.

And by the end of February, President Donald Trump, the golfer in chief himself, who was scheduled to host two live events at his courses this year, also decided to do this. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Liv's executives tried to dismiss Saudi Arabia's collateral financial damage from the war as just a flesh wound. But in April, the Saudi Public Investment Fund finally presented its new five-year plan, a plan which focused on, quote, maximizing financial returns and strengthening investment efficiency. Sounding more like McKinsey than the money waterfall that would eternally keep sports property. in America going up and to the right.

In fact, this plan ultimately reduced Saudi Arabia's international investments by 10%. At which point, I started monitoring what the sports industry was thinking about the war in Iran. People made the parallel very quickly. In fact, I tweeted, you know, now that oil prices are going to skyrocket, maybe Liv can re-sign Bryson because the Saudi economy is tied very closely to the, the price of oil. But then the refineries were starting, you know, getting set on fire by drone attacks and the straits were closed and you couldn't export the oil. So the whole situation is so volatile. But if you're paying attention, this was always going to be a thing. And then, of course,

in April, when the Piff dropped this five-year strategic plan, they made it very clear they were reducing their discretionary spending. And it wasn't just live golf, right? Piff was going to underwrite Tom Brady's flagged football league. That went away. Snooker is a huge sport in Europe and parts of the Middle East and Saudi Arabia has sponsored the Snooker Masters and they had a 10-year deal and they canceled that after two years. They're selling one of their soccer teams in the Saudi League, the Piff owns. So sports is consolidating, I think, around F1, around English premiere,

like some of these mega franchises. But sort of the vanity projects, the gambles, let's take a flyer on this, like those are going away. The theory was we're going to diversify our portfolio as a country, as a sovereign wealth fund from just oil into all of these things. And sports was seemingly going to be their main artery towards that. And yet, as all of this was happening, it turns out, oh, right. But the way to buy up all of those things, to fund all of those things was with oil. Yeah.

And for decades, there were no professional sports activities in Saudi Arabia. Arabia. It was only when MBS sees power and there was a young, restless population. He's like, we got to distract these people. And so then it was like, let's bring on the sports. And so they, they just said yes to everything. And now as time has gone by, they've seen what works, what doesn't, what people care about, what's losing billions of dollars every year. And so there was, there was a gold rush sort of fever around 2015, 16, 17, when MBS assumed power. And they just launched all these initiatives. This league was a monument to decadence, and that's going to end. On golf Twitter, we call it zombie live. You know, it may keep going for a year or two because they have to

fulfill contracts, which they've signed with venues and boards of tourism and corporations and players. But live as we know it looks like is dead. But I wonder if this has said to you anything about what the ceiling was for this project to begin with. with. Live golf began as the Premier Golf League, and it was dreamed up by these Brits who were just disgruntled golf fans. And the reason the PGA Tour was vulnerable to a challenge is because it never really had a competitor. And any business without a competitor is going to get stale and bloated and inefficient and maybe a little boring. And that was the PGA Tour. And so the Premier Golf League sought to reimagine what professional golf could be. They brought on the Saudis as

investors. The Saudis, specifically, Al-Rumayan, pledged $500 million to try and launch this Premier Golf League. They could never sign the players. They just, they weren't closers. And ultimately, the Saudis were like, okay, we can do this without them. And they more or less cut and pasted the entire Premier Golf League format, the 54-hole shotguns, the purses, the 14 tournament skills. That was all from the Premier Golf League. The Saudis shamelessly ripped it off. And in fact, now they're getting sued finally by the founders of Premier Golf League, which is a whole other story. But the key thing that the Premier Golf League was selling was a 10-year plan. They said it's going to take us 10 years to make this sustainable.

There's massive costs up front to sign players to build infrastructure. Like it's going to take 10 years and Liv hired some of the consultants who helped the Premier Golf League. The same humans went from one side to the next. And they were always preaching. It's a 10-year plan because they knew how long it was going to take. And ultimately, Yaseer didn't have the stomach for it. Or more specifically, his boss did not.

or only in year five. And so LivGolf has made, ironically, has made some progress. Their revenue is going to be up this year. They brought on some blue chip sponsors in HSBC and Rolex and Workday. The individual teams have had some success in attracting more endemic sponsorship from golf club manufacturers and apparel. When they went to South Africa and Australia this year, they had over 100,000 fans on site. They sold out the premium.

hospitality in Korea. They signed this TV deal all throughout Asia. So things that were starting to turn, obviously they got world ranking points, which was a huge deal to try and attract some young players. Like the depth of the field has gotten much stronger by bringing in some good young players. So Liv was making progress. It was halting and it was slow, but signs were there. But ultimately, they were never going to know what they could have done in five more years because that's asking for a tremendous amount of patience and a tremendous amount of capital. And that's just not how the world works.

