When Bryson DeChambeau tees off at the U.S. Open this afternoon, he will be doing so with the future bearing down on him. The LIV Golf Tour is about to lose its funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which means that DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and the rest of the former PGA greats who defected to LIV will soon have a decision to make: Do they come crawling back to the PGA, or find new day jobs?
DeChambeau’s options may be more limited than Rahm’s or Brooks Koepka’s, who has already begun his journey back at the bottom of the PGA Tour. That’s because DeChambeau is more or less the face of LIV Golf, and was happy to be something of an ambassador for the tour as it courted a right-wing fanbase and established itself as a culture-war front. A return to the PGA Tour would require DeChambeau to eat a lot of shit, and so far he doesn’t seem willing to do that. “I think there’s a way to solve any problem,” DeChambeau said last month when asked if he would consider returning to the PGA. “It’s really about if the membership wants me back.”
Given his recent play, there’s no urgent reason for the PGA Tour to want DeChambeau back. At the Masters in April, he missed the cut with a brutal triple-bogey on the final hole of the second round, unable to extricate himself from a greenside bunker. He lost 2.5 strokes to the field over those two rounds, in line with senior golfer Zach Johnson. The next month, at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, Bryson slapped it around the course and whined about his irons for two days before again missing the cut. Again he lost about 2.5 strokes to the field, a little worse than senior golfer Stewart Cink.
On the LIV Tour, DeChambeau has been fine in 2026. Amid a top-heavy group of mostly washed-up players, he ranks second in strokes gained tee to green, and first in ball striking. That doesn’t matter, though, because LIV doesn’t matter.
All of this leaves DeChambeau, a nine-time PGA Tour winner and two-time major champ who very well might be the greatest-ever driver of the golf ball, with one remaining option: Become a full-time YouTuber.
DeChambeau has been in the “content creation” game for some time now, and has been quite successful, racking up 2.74 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.
DeChambeau’s YouTube content is varied: Sometimes he takes his social media army and camera people to a local course and tries to break the course record. This, as golf enjoyers might know, is rarely difficult considering Bryson’s smooth seven-iron swing goes 220 yards. Also, he’s a pro, and any pro can wreck your local public course. Other times, Bryson invites fellow content creator types to play with him and try to break 50 on 18 holes. The never-ending string of birdies gets a little monotonous. Occasionally, Bryson makes a long putt and runs around like he won the Masters. For all his annoying characteristics, the guy seems to enjoy the game.
He’s made videos with Mr. Beast, including one in which he pretends to kill Mr. Beast during a trick shot gone wrong. He once gave away a Bentley after 12 days of trying to chip a ping-pong ball into a plastic shot cup. Scroll through his YouTube channel and you might find the one where he is hitting golf balls off the roof of a moving golf cart. There's also one where someone known as a Bryson Bro straps himself to a nearby water tower and chips balls to a green while another makes a 143-yard putt from the middle of the fairway. There’s lots of screaming and running around and chest bumping, things of that nature.
In July 2024, DeChambeau teamed up with insurrectionist presidential candidate Donald Trump in a Break 50 YouTube video that also happened to serve as nice campaign-season propaganda for Trump. DeChambeau functions as Trump’s hype man throughout, blurting, “let’s go” after every other Trump swing. DeChambeau manages to yell and laugh when Trump trickles in an eight-foot putt on the eighth hole with the single ugliest putting stroke I have ever seen.
The Bryson-Trump video was pitched as a fundraising effort for the Wounded Warrior Project. Almost a year after the video was published, it had raised around $34,000.
The question is whether this is all DeChambeau wants out of the rest of his professional life. So far, he’s doing his best to convince everyone that he doesn’t need the PGA Tour, and is in fact happy to spend the rest of his days making videos in which he hits wedge shots over his mansion onto a multi-tiered backyard green. "I think, from my perspective, I'd love to grow my YouTube channel three times, maybe even more," he said last month. “I'd love to do a bunch of dubbing in different languages, giving the world more reason to watch YouTube. And then I'd love to play tournaments that want me."
DeChambeau’s insistence that he’s focused on growing his YouTube channel, and excited about “dubbing in different languages,” can be read as a negotiating tactic. If the PGA Tour doesn’t beg for me to come back, he seems to say, I’m perfectly fine doing videos of me chipping foam golf balls into wine glasses placed on rafts in my pool for my 2.74 million YouTube subscribers. How effective such a tactic might be remains to be seen.
“I think he’s lost all sense of reality,” Eamon Lynch of Golf Channel said back in May, when LIV’s Saudi moneymen announced they would yank their blank check for the rebel golf tour at the end of the 2026 season. “He still thinks he has negotiating power. … Bryson is essentially saying you guys need me more than I need you. He thinks it would be satisfying for him to just go hit golf balls over his garage for the rest of his life.”
“If Bryson has one talent,” Lynch continued, “it’s illustrating the delta between self awareness and self absorption, and I don’t think he’s ever quite figured that out.”
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if DeChambeau’s true ambition is to make YouTube videos, or if he’s just pretending that’s the case in order to gain some leverage over the PGA Tour. Because both realities leave him in a place where he has to project to the world that trying to break 50 on a municipal course from the short tees is the same as finally breaking through at Augusta, or that running around the course with a manic Kevin Hart as his caddie is equal to conquering an ancient British Open venue that has tested the game’s greats for generations. That’s a sad position to be in, no matter how sincere DeChambeau may or may not be.
The tragedy of all this is that DeChambeau really is one of the best players on Earth, someone who could have been an all-timer if he weren’t so self-sabotaging. DeChambeau, as recently as 2021, was the third-best ball striker in the world. He gained more strokes off the tee in 2020 and 2021 than anyone else on the PGA Tour. He is the purveyor of the “bomb and gouge” style of golf, in which very jacked pro golfers hit the ball as hard as they can and don’t ever worry where it goes because when you’re that strong, it doesn’t matter. It’s spreadsheet golf, and it’s gross and perverse, but for a while it made DeChambeau one of the best two or three players alive. He was long ago dubbed “The Scientist” because he sought any angle to hack the game and reduce it to a math equation to be solved.
In 2022, DeChambeau made a big bet, one that was either a resounding success—he took well over $100 million from the Saudis to join the tour—or a spectacular failure, depending on whether you like the guy. We’re going to see a lot of elite golfers take the humble path back to PGA Tour relevance when LIV is finally swept into the dustbin of sportswashing history. Rahm, for his part, seems to be strategically distancing himself from the tour he joined in 2023.
Bryson has, so far, declined that path. Maybe he doesn’t even see it, and really is happy to chip golf balls over his garage for his YouTube followers. It’s not a green jacket, but it’s something.
