LIV's Saudi boss left the league the way he entered it

Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s head-spinning return to LIV Golf on Sunday quickly earned a place in the annals of “awkward post-breakup behavior” history, somewhere between “asking your ex to borrow his printer for a class assignment” and “immediately dating her best friend.”

But if the Saudi businessman responsible for funneling $6 billion into the upstart league before abruptly withdrawing financial support earlier this year was hoping to slip by his old flame’s place unnoticed … well, he didn’t do a very good job.

“I think we all found out last night that he was going to be out here,” Bryson DeChambeau said Sunday, shortly after concluding his final day of play at LIV’s latest event in New Jersey. “I think he needed to have some conversations with the president. That was a whole ‘nother thing. I’m not going to get involved with that.”

As play got underway on Sunday during the final day of competition at “LIV New York,” cameras captured the governor of the Saudi government’s trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund standing next to Donald Trump in a private suite at the president’s golf course in New Jersey. In them, Al-Rumayyan looks about as he usually does: in a trim polo, wearing a very expensive watch, sporting an amiable grin and a salt-and-pepper beard. And silent. Stone-cold silent.

These photos might not have been all that unusual were it not for the venue: At a golf tournament for the league Al-Rumayyan’s Saudi PIF is in the late stages of dropping altogether, halting its investment after half a decade and more than $6 billion. Once a fixture at LIV events, Al-Rumayyan has all but stopped attending LIV gatherings after his employer’s decision to stop funding LIV. That is, except for Sunday at Bedminster, at the end of the same week when LIV announced a new, mystery investor (reportedly the private equity firm BC Capital) and elected not to comment about intensifying rumors that the league is on the brink of canceling its team championships scheduled for Michigan at the end of this month.

If DeChambeau was upset with his soon-to-be ex-boss for his sudden ejection from the LIV project, he did his best to hide it, opting to take the high-road when asked about Al-Rumayyan’s surprise appearance.

“It was great to see him out here,” DeChambeau said. “I think he’s done wonders for us and the global game of golf. How it moves forward, I think there’s a great place for the PIF and where they want to be moving forward. Where that is, I’m not exactly sure. I have no idea. But I know that he’s supported golf for a long, long time, and as this transitions over hopefully into the new investor’s hands and into the players’ hands, and that’s what it’s going to be, in the players’ hands, we really have an opportunity to align a lot of the global incentives to be a force for good for the game.”

Not even DeChambeau could hide from the evasiveness of that answer – the big man himself admitted it was “a lot of wordiness.” But DeChambeau’s own non-answer underlined a theme that has been growing harder to ignore as the Saudi PIF prepares to pull the ripcord out of LIV — a theme that many of DeChambeau’s previous non-answers when asked about the shadow figure behind the league have served to underline.

That theme: Al-Rumayyan and his Saudi brethren have enacted an enormous amount of change upon golf as we know it over these last five years. And yet in that time, they’ve said almost nothing.

Yasir Al-Rumayyan and President Trump take in the action at LIV New York in Bedminster, N.J. Getty Images

In the short history of LIV Golf, there is perhaps no character whose name engenders a greater sense of mystery than Al-Rumayyan’s.

The PIF leader and top lieutenant to Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman played perhaps the most critical role of any person alive in LIV’s germination from a glitzy idea into a multi-billion-dollar investment. The stories of LIV’s founding and early days are littered with references to Al-Rumayyan — known by the players simply as “H.E.,” for, “His Excellency” — and the vision of the league’s current existence is littered with his fingerprints, evident everywhere from its New York City HQ (in the same midtown skyscraper used to house several other PIF-funded startups) to many iterations of its Pro-Am schedule, where Al-Rumayyan was a regular fixture.

The simple truth is that for most of LIV’s history, Al-Rumayyan has been the man responsible for cutting the checks. As you can imagine, that’s a pretty big deal for a startup with a $100 million per month cash burn rate.

But Al-Rumayyan’s public influence has not necessarily manifested in public access. Outside of a short (and ill-fated) interview with Jay Monahan to announce the famed “merger” between Al-Rumayyan’s league and the PGA Tour, Yasir has never granted a single interview in the golf world. In that time, he has left countless others — DeChambeau chief among them — to speak for him and his Saudi partners.

In the end, it is entirely conceivable that Al-Rumayyan’s presidential visit to Bedminster is the last we see of him at a LIV event. If it is, it will bring its own set of questions. Was this kind of soft power the Saudis’ chief interest in golf? Was the competition they asked golf fans to care about less important than the people it attracted into their orbit? Were the players they paid untold millions compensated at least in part for their willingness to speak on behalf of Al-Rumayyan?

The current LIV leadership would have you know that the answer to each of these questions isn’t nearly as black-and-white as it seems. Golf has always been a vessel to something bigger, and there’s nothing wrong with that … even if “something bigger” is the leader of the free world.

True as that may be, Al-Rumayyan’s appearance is a reminder that LIV’s investors might have done the league a few billion favors, but those favors came at a price. The price of standing at a podium answering questions for a man who never bothered to answer them himself.

For DeChambeau and for the rest of crowd who spotted their ex-flame floating around the property on Sunday at Bedminster, that explanation wasn’t necessary on Sunday evening. As it turns out, sometimes our loudest words are the ones we don’t say at all.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.