This week Bryson DeChambeau is in Saudi Arabia, kick-starting his fourth year with LIV Golf. It’s not surprising to see him in the Middle East. But when, a few weeks ago, the PGA Tour cracked open the door for recent major winners to make an easy return, DeChambeau’s continued commitment to LIV got slightly more complex. Monday marked a deadline by which he (and Jon Rahm and Cam Smith) could join Brooks Koepka in returning to the PGA Tour. That deadline has now passed.
Now what? DeChambeau will indeed honor the final year of his original LIV deal. But he’s also clearly been thinking seriously about how life could be different moving forward. His recent comments sent me back to a conversation we had six months ago in England during a practice round.
At the time, my aim was to write about DeChambeau’s wildly successful foray into YouTube, so that’s where our conversation began. But DeChambeau’s a big-picture thinker, so he steered our chat in the direction of media in general, both creating it and how the powers that be (LIV and the PGA Tour) could model a greater share of media rights to players. Players getting a bigger piece of the pie is, of course, a move that would benefit DeChambeau. But he’s also an expert in the space; one could argue that no player in the history of the game has ever leaned into golf’s alternate viewing avenues quite like DeChambeau.
Palmer’s name came up multiple times in our conversation, enough to realize The King owns serious real estate in DeChambeau’s consciousness. Rather than discuss how YouTube had changed DeChambeau’s marketability, he chose to discuss it in terms of value he was adding to the ecosystem, much like Palmer did decades ago.
“From my perspective, [marketability] is an ancillary thing to providing value to the game,” DeChambeau told me. “What Arnold Palmer did? He created a Golf Channel! Like, he was so much more outside of just playing golf and winning golf tournaments that probably was more meaningful, in a sense, in his career and his legacy and his footprint, than him actually winning tournaments. Right? You could argue that.
“Now, did golf help him? One hundred percent. But I looked at that and I’m like, Man, why doesn’t everybody do something like that? It takes a unique individual, but from a marketability perspective to value — I try to provide as much value as possible.”
DeChambeau’s avenue for new-age value is well known. It’s YouTube, which he considers the fairest platform to work with, given its revenue split with creators is around 50-50, and sometimes greater. He is worth an endless amount of money but had to go “in the red” for a few years, he said, to make his account profitable. Now he has a staff of 10 people working on his content business. The YouTube account boasts more than 2.5 million subscribers, more than the PGA Tour and LIV Golf combined.
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Golf fans may have scoffed in January when DeChambeau publicized for the first time that he’d consider just playing his golf on YouTube after his LIV deal ended, rather than sign his rights over to any tour in specific. On one hand, this could easily be a negotiating tactic — DeChambeau is in extension negotiations with LIV — but he admitted the same thing to me during that conversation in July.
DeChambeau says he’ll spend one to two days during each off week to create YouTube videos. His “Break 50” videos — which he has made with the likes of Donald Trump and Steph Curry — each take roughly the same amount of time as his tournament rounds. His initial dream for that series was “a podcast on steroids,” and whether or not he achieved that result, a schedule wholly devoted to YouTube gets his mind racing.
“Here’s the deal,” he began. “If I wasn’t playing tournament golf, I could do 3X the amount of YouTube videos. I could a video almost every single week. And come up with all these different series and ideas — what do you think those numbers could potentially be if I continue and fully went into it? That’s where I saw Mr. Beast and Dude Perfect and what they did. I said, I wanna create as much value as I can.”
He’s obviously not alone. LIV Golf also wants to create as much value as it can. The PGA Tour, too. But for a long time the media rights of pro golfers — who operate in most instances as contractors offering their skills to a TV broadcast while trying to climb a leaderboard — have been pooled together to retain maximum value. The PGA Tour’s annual revenue from its sale (and strict protection) of TV media rights sits around $1 billion. LIV Golf’s existence damaged those numbers, and the Tour has been making moves ever since to refashion its product for maximum profits. The Tour has long considered any pro golfer playing any golf competition on camera as part of its media package. But times are changing … slightly.
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Last summer, the PGA Tour loosened its regulations on players creating golf content during practice rounds. Any member who wanted to, say, create a video of themselves playing the front nine at TPC Sawgrass during tournament week would now be allowed to do so without issue. In the past, Tour pros would have to seek and receive special permission on a case-by-case basis. The doorway has cracked only slightly — for instance, live video, or videos involving more than one player still require approval — but it’s movement in the positive direction. Movement away from a model that DeChambeau called “monopolistic.”
And just because he sees it that way doesn’t mean he isn’t fascinated by the PGA Tour rights model. “It’s impressive,” DeChambeau said, adding that the Tour’s once-entirely non-profit status made it doubly effective. In order to change it — and in order for LIV to change, too — DeChambeau simply wants his phone to ring.
“I wish more people would just call me, you know?” he said. “Just talk to me.”
He admitted to being pretty black-and-white in his approach to complex issues in the past, and said he’s trying to approach things more neutrally these days, operating more in the gray. But he’d love for “individuals that make decisions” to look at what he’s done — for instance, posting his entire final round from the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst to his channel — and work with him to find a path that other pro golfers can follow.
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By individuals who make decisions, he very literally means Brian Rolapp but also someone like Fred Ridley, chairman of Augusta National, or Sellers Shy, the head of CBS’s golf coverage. DeChambeau will tell you that he wasn’t nearly knowledgeable enough during his time on the PGA Tour (2016-2022) to really opine on pushing the limits of media rights, but he’s learned a ton in the last four years. He considers himself fluent in LIV’s TV deal with FOX and the PGA Tour’s deal with NBC. Now, he very much wants a seat at some sort of table to figure out how antiquated systems could get pushed, as he said it, “into the future.”
“I wish I had better ability to make decisions for limits and tours,” DeChambeau said. “I know the value that could be created if it’s set up correctly in the media structure … I mean, I wish they would look at me and be like, Okay, Bryson, how do we invest that in a small fraction of what we’re trying to accomplish? How can we implement that in a small manner to test it? Rather than just No, we know what we are doing.”
Now, as the calendar turns to February 2026, it remains fascinating as ever to forecast where DeChambeau will appear next. Golf’s still-warring tours will fight for his allegiance. Golf’s powers that be will try to make him part of their plans. It’s hard to know what DeChambeau wants, how he’ll decide what’s next, where we’ll see him and where we won’t. His LIV Golf season begins this week. The mystery of what’s next is already underway.
