By Michael Mattingly, Lead Golf Columnist | Sept 13, 2026
Sunday morning in America is a wonderful thing.
The coffee is brewing. Somebody has already made an unnecessary bowl of sugar-coated cereal. College football is over for the week. Fantasy football lineups are being checked for the tenth time. The lawn still needs mowing.
And half a world away in the Netherlands, the ladies of Team Europe just captured the Solheim Cup with a dominant performance in the singles matches.
And this is all before the first Sunday of the NFL kicks off.
For a few hours this morning, professional golf has become wonderfully simple.
There was a scoreboard.
There were matches.
There was a trophy.
Somebody won.
Somebody lost.
But nobody needed to know who owned the league or the golf course.
That simplicity is worth remembering because men’s professional golf has spent the better part of four years making something remarkably simple incredibly complicated.
LIV wasn’t supposed to join professional golf.
It was supposed to change it.
Candidly, I didn’t particularly like the way LIV came into the game. I didn’t like the Saudi money or the thinly veiled intention of using golf to attract investment and tourism while putting their human rights record in the background. And the basic economics never made much sense to me. Paying out more than you take in isn’t exactly a sustainable business model.
I also didn’t like watching a sport I love become a fight over competing tours, television rights, contracts and control.
But none of that changes a fundamental truth.
The players had the right to leave.
They were offered extraordinary amounts of money. They made a decision about their careers, their families and their futures.
Some took the money.
Some didn’t.
Both groups made a choice.
That’s what freedom means.
The uncomfortable part is what comes afterward.
If you voluntarily leave something good because you believe something better exists somewhere else, are you automatically entitled to your old place when the new opportunity doesn’t work out the way you expected?
I don’t think so.
The PGA Tour isn’t obligated to take anyone back on the same terms they left.
That isn’t revenge.
It isn’t necessarily punishment.
It’s a consequence.
And there is a difference.
There is also a difference between accountability and vindication.
Accountability says, You made a choice, and you have to live with it.
Vindication says, You made a choice I disagreed with, and now I’m going to enjoy watching it go badly.
Golf doesn’t need more of the second.
The LIV players weren’t wrong to take the money.
They also shouldn’t be surprised that leaving had consequences.
Both things can be true at once.
In my view, this is where the LIV story gets really interesting.
The fight was never just about money.
It was about power.
LIV wasn’t created simply to give golfers another place to play. It was created to challenge the structure of professional golf.
And the PGA Tour wasn’t fighting simply to protect the purity of the game.
It was fighting to protect its position within that game.
Money was involved.
Of course it was.
But so was control.
The players wanted money.
LIV wanted influence.
The PGA Tour wanted control.
And the fans wanted something much simpler:
They wanted the best golfers in the world to play against one another.
That last part somehow became the easiest thing to forget.
Four years later, the irony is difficult to miss.
The rebellion against the PGA Tour’s dominance may ultimately leave the PGA Tour in an even stronger position.
The framework created to reunify professional golf put the PGA Tour in the driver’s seat of the new commercial structure involving the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the interests surrounding LIV.
That’s a remarkable ending to a story that began with the promise of disrupting the establishment.
LIV set out to challenge the golf establishment.
Now the question is whether its legacy will be helping that establishment consolidate its power.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Maybe it is.
I’m not sure.
And that’s precisely why I find the next chapter more interesting than the last four years.
Because professional golf still has to answer the question it should have been asking all along:
Who is this actually for?
If the answer is the players, then compensate them fairly.
If the answer is the tours, then build a sustainable business.
If the answer is the investors, then make money.
But if the answer is the fans, there is only one thing we really want.
We want the best players playing the best players.
We want competition.
We want rivalries.
We want meaningful Sundays.
We want to know that when somebody stands over a six-foot putt with everything on the line, the person standing across from her—or him—is someone we actually wanted to see there.
Which brings us back to the Solheim Cup.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about watching America and Europe fight over a trophy.
Nobody is talking about ownership structures.
Nobody cares who controls the commercial rights.
Nobody is arguing about which tour won.
They’re just playing.
The Solheim Cup is over.
Europe won.
And by this afternoon, the NFL will reclaim most of America.
That’s the nature of the sports calendar.
But maybe professional golf’s great lesson from the last four years is sitting right there in the Netherlands.
Freedom gives us the right to choose.
It does not guarantee that the path we choose leads where we hoped.
The LIV players were free to leave.
The PGA Tour is free to decide the terms of a return.
And the fans are free to wonder why it took four years for everyone to remember what we wanted in the first place.
We didn’t want control.
We wanted golf.
Sometimes the grass isn’t greener.
Sometimes it’s just different grass.
And sometimes, after wandering around on the other side of the fence, you discover that the people who stayed have already moved on.
Enjoy Your Sunday – MWM