You can't game plan a war in your backyard like has happened to the Saudis. You don't know what's going to happen the next presidential election, and no one in today's world has 10 years. I want to get to the sort of timeline here in a second. But, yeah, look, one of the most famous quotes was the one that you got from Phil Mickelson

that he resented and continues to resent, I can only imagine, because he said to you, as you're writing your book on him, quote, we know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there

for being gay, knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA tour operates. And so, again, in that infamous quote about the scary motherfuckers, as he calls them,

that are the Saudi authorities, there was already this notion of, yes, but there is a transaction that is worth it. What's interesting to me is the plan and the strategy and who are the parties who most could use a partner like Saudi Arabia. And so I bring it back to Vision 2030. And that was Saudi Arabia's grand plan. And it was launched in 2016.

You may recall something else that happened that was quite pivotal later in 2016. The Fox News Decision Desk has called Pennsylvania for Donuts. Donald Trump, this means that Donald Trump will be the 45th president of the United States. One of the few times golf as an institution never showed any backbone was when the PGA America pulled the PGA championship from Trump Bedminister. It is in reaction to some of the inflammatory rhetoric of the presidential campaign. And the PGA tour repudiated Trump. They took away his event at Dural, sent it across the wall to Mexico City.

the LPGA and Trump had been longtime partners. That ended. The British Open has famously repudiated Trump and refused to bring the Open Championship to Trump Turnberry. Golf means more to Trump than any of us can ever imagine because he's always found a way to buy himself into the highest echelons of society. The one thing you cannot do is buy your way

into the great old clubs of America. So he was never allowed to become a member at Augusta National. or Pine Valley. And you can buy the biggest, ugliest house in Florida and Mar-a-Lago, but you can't buy your way into Seminole Golf Club. And this burned trump

to the core that golf had always turned its back on him. And so he had to create this whole empire of his own clubs in his image with the tacky waterfalls and the Roman columns and all that stuff. And so hosting these tournaments was the pat on the head

from the establishment he'd always needed. Like, we still don't want you as a member, but we will bring our tournament to your venue and we'll accept you in that manner. But then he lost all the tournaments, and that wounded him so deeply. And the only organization that would take on Trump, who was so radioactive in the golf world, was live golf. Well, I've known these people for a long time in Saudi Arabia, and they've been friends of mine for a long time. They've invested in many American companies. They've invested in many American companies. big percentages of many, many American companies.

And frankly, what they're doing for golf is so great. What they're doing for the players is so great. The salaries are going to go way up. The PGA was not loved by a lot of the players, as you know, for a long time. They were desperate for somewhere to play. He had some pretty good golf courses. He raised his hand. And so, you know, the first season, two of the first eight events on Live were at Trump venues.

And so they became allies. And he played in the proam with His Excellency. or Alderman, and this was just another way that the Saudi money could flow to the Trump family, just like MBS gave a billion dollars to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for his investment portfolio. They were always allies during the first Trump presidency. And so that was Trump's way back into the golf world. It's interesting to think that Trump helped save Live Golf, and then him waging war in Iran may end Live Golf. He's going to lose the tournaments that he was being paid to host.

This all comes full circle. It's remarkable, man, how symmetrical some of this is. I mean, the PGA Tour had, it was a proud institution. It did not have the money that the Saudis did. It still doesn't. But they've won this war. You couldn't buy Rory or Scotty. You couldn't buy a membership in Augusta National, which you see or crave.

The legacy of a professional golf turns out not to be for sale. People still care about the old tournaments and the old venue. use. And you can't just crash the party with a lot of money. And of course, Trump's in the middle of all of it. Because after he was reelected, you know, one of the first things he did was trying to call together the leaders in golf on both sides. And yes, I feel like he cared more about finding peace in professional golf than he did finding peace in Gaza. He was way more emotionally invested in trying to, in trying to solve this, this war in golf. And in a roundabout way, he has. It's not how he envisioned in some grand handshake on the South Long.

