Golf, like family, has a way of bringing people back

You hit a terrible shot, you get another one. You miss a three-footer, you get another hole. You lose a match, there is always another tournament.

Apparently, this philosophy now applies to professional golf itself.

After four years of behaving like two families who stopped speaking after a particularly ugly wedding, golf is once again discussing the possibility of everyone sitting at the same table.

LIV Golf has just finished its 2026 season, and its future is suddenly less certain than it looked when the whole thing began. Ian Poulter, one of LIV’s most recognisable faces, admitted this week that he isn’t sure whether he will continue. LIV has secured a non-binding term sheet for fresh investment for 2027, but the final agreement is still to be completed. Patrick Reed has already left LIV and is preparing to return to the PGA Tour.

This is golf, so naturally nobody agrees on how the reunion should work.

Rory McIlroy has questioned what value some LIV players would bring back. Scottie Scheffler, on the other hand, has been more welcoming. His view is fairly simple: if Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau are available, why wouldn’t you want the best players playing against each other?

I understand both sides.

When LIV arrived, it wasn’t just another golf tour. It was a declaration of war, with enormous money, shorter events, team golf and a lot of very unhappy people. Players had to make choices. Some chose the PGA Tour. Some chose LIV. Some chose the money. Some chose principle. And some, if we are being honest, probably chose the option that involved the least amount of explaining to their accountant.

Now the golf world is wondering whether the divorce settlement might be more complicated than the divorce.

Brooks Koepka has already shown that returning is possible. Patrick Reed is following. The question now is what happens if bigger names want to come back.

Imagine the locker room.

“Welcome back.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry about everything.”

“No problem.”

“By the way, you owe us $25 million.”

“Actually, I was going to ask if you had a tee time.”

Golfers, thankfully, have short memories when there is a good fourball involved.

The funny thing is that this is hardly new. Golf has always been full of rivalries that looked enormous from the outside and rather less important once the players got together.

Lee Trevino was one of the great characters of the game. When Tony Jacklin once tried to silence him before a round, telling him they didn’t need to talk, Trevino’s response was perfect: “You don’t have to talk, Tony … you just have to listen.”

That is probably the correct way to handle professional golf politics too.

Listen. Smile. Then go hit your drive.

Trevino also came from a time when golf was a very different business. Before the private jets and guaranteed contracts, he was hustling on municipal courses and playing money games. At the 1968 US Open, after shooting 69, he sat near the practice green in a golf cart with a beer — and nobody paid much attention to him. A few years later he was one of the biggest stars in the game.

That is the part of golf I find most amusing. The numbers change, the purses change, the equipment changes, but the players remain golfers.

Give a golfer enough money and he will still complain about a bad bounce.Give him a $10 million purse and he will still ask his caddie why the pin is in such a stupid place. And give him a 30-foot putt for a million dollars and he will still say, “I knew I had that one.”

For Indian golf, the LIV-PGA story is particularly interesting because we have skin in the game. Anirban Lahiri is entering his fifth straight season with Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers GC. He has been part of the LIV experiment from the beginning and has experienced both its attractions and its complications. He is also one of the few Indians to have operated at that level of the global game for so long.

At the same time, Indian golf is becoming increasingly relevant on the other side of the divide. The DP World India Championship returns to Delhi Golf Club in October with a $4 million purse, and the field is already attracting major international names, including PGA Tour winner Min Woo Lee. Shubhankar Sharma and Lahiri are among the Indian names attached to the event.

And then there is another interesting development: the LIV-backed International Series India, which was scheduled to return to Prestige Golfshire, has been cancelled. That tells us something about how quickly the professional golf landscape can change.

For years, Indian golf fans worried about whether our players could break into the big leagues. Now the bigger question is: which big league?

Maybe that is the real lesson from the last four years. Golf tried to divide itself into camps. But the sport itself refused to cooperate.

Fans still want to see Scheffler against Rahm. They want McIlroy against DeChambeau. They want the majors to mean something. They want the Ryder Cup. They want the best players in the world in the same tournament often enough to know who really is the best.

Players, meanwhile, want to earn money, play good golf and have some control over their careers.None of these things are mutually exclusive. At least they shouldn’t be.

The Tour Championship this week is another reminder of what professional golf does best. Thirty of the best players in the world will gather, and this time everyone starts from scratch under the new format. No handicaps. No favours. Just golf. That is probably where all the arguments eventually end.

And golf has a wonderfully brutal way of settling arguments. The ball doesn’t care which tour you played on last week. It doesn’t care how much you were paid. It doesn’t care whether Rory likes you. It doesn’t care whether Scottie welcomes you back. It certainly doesn’t care about your Instagram following. It just sits there. And waits.

Maybe that is why I think a reunion is inevitable in some form. Golfers are competitors, but they are also addicted to competition. You can give them money, fame, teams and guarantees, but eventually the best players want to know one thing: “Can I beat him?”

That is the oldest currency in golf.

And if the PGA Tour and LIV finally figure out how to put the best players back in the same room, they may discover something the rest of us already know.

Golf is much more fun when everybody is fighting on the same golf course.

Rahil Gangjee is a professional golfer, sharing through this column what life on a golf course is like