LOS ANGELES — To the extent that Brooks Koepka chose a side in golf’s soon-to-be-settled civil war, it was limited to cashing a check. It was one year ago, a couple days after the U.S. Open, that he bolted to LIV Golf. The 12 months since have been fraught with litigation, suspensions, fines, public bickering and bruised feelings — much of it involving his fellow LIVers who took up cudgels for the cause on social media. Through it all, Koepka has maintained his customary aloof detachment.
That 122nd U.S. Open at Brookline was contested under the LIV shadow, coming one week after the Saudi-funded league’s inaugural event near London. The 123rd national championship arrives under a similar June gloom that provides no greater clarity on the future of the elite professional game. Arguably, things are even more uncertain after the June 6 announcement of a deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which owns and bankrolls LIV.
The haziness at Los Angeles Country Club owes in part to the secrecy with which the PGA Tour-PIF negotiations were conducted and the shock revelation of the agreement, but also to the dearth of details about what has actually been agreed.
“I don’t know anything. So I’ll talk about my FORE Youth project that we’re doing,” Collin Morikawa said Tuesday, a tart pivot to his personal charitable endeavor that signaled his frustration with the situation.
“For a lot of different parties, there’s a lot of different reasons of why it’s happening. So we all want to know the why. We’re so interested in the why,” he eventually added. “I don’t think we’ll ever really get an answer. But we don’t even know what’s going to happen.”
World No. 2 Jon Rahm made it sound like a Norma Rae-style unionization drive is underway against the man. “I think it gets to a point where you want to have faith in management, and I want to have faith that this is the best thing for all of us, but it’s clear that that’s not the consensus,” he said. “I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management.”
The alliance was just as much of a surprise to LIV golfers as it was to their once (and likely future) colleagues on the PGA Tour. Koepka learned of it watching the news while eating breakfast at Grove XXIII, Michael Jordan’s club near Jupiter, Florida. Soon thereafter, he met Justin Thomas and Rickie Fowler on the range. They too were just hearing the news, if…
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