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LIV Golf Had the Most Embarrassing Moment After Its Possible Final Event

Andy Nesbitt|
LIV Golf’s 2026 season came to end Sunday.
LIV Golf’s 2026 season came to end Sunday. | Brian Spurlock/Getty Images

LIV Golf’s 2026 season came to an early close on Sunday in Indianapolis. Michael La Sasso got his first career win at the age of 22. Jon Rahm’s Legion XIII squad won the season-long team championship. And millions of more dollars were handed out to professional golfers who already have millions of dollars in their bank accounts.

After the final putt dropped everyone was was left asking one big question: Is this the end of LIV Golf?

The struggling golf league has had a brutal run the last few months after the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia announced that it would be cutting off its seemingly endless supply of money at the end of the season. The league’s future is very much in doubt and if it does survive, it seems easy to predict that it will look much different going forward and will likely be without a number of the star players who left the PGA Tour for the large piles of Saudi cash.

NESBITT: The 10 Saddest Moments in LIV Golf History

Sunday’s final round on a golf standpoint was actually pretty good. La Sasso was able to make a dramatic birdie on the final hole to beat Rahm by a shot. Veterans Bryson DeChambeau and Sergio Garcia were right there, too, finishing in a tie for third.

But the real story from Sunday was how this all seemed liked an empty end to an empty league that had hopes of changing professional golf forever but really just served as a money grab for everyone involved. Well, not for the vendors and contractors who are suing LIV Golf over money that they are allegedly owed, that is.

Nothing summed that up more than the embarrassing moment shortly after the tournament ended. Rahm and his teammates were presented their championship trophy on a stage off in the corner of the golf course that had maybe 100 fans standing around to take in the celebration. Champagne bottles were then opened but went barely sprayed before the players quickly made it known that they wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Here’s how that awkward moment played out:

Usually after winning a championship players would be soaked in bubbly booze. That didn’t happen Sunday in Indianapolis. Tyrrell Hatton, who picked Queen's legendary hit "I Want to Break Free" as his walk-up song earlier in the week, quickly ducked away from the suds and later said in an interview that he had a flight to catch and just wanted to get to the airport.

The saddest part of that muted celebration came at the end of the clip when we got to see what the whole scene around the stage looked like.

Not great.

LIV Golf was supposed to have one more event this week in Michigan but that has since been canceled. Now CEO Scott O’Neil will be busy trying to lock down investors in hopes of making LIV Golf 2.0 a real thing.

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But you have to wonder what that will look like and who would really want to be involved with it. DeChambeau said after his round that there is “something fun coming” for LIV Golf but right now it’s really hard to take his word for anything.

Rahm is still under contract with the league and is reportedly owed upwards of $150 million from LIV Golf. But is he going to want to play for a league that if it survives will only have 10 events next season and will likely see the purses for those events be a lot less than they were when the Saudis were dumping boatloads of cash into each tournament?

For now, we’ll have to wait and see. But Sunday’s finale felt like the end of an era. The good news is not a lot of champagne was wasted. So they have that going for them, which is nice.

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Andy Nesbitt
ANDY NESBITT

Andy Nesbitt is the assistant managing editor of audience engagement at Sports Illustrated. He works closely with the Breaking and Trending News team to shape SI’s daily coverage across all sports. A 20-year veteran of the sports media business, he has worked for Fox Sports, For the Win, The Boston Globe and NBC Sports, having joined SI in February 2023. Nesbitt is a golf fanatic who desperately wants to see the Super Bowl played on a Saturday night.

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