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Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. One of the first thoughts I had while thinking about this unfolding story was that Liv's whole war against the PGA tour was not the most cost-effective way to sportswash Saudi Arabia's human rights record. In retrospect, you know, the whole bone-sawing of Washington Post-Journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the whole thing, for instance,

about how President Donald Trump was hosting a tournament at his course in New Jersey over the protests of the families of 9-11 victims who physically showed up. My sense was, if you're going to spend $5 billion to north, normalize the kingdom, you probably could have just spent your money backing an incumbent American sports organization instead of trying to build an unsustainable rebel league in order to antagonize one. While talking to Alan Shipnuck, something jarring did occur to me as

we continued the postmortem of this mission. Because what if you consider the fact that the PGA tour already surrendered it's supposed to be. moral high ground in this battle. And what if Saudi Arabia also already got almost everything that it wanted? You look at the alliances that the PIF and the Saudis have forged with Trump through Liv Gulf? Lib has been successful as going to these world capitals and conducting tournaments, whether it's been in Seoul, Korea, or it's been in Tokyo, it's been Mexico City.

And for one week, they take over the town and they entertain the place. and the business elite. And who knows how many deals have been cut for the Piff out of those weeks. And maybe that justifies the outlay of $5 to $6 billion they spent on Liv Golf. When Liv went to Adelaide a few years ago, the premier of Southern Australia, you know, reaffirmed this long-term commitment that Australia has to, you know, supply Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars every year of beef and wheat and barley and all these things. So on one level, if you can feed your population, if you can distract them and you can prevent political unrest and regime change, it's definitely worth John Rom's contract. And so you can't judge live as a traditional business or traditional sports league because

the goals were very different. It wasn't necessarily to make money. It wasn't necessarily to export the values of golf. It was to win hearts and minds around the world. It was to sports wash, the Saudi atrocities. And there's a really interesting piece of history here where the first ever professional golf tournament in Saudi Arabia was scheduled for January of 2019.

It was the Saudi International that was dreamed up by Yasser Al-Ramayan. It's going to be part of the European Tour schedule. And a couple months earlier, Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated. And the entire Western world was pulling back from the Saudis. You know, Jeff Bezos canceled an appearance over there. And Ari Emanuel, he canceled, the $400 million deal, you've been chasing for years. Richard Branson pulled out of a big deal with the PIF.

And at a moment with the Saudi elite, we're desperate for allies, the European Tour still conducted its tournament. And that was a monumental moment when the entire regime was vulnerable. And I think that was a fundamental affirmation that golf is our friend, and we can count on these guys. And they can help us achieve. what we want politically. The other thing I'm looking at, this portfolio, the Saudi public investment fund,

they're looking elsewhere, right? And so soft power, I mean, this is the reminder. You know, Gulf was one avenue, but it seems like the other one that they decided to go and back was, oh, right, Paramount. They're spending $110 billion to go take over Warner Brothers. And I'll just quote this line from the Hollywood reporter, the filing by Paramount Skydance with the Securities on Exchange Commission

did not outline how much the funds plan to contribute, but sources familiar with the investment, and said the total amount was around $24 billion, with Saudi Arabia's Piff contributing about $12 billion, and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar, putting up around $6 billion each. This is part of a broader push by the country to curry favor with Trump by influencing Washington

and also keep young Saudi eyes and minds on the screens, not on questions of human rights. And so from the perspective inside of golf, what is the attitude from the PGA system? side of things. How much of the sports washing stuff is part of the golf conversation? How much of it is actually you guys tried to kill us and look who's bleeding now? A big talking point in the first year of live was the sports washing and Jay Monaghan, the PGA tour commissioner famously said, you know, no one's ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA tour. And they co-opted the 9-11 families and the

tour leaned in heavily on that. And it made sense because the tour was a proud American institution and you had these scary motherfuckers coming in and trying to take it over. And so then it blew up on Monahan specifically, but the tour in general, when after a year of fighting, they tried to cut a deal with the public investment fund. And then it was, then they looked like the ultimate hypocrites. Yeah. And so what's happened today into your earlier question is we've recognized that together we can have a far greater impact on this game than we can working apart. And I give Yasser great credit

for coming to the table, coming to discussions with an open heart and an open mind. We did the same, and the game of golf is better for what we've done here today. The moral argument is fine until you give it up to take the money.

