Even with the PGA Tour and LIV Golf announcing plans to merge, stories concerning the rivalries between players on the respective sides are still simmering.
Because the Saudi-backed LIV tour was amping up, a variety of golfers, including Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, got nine-figure deals to leap ship for the upstart league.
In an excerpt of golf author Alan Shipnuck’s latest 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 summertime of 2022 by which Koepka, Johnson and his wife, Paulina Gretzky, and Pat Perez and his wife, Ashley, were partying at a personal bar at Adare Manor in Ireland, across the JP McManus Pro-Am.
Perez reportedly thanked Johnson profusely for recruiting him to LIV, the implication being that it modified 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’re thinking that I give a f–k what they think? You’re thinking that I care what people say about me? I just had three surgeries, and I’m alleged to turn down $130 million? I grew up with nothing. After signing that contract, the primary person I called was my mom. We each 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.
Nonetheless, there was some regulatory scrutiny across the proposed merger, and other bidders for the PGA Tour including Endeavor and Fenway Sports Group have reportedly emerged, so it stays to be seen what the golf landscape will seem like going forward.
