Crypto bros and golf fans, rejoice! Two and a half years after LIV Golf split from the PGA Tour in a theatrical splash of attitude and cash, the golf world remains as divided as ever, with two sets of stars running on parallel tracks. The game’s best only cross over four times a year, at the majors … and, now, in a made-for-TV holiday event called the “Crypto.com Showdown.”
Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka — the first two PGA Tour stalwarts, the latter two LIV’s most successful players — will tee it up at Las Vegas’ Shadow Creek golf course for what’s being billed as the “first-ever multi-million-dollar professional sports prize purse in CRO Cryptocurrency.”
The match will be broadcast on TNT, TBS and associated networks and apps, starting at 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday night. The “Inside the NBA” duo of Charles Barkley and Ernie Johnson will be broadcasting the Showdown, presumably with a bit less gravitas than employed at Augusta National.
One interesting wrinkle: this will be a team-play event, with six holes of best ball, six holes of alternate-shot, and six holes of singles play. It’s like a mini-Ryder Cup! But given how LIV has brought the concept of regular team play to the forefront of golf, it’s entirely possible that this could be a look at the future of the game.
Credit to the Showdown organizers for getting four of the game’s best on one course. McIlroy doesn’t have a major victory since 2014, but he’s still at the top of his game. Koepka has five majors, and is a threat any time he tees it up at one of golf’s marquee events. DeChambeau claimed his second U.S. Open this past June. And Scheffler is simply unstoppable, with a Masters victory, an Olympic gold medal and a Tour Championship win all in 2024 alone.
Let’s be honest: It’s pretty ridiculous that the only way outside of majors that we can see the game’s best sharing a course is a tricked-up made-for-TV event. They should be playing each other a dozen times a year, at the very least.
The U.S. Open duel between McIlroy and DeChambeau was one of the finest majors of the last decade. When Koepka is engaged, he’s as tough as anyone in the game. And Scheffler is so dominant that the rest of the field needs all the help it can get to slow him down.
Plus, these four — particularly DeChambeau — have the potential to be interesting personalities. There was a bit of what passes for trash talk in golf on the course on Monday, as DeChambeau hammered McIlroy on the range one more time:
“I’d like to go up against Bryson and try to get him back for what he did to me at the U.S. Open,” McIlroy said.
“To be fair,” DeChambeau replied, “you kind of did it to yourself.”
DeChambeau remains one of the game’s most fascinating figures, a budding social media superstar in a sport that’s otherwise struggling to find traction. Until he joined LIV, he was best known for his long-running feud with Koepka in the late 2010s. He opened up about that last week while promoting the Showdown.
“We had our spats,” DeChambeau said. “But we realized when we both went to LIV we had quite a few things in common. Kind of like stepbrothers in a sense. And we’ve developed a pretty solid relationship and have good respect for each other now.”
“We all get older, we all mature a little bit, and then you realize, hey, Bryson’s a good dude,” Koepka said. “I think he’s severely misunderstood and I think the world is actually starting to really see who Bryson DeChambeau is, which is cool. I’m the first person to admit it, I was wrong with what my original thoughts were.”
If Koepka and DeChambeau can get along … maybe all of golf can get along?
We’re a long way from any reunification of the game of golf. But for a night, at least, golf fans can get their first look at four of the game’s best sharing a course for the first time since the Open Championship in July. Enjoy it, because it’s the last time it’ll happen until the Masters in April.