In the beginning, the players were pounded with these questions about sports watching, about Khashoggi, about human rights, about MBS. And by year two, those had mostly gone away. And, you know, Bryce and Deschambo famously said, we're done with that.

We talked about that last year. And it was kind of effective. And so sports washing is insidious because it works. There's been very little conversation in the last three years about sports washing. It's just completely gone away. And that's why you do it. The whole Paramount deal is interesting because CBS gets swept up in this. And CBS is the home of the masters and the home of the PGA tour.

And so there's been some thinking like that place. to roll in the PIF shutting down live golf because we can't own both sides of the competition. We're fighting amongst ourselves if we're funding live and we're televising the PGA tour. So, you know, depending on your level of conspiracy theory,

you know, that may have been a factor. So we're just left to speculate in this vacuum. Donald Trump doesn't seem to have any hesitation about playing both sides here. We are talking as he has just again hosted this tournament, a live tournament at Trump National in Washington, D.C.

And the PGA was at Dural the week before for the 26th Cadillac Championship. It was the first PGA tour event to be held at one of Trump's properties since he became the president. And so even as all of the chaos is swirling and erupting,

Trump is, as always, cashing in everywhere. Elections have consequences. And when he won again, the PGA tour finally said, okay, what can we do? He's the President of the United States. He wants to have a tournament. Let's give him a tournament.

So they went back to Joral. I mean, as an artistic endeavor, it was a total failure. The stands were empty. The golf course was boring. There was no buzz at all to that tournament. You know, Rory McElroy, the Masters champ, skipped it. The tournament was a complete dud in every way, but it still made Donald Trump whole.

He got a tournament back from the PGA tour. And so, yeah, right he's he's always going to find a way to maneuver into any situation and he's done that quite effectively with a gulf however that the the royal and ancient still refuses to to give him an open like and i've talked to some of those old boys over there these tweety jeds who run that thing and they're basically their stance is over our dead body and even though the scottish governments put a lot of pressure on them they refused to do it like they just gave the open in 2008 to royal lithman st an which is, of course, that nobody likes, totally artless,

and Turnberry's beautiful and wonderful and has all this great history. They won't do it. Like, they're the last line of defense, and it's kind of delicious in its own way, but everyone else in golf has come back to Trump. He's the sitting president, and he knows where the pressure points are, and so he's getting his way. But the idea that even as the PGA is capitulating to Donald Trump,

that there are places in this world, there are places in the world of golf that will not abide by him because they do have some sense of a code that is not simply financial. It is, in the way that you put it, the thing that I do almost perversely love about sports. And this is the through line through this whole story,

which is you could have $900 billion at your disposal. You could have all the money in the world. You could be the president of the Frient United States. But there are some things that money cannot buy you when it comes to sports. And as much as I've never thought of a golf club as a place that could be a fortress against the power of money, it does remind me that some things can't be bought,

and that might be the only thing left in terms of a moral high ground or anything resembling one that professional sports can offer us at this point. Well, I mean, all Rwaiyan openly coveted a green jacket to become a member of Augusta National. That would have been the ultimate acceptance of the Western world. That would have given them access to the halls of power in a way that almost nothing else could. And when there was this short-lived sort of truce between the tour and live and these consultants put together this prospectus of what the deal would entail, tucked into the small print was that Yaseer wanted to become a member of Augusta National. And of course, the best way to not become a member of Augusta National is to ask to become

a member of Augusta National. Like, that's just not how it's done. And so there's always been this thinking, like, he was willing to light $5 billion on fire if he could have gotten a green jacket. When it became clear that wasn't going to happen, he's like, I'm out. Fuck it. And there's this weird code in the golf world. And, you know, Trump's never going to become a member of any of these great old clubs. Even though he's been elected president twice and everything else, it's never going to happen for him. And that burns him so deeply. And it drives a lot of his behavior. I truly believe that. Yeah, I think much like Alan Shepnuck's neck. He has a lot of scar tissue at this point around this topic. Oh, look at that. Heels. Almost, almost. I think I just reopened it. It then clotted against my

turtleneck. It's probably dripping down my chest right now. The flip side of this metaphor is that sometimes you can just pick it a scab and it starts bleeding all over again. Yeah, yeah. In some ways, that's what this whole story has become. You know, the scab picking is going to go on throughout 2006. The recriminations and the b-hanness is turned up to full volume right now as everyone's posturing for who needs whom more. Arbon Lahiri's a very B-less golfer who plays on live golf. and he's, but he's made $35 million since Liv launch.

