Turns Out Sportswashing Makes You Bad At Sports!

Trump’s favorite golfer, Bryson DeChambeau, missed his third straight cut at a major this weekend, falling short of the +4 number needed to see the weekend at the U.S. Open. DeChambeau is not a PGA Tour golfer, as he was the highest profile defection to the formerly Saudi-backed LIV Golf. This was established as a challenge to the PGA Tour’s supremacy in the regime’s broader attempt to use sports and entertainment to try to make the world forget about its heinous crimes, and now they are abandoning it because Bryson’s favorite president’s war in Iran has royally fucked up the global economy, especially for oil producing Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia. The problems with LIV are and were myriad, and now the league is on a path to reinvent itself as it tries to find $350 million in funding while retaining its stars who only joined because they decided that their souls did come with nine-figure price tags.

The Saudis paid exorbitant (back-loaded) contracts for golf stars like Bryson ($125 million), Jon Rahm ($300 million), Phil Mickelson ($200 million), Brooks Koepka ($130 million), and Dustin Johnson ($125 million). This was an assault on a PGA Tour that was not able to compete in that monetary stratosphere, and for a while there, many felt that LIV was an existential threat to golf as nearly a third of the world’s top 150 players defected. After 2022 British Open Champion Cameron Smith left for LIV on a $100 million deal, the takeover began to feel a little inevitable.

But LIV has one teensy tiny little problem: they play a rinky dink format for babies that makes all of its competitors soft as a marshmallow in Riyadh heat. PGA Tour events are 72 holes (four straight days of golf), and they send the bottom half of the field home after 36 holes. But on the blood money retirement tour, they only play 54 holes, and everyone gets a participation trophy in the form of a check, and there is no cut. This has turned all the LIV golfers, especially Bryson “maybe I’ll be a content creator” DeChambeau, into delicate little flowers who cannot play in the world’s most difficult events against the best golfers alive.

The U.S. Open is the hardest of the four golf majors, as every hosting course each year takes it upon themselves to design an elite golf torture chamber. These guys are so good, and the equipment has become so advanced that schmucks like me can be good if I’m willing to spend enough money, that a lot of these tournaments now are just infinite birdie battles. The U.S. Open is designed to be difficult, and a lot of these LIV schlubs living the easy golf life, including Trump’s big beefy boy who only believes we went to the moon because Elon Musk said so, wilted under the pressure and the wind of Shinnecock Hills Golf Club the first two days. Another LIV Golf MAGA enthusiast who is more known for his online persona than golf these days, Phil Mickelson, didn’t even play in the U.S. Open, as he is in the midst of a messy “you can’t fire me I quit” breakup with one of his golf clubs. Things are not going great for LIV right now.

OOOOOOF

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— Denny Carter (@dennycarter.bsky.social) June 20, 2026 at 8:01 AM

Of the 13 LIV players in the U.S. Open, five missed the cut, including the league’s two biggest stars in Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. As Shane Ryan of Golf Digest noted, “At the end of play on Friday at the 2026 U.S. Open, there were 21 players at even par or better, led by Wyndham Clark at seven under. None of them are currently playing for LIV Golf.”

Just two majors have been won by LIV players, Brooks Koepka who won his fifth major at the 2023 PGA Championship, and Bryson at the 2024 U.S. Open that Rory McIlroy painfully gagged away, setting up his Masters heroics the following year to complete the career grand slam in a dream Sunday pairing with Bryson who self-ejected and turned it into a two-man battle between Rory and Justin Rose. Koepka’s decline cannot be blamed solely on LIV as he has had a slew of injuries derail his career, but Bryson is the poster child for LIV’s implosion. Missing three cuts in a row at the same time that LIV’s financial backing is evaporating thanks to the idiotic war Bryson’s good buddy started and now can’t get himself out of feels bigger than golf. We live in an age of increasing MAGA hubris, and they cannot hide from it on the golf course. 

Golf statistician Ron Kloss revealed back in December that only Bryson and Tyrrell Hatton have improved their average performance in majors after joining LIV Golf, and everyone else’s game has deteriorated when it matters most. Bryson has missed three straight cuts at majors since then, so Hatton is really the league’s lone success story, coming into Saturday at the U.S. Open tied for 34th and two over par. LIV top 10 finishes had also fallen from 23% to 15%, with Jon Rahm down 23 places on average.

This should not be happening. The best golfer in the world is Scottie Scheffler, in the middle of a genuine Tiger-like run over the past few years. Just behind him is Rory McIlroy, perhaps the only thing golf has ever had to a truly sympathetic and anti-establishment figure, as McIlroy stuck his neck out to defend the Tour against the LIV assault, only to have the Tour stab him in the back and make a deal with LIV. These two guys are who Bryson and Jon Rahm should be competing with atop the tippy top of golf’s hierarchy to stake their claim as the King of golf’s first post-Tiger era. Instead, they’re 32nd and 8th in the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR), respectively, in part because LIV’s watered down tournament structure has been banned from accumulating OWGR points, which has made it increasingly difficult for more LIV guys to qualify for majors.

Despite the fact that Rahm and Bryson have proven that they can compete with Rory and Scottie, they struggle to do so now, and clearly derailed their careers to some degree because they took a lot of blood money to play a kind of golf that both in theory and in data suggests it harms the players’ ability to excel at the highest level. A year ago, we all thought we would finally get the made-for-TV Rory versus Bryson proxy war, and ever since about the fourth hole when he self-ejected with back-to-back bogies, Bryson has been more of a golf YouTuber than anything resembling a serious threat to win a major.

We saw similar dynamics in soccer where Jordan Henderson took Saudi sportswashing money to join Al-Ettifaq in 2023, and then stepped on the pitch against a very different kind of competition, immediately regretted it and returned to Ajax after less than half a season. Gabriel Vega joined the Saudi league at 21 years old, was heavily criticized for joining what is becoming soccer’s Senior PGA Tour for Christiano Ronaldo and Sadio Mané types, and then he left after two years to play real club soccer in a system trying to win and not cosplay major professional sports in service of making a murderous regime look normal.

Turns out that when you sell your soul and abandon the standards of sport to play a watered-down version created by mass murderers, you get worse at the sport! Who could have ever thought this would happen? Oh well, maybe there’s another career pivot here for MAGA’s favorite golfer. Perhaps Bryson can spend his Sunday shooting some neat trick shot golf videos for his burgeoning YouTube career while real professional athletes compete at the sport’s highest level for one of its most coveted prizes.