Gavin Cooney reports from Augusta National Golf Club

TURN YOUR MIND back three years, when the war between LIV golf and the game’s establishment was running hot. 

After a winter of rancour, the best players in the world came together once again at the Masters, with 18 LIV players in the field but brash CEO Greg Norman sitting at home, uninvited. Norman spoke from afar of the LIV contingent storming the green in the event one of their fellow defectors won the tournament.

Past champions meanwhile broke bread at their annual dinner having slung insults at one another over the preceding months: Freddie Couples memorably derided Phil Mickelson as a “nutbag” and Sergio Garcia as a “clown.” 

As players threw shade, LIV threatened to throw light upon the secretive club running the Masters. In an anti-trust litigation suit, LIV described the membership as “approximately 300 people, virtually all of whom are in rarefied positions of power and influence”, describing Augusta National as “a small club with a small membership comprised of America’s most powerful people that hosts the most important professional golf major.” 

With battle lines drawn, it was an idol of the PGA Tour, Jon Rahm, who was the last man standing on Sunday evening, finishing ahead of LIV’s Brooks Koepka, whose fading after 54 holes provided a rich irony and one part of the parable: ultimately, when it comes down to it, the PGA Tour is still where you want to be. 

At that stage the feeling was that the two sides had become entrenched into a long and potentially intractable war.

A few months later, LIV and the Tour announced their bombshell framework agreement, but what was spun as a merger has instead proved to be little beyond a dubious ceasefire. The only certainty that remains in this split is the fact of uncertainty. Three years on, Greg Norman has left and LIV have hired a new CEO, as have the PGA Tour. LIV have also embarrassingly extended their events to 72 holes – LIV are the roman numerals for 54 – and they have finally got a few world ranking points for their players, albeit only for their top-10 finishers.  The divide remains and much of the heat has gone out of hostilities, but whatever buffer zone separates both sides has proven porous.

Nothing better encapsulates this than the fact that the top two of 2023, Rahm and Koepka, have effectively swapped sides. Rahm is now on LIV, while Koepka has returned to the PGA Tour. 

The game remains split and there is no sign of it coming back together anytime soon. The PGA Tour are ploughing on by themselves now, buttressed as they are by a healthy cash injection from American investors and hedge funds.

The Saudi-backed circuit continues too: the loss of Koepka has not been the end of LIV – as was triumphantly forecast by some PGA Tour backers – and while it generally struggles for attention and media coverage, LIV did provide arguably the most compelling golf story of the year so far, with Anthony Kim returning from extraordinary personal turmoil to win their event in Adelaide. 

So who knows how this rupture ends, or whether it will ever end? 

Amid this long, eddying conflict, Rahm is the most interesting figure. Three years ago his victory was wielded as a reproach to LIV and proof that the PGA Tour is ultimately the home of the best and most competitive players, but that parable didn’t survive much contact with reality, given Koepka won the very next major championship, before Bryson DeChambeau won an epic US Open at Pinehurst a year later. 

Koepka and Rahm after the 2023 Masters. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

But what worked for Brooks and Bryson has not worked for Rahm. His lucrative move to LIV at the end of 2023 has precipitated a collapse in form at the majors. His next three starts read T45-CUT-DNP, while a nondescript T14 finish at last year’s Master prefaced a belated return to contention at the PGA Championship at Quail Hollow, though his T8 finish was not a fair representation of character given he played with reckless aggression to chase down Scottie Scheffler.

Alas he did not do much at either of the major Opens on either side of the Atlantic, and so he returns to Augusta this year still needing to clear his throat and issue the final rebuke to those who tell him that LIV paid him a lot of dough to lose his competitive edge in the majors. 

He is meanwhile embroiled in a stubborn argument with the DP World Tour. The Tour have come to a settlement agreement with their members who went to play on LIV without sanction: pay a fine and play in an additional two DP World Tour events on top of the mandatory four needed to retain one’s membership.

Eight golfers accepted the deal, allowing them to be eligible to be picked for the European Ryder Cup team, but Rahm is the only man to say no, going on the offensive to say the deal is tantamout to “extorting” players, saying he wanted the freedom to play the events he wished and not to have the schedule dictated to him. (Wait ’til he checks the mandating of events in his LIV contract.)

Justin Rose argued the other side of the coin. “Obviously, eight did it and Jon didn’t, so, I mean, there’s pretty decent precedent that the deal wasn’t outrageous that they were proposing.”

Rahm tried to bat away questions about the stand-off this week, telling his press conference that he was confident the issue would be resolved with the DP World Tour, that he expects to be able to play in next year’s Ryder Cup and that he may be back in action on the DP World Tour in time for the Irish Open this September. He otherwise suggested Masters week was an inappropriate time of the year to be talking shop like this. 

It’s a remarkably hardline stance for Rahm to take, and one that is earning him precious little favour in the court of opinion. Then again, all professional golfers preparing to win around Augusta National need a certain quotient of bloody-minded pride.

If Rahm’s victory in 2023 was painted as one for forces far beyond himself, you get the sense that a repeat win this year will be solely for himself.