And he said, I don't even want to go back to the PGA tour. And I was like, we don't want you anyway. The tenor of the debate is so juvenile. And then it's not going to end in 26 because if zombie live goes on and if John Rom is trapped there because of this ironclad contract and he's frittering away his prime years and he's miserable, it's a never-ending story. And I mean, I remember when golf used to be boring.

Yeah. And now we've got the President of the United States. We have the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. We have war in Iran. We have Bryson in the Oval Office. Like, we've gone from the sports page, the business page, the front page. It's been an incredible ride. The news that Yaseer Al-Ramayan had stepped down from Liv's Board of Directors was April 29th.

And who's running it now? Like, how does that work? Yeah, I mean, the PIF is going to continue funding it for the rest of this season. But Yashir pulling out, it was obviously very symbolic. It also was, to me, a total act of cowardice. Like, this was his project from the beginning. The captain should go down with the ship. And, like, for him not to try and stick around and solve this,

I thought it was weak sauce. That was a big deal for him to cut and run. And so, you know, they brought in this new CEO, Scott O'Neill, who's very dynamic. He's about a year and a half into his tenure. Formerly from Madison Square Garden and the 76ers. Yeah. And so this is now his problem to solve.

Can you reimagine Live and can you get some investment to keep it going? The answer might be yes. I talked to a couple of Live executives after Alderman, you know, pulled up stakes. And of course, they only ever speak on background. You can't use their name, which is frustrating. But one of them said, like just look at the money that's pouring into professional sports at every level, men's and women. And you can now get in on Live for pennies on the dollar. We have all these deals in place.

There is a lot of infrastructure on the TV side. We have venues. We have big markets, world capitals. It's potentially a great value. And they also have the corporate support that's in place. And they have boards of tourism who are on board. But no one knows if they have players. Right.

That is, in fact, the product. So the players are waiting to see how it's going to shake out. And if you're Scott O'Neill, how you sell the future when you don't know what the future is and neither do the players, that's the ultimate balancing act. But again, there is a path forward for Liv, but it's never going to be the noisy, splashy, disruptive force that it hoped to be. I just want to reread one of the quotes from Scott O'Neill, who, again, not an easy hand to play, given everything you've described,

the war in Iran, perhaps the most unmanageable of all of the economic threats. But he was on the TNT broadcast. It was Liv's Tournament of Mexico City in mid-year-old. April and he says quote live golf is in the best shape it's ever been in period end of sentence and I would play that video for you except the video has been deleted yeah which feels also a bit perfect for this story and one executive said to me how many people hated live golf because of the Saudi influence probably two thirds of all the haters it was around the Saudis and now you take that away it should make us more attractive

to golf fans, to make us more attractive to corporations. You know, we're not radioactive. We're an independent sports league. So they're trying to turn into a positive. Yeah, we lost all their money, but we also lost their baggage, too.

But again, you can't, you can't have a professional sports league without the athletes. And that's what's going to come down to. Bryson is, of course, the biggest domino here. John Rom's important symbolically, but he does not move the needle anywhere like Bryson does.

And if Liv can resign Bryson, and maybe they just give him a piece of the league. You can have 25% equity of live golf. It creates some weirdness, but it also might be what it takes to sign him. It would appeal to Bryson. Like, Tom Brady never owned a piece of the NFL. Tiger Woods never owned a piece of the PGA tour. Like, that might be how they can get his deal done.

If they can keep Bryson and his juice and his online presence, they have a lot of good young talent signed to deals that are really going to have nowhere else to play. I mean, live could remain a somewhat intriguing proposition, but of course, there's many ifs built into that sentence. I mean, look, the program that the PGA launched, right, the returning member program, which is just funny. It's like a gun buyback program for people who went to live.

