I was wrong. We were wrong.
I, like many hopeful golf observers, believed LIV golfers would never win a major. I thought inferior preparation would fail to season them for days of rain-soaked intensity while competing at the highest level for the biggest prizes in professional golf. I thought bone-chilling winds would render the Bone Saw Tour irrelevant.
This was wishful, at best; foolish, at worst. This was wrong.
Brooks Koepka and his LIV posse rolled into Rochester, N.Y. and rolled over the competition at the PGA Championship. Koepka now has five major titles, three PGAs, almost $43 million in PGA Tour winnings ... and a $100 million bonus for signing with LIV last year, as well as almost $17 million in total LIV earnings.
I begrudge him, and his, and all of the LIV money. Many of my brethren, sports fans or sports writers alike, begrudge him the same. The LIV gang teased us at the Masters. Koepka led entering the final round, but faded, and no other LIV golfer really had a chance.
Then they broke our hearts at the PGA. Koepka won by two strokes. It wasn't nearly that close. The best golfer on the Trump Tour is probably the best golfer in the world.
Sad.
I assumed karma or fate or cosmic golf justice would prevent this, but there's no such thing as karma or fate or cosmic golf justice. I hoped something — deep rough, narrow fairways, athlete's foot, jock itch — anything would prevent these sports-washing tools of the Saudi government from promoting its oppressive regime by winning at Oak Hill.
The club's East Course has seen icons like Jack Nicklaus and Lee Trevino Curtis Strange win majors on its hills and among its trees and around lurking Allen Creek — a hazard not half as treacherous as the golf traitors who shined there last week. Nicklaus and Trevino and Strange won here as they built, with their labor and showmanship and sacrifice, the modern tour that enriched Koepka and his peers. Koepka and his crew then deserted this circuit for a tour whose charter is to bury the PGA.
LIV players all have been suspended by the PGA and DP World Tours, but all four majors still allow LIV golfers who still qualify to compete. Man, did they ever compete.
After rain and wind early in the competition, Sunday shone bright on a gloomy day for professional golf.
Validation
"It validates everything we've said from the beginning: That we're competing at the highest level and we have the ability to win major championships," said Bryson DeChambeau, a LIV defector and, perhaps, the most despised active golfer on the planet.
DeChambeau is half right.
Three-day hit-and-giggle "tournaments" on subpar courses against the Pat Perezes and Charl Schwartzels of the golf community is not the "highest level" of golf. The Korn Ferry Tour and the DP World Tour (European tour) are far better weekly tests. However, DeChambeau is absolutely right about LIV golfers' ability to win major championships.
Anti-LIV-ers like myself gloated in a fog of relief when Koepka, leading by two strokes entering the final round, collapsed on the fourth day at Augusta National and lost by four. We pointed out that a real tournament, one that lasted four days instead of three, one in which all of the very best golfers in the world competed, was a bridge too far even for a four-time major winner in the prime of his life and his career.
We generally dismissed reality: Koepka and LIV pioneer Phil Mickelson tied for second at the Masters, Patrick Reed (despised nearly as much as DeChambeau) tied for fourth, and 12 of the 18 LIV participants made the cut. We dismissed reality because it was the Masters. Of the four majors, the Masters has the weakest and shallowest field. It is played on a course that every golf prodigy knows by heart before he can shave, and, unlike the other three majors, it is played at the same course every year.
But now Koepka has won. He won on a venerable course against the best field of golfers of any major in horrid conditions while carrying the weight of his defection and the banner of his tour on his back. He quashed for good the specious argument that LIV was where top talent went to die.
Worse, he did not validate LIV by himself. DeChambeau (7th) and reigning British open champion Cam Smith (9th) finished in the top 10. Reed and Mito Pereira, who tied for 18th, joined them in the top 20, and 11 of the 16 LIV-ers made the cut, including Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.
But with Johnson and Mickelson past their primes, and with Smith's and Reed's inconsistencies, Koepka always was LIV's best hope to break the major barrier. Not that he much cares.
Joe Cool
Koepka always has been a complex study. Even before he defected to LIV, he was irreverent to a fault. He always has been a maverick in regard to deference and golf's traditions. He feuded with DeChambeau and other players. He criticized any and all golf organizations whose actions or policies he considered imperfect. He has admitted he left for LIV to insure financial stability if his injuries forestalled this level of comeback, and he almost never parrots LIV-approved messages. He even refuses to wear his LIV-branded shirts at non-LIV events.
He has always played golf for the fulfillment and the enrichment of Brooks Koepka.
After he won Sunday he said, "I definitely think it helps LIV, but I'm more interested in my own self right now, to be honest with you. It's a huge thing for LIV, but at the same time, I'm out here competing as an individual at the PGA Championship. I'm just happy to take this home for the third time."
This is a bitter pill, made more unappealing by the moderate conceit from DeChambeau and the sickening chest-thumping from Greg Norman, who easily was most detested man in all of golf — and that was before he became the CEO of LIV.
He tweeted, "As for the LIV Golf League players. they belong and the Majors and golf knows."
Now I know — we know — too.