We're like, we're repatriating all of these exiles. I know Brooks Kepka accepted it, and that was, yes, extremely notable in terms of like the weather vein pointing in one direction. But the PGA just has to be loving this, man. You mentioned the returning players program, which was so delicious because the tour just made it up willy-nilly. And one of the criteria was if you'd won a major championship since 2022,

guess who won a major in 2021, who they wanted to give a giant middle finger to, Phil Mickelson? They could have extended that window one more year, and Phil would have been eligible. But that was Tiger Woods and others just saying, just turning the knife on Phil. So, yeah, they can craft some very, narrow language that could get Bryson back, could get John Rom back, if they want to. And you may

have seen this today. This is a broke today, Pablo, that the tour is revamping its social media policies for its members and giving them more latitude for what they post, how much they post, how much content they can capture at tournaments. Clearly, this is directed toward Bryson as a carrot. And it'll benefit other players. It'll benefit the tour. Like, they've always been a few steps behind. So this is overzeu anyway, but the timing is not an accident. Well, there's this whole wooing process going on. And Bryce is talking about, well, maybe I won't go back to the tour. I'll just play YouTube golf now to stay sharp. And so now the tour has to figure out how they can sustain itself wildly overpaying its players. But that, they've won the war, but now can

they survive the piece? You know, that's the question for the tour. The chest pieces are always moving on the board. And that's what's so delicious about this. It seems like the president likes the cut of his jib, Alan. Bryson's amazing. I mean, he's somebody that can put on 25, 30. At one point, I guess he put on almost 50 pounds. Remember, he looked like a linebacker for the Sparks. And he decided he didn't like himself that way.

It was all muscle, Gary. It was crazy. He looked like a massive football player. He wouldn't want to play a monarchy. And he said he didn't like it. He developed too much speed. This is the problem that people. He had too much speed.

He wanted to bring it down a little bit. He can put on weight, like up and down like a yo-yo. And he doesn't take the shot, okay? He doesn't need the fat shot. He just said, do you ever take this shot? He didn't even know what the hell I was talking about what shot. No, he can put it on. He's a scientist.

He's like a scientist with his body. He's a great guy. When he did put it on, those 50 pounds in a very short period, to time. And it's in my book, Live and Let Die. I detailed his diet. And someone close to Bryce, and I asked him this, I said, how is, you know, how is you processing this? Like, that's got to be hard on your body. They said, well, his bowel movements are volcanic. So I've always loved that word. We haven't really even talked about Phil Mickelson. I know. Who's MIA right now for reasons that everyone is, again, texting about, but no.

No one will say out loud for reasons that I think only inspire follow-up investigations on my show and perhaps on your cell phone. But the question of like, wait a minute, he's fighting to reopen this oil pipeline off the coast of California. We showed in a previous episode an extraordinarily graphic text having to do with President Trump. Yeah. And also, by the way, the federal government is looking into that same company's sable

offshore. And he's like currently in this episode also receiving votes for being messy. That's where golf is right now. More than that, he was one of the key pieces. And he's a founding father of LiveGolf. And he helped pay the lawyers who wrote some of the constitution of LiveGolf. Like he's been there from the beginning. And this whole thing is disintegrating around him.

And he's completely gone underground. It's wild. You're talking about one of the key protagonists in this entire drama. And even though he's been out of sight, it doesn't slow anything down. The stories has so much momentum that you can lose a Phil Mickelson, second most important golfer of our lifetimes. And the greatest content machine, the sports ever known, and nothing skips a beat.

Like, it's absolutely incredible. Yeah, I will merely quote Phil Mickelson here at the very end from November 8th, 2025 at 7.23 p.m. Eastern. when he replied to my tweet by saying, quote, I've never heard of you and have no idea who you are, but given what I know to be true and what you report, your tabloid and I'll wait for the right opportunity, period. Thumbs up emoji.

Phil Mickelson, if you are out there and listening, I dare say that the right opportunity may have arrived. And if you want to talk to me or Alan Shepnuck, if I may speak on your behalf for a second here, Alan, I think both of us would love to hear from Phil. both of us would welcome the opportunity for a follow-up episode. It's time. I mean, he's going to have to emerge at some point,

and there's going to be an accounting. You know, it's just inevitable. The people need to hear Phil, because in some ways, he's been vindicated. You know, his two biggest beefs to me were that the players on the PGA tour did not have enough say in their governance and that they were underpaid. And as soon as Liv arrived,

the tour blew up its entire governance structure, to give the players all the power. He was right about that. And they turned the spigot on, and the money started flowing out of the reserves. And so Phil was right again. But because of who he is and the way he conducts his business, no one wants to give him credit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's time for him to speak. It's time for him to make like Alan Shepnuck and just open up a vein. Yes. I can't top that. I think we're done here, Pablo. This has been Pablo Torre

finds out a Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.