Bryson DeChambeau Got More Than $100 Million Guaranteed to Join LIV Golf

The newly-launched LIV Golf tour has been a huge topic this week, as a slow trickle of prominent players have defected from the PGA Tour to join the Saudi-backed venture. Perhaps most staggering has been the amount of money those pros have gotten from the new tour. One example is Bryson DeChambeau, who reportedly got more than $100 million guaranteed to join LIV.

Golf Digest's Dan Rapaport reported that figure this week, claiming DeChambeau got "over $100,000,000 guaranteed to join LIV Golf." Rapaport also pointed out that the Saudi-backed league had paid somewhere between $400 and $500 million for Dechambeau, Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.

That figure also doesn't include money paid to bring in other top names. It's just an insane amount of money and for what? Johnson is still a top-level player, so his defection was big news. But Mickelson is 51 and his career was already winding down, and the most interesting thing about DeChambeau was his feud with Brooks Koepka, which won't be continuing if they're on different tours. Sure DeChambeau hits bombs but other than that he's not going to draw viewers.

I guess we'll see how this goes. The leaders of the new tour clearly think they have a really smart plan to take on the PGA Tour head-to-head. They think handing out gobs of cash is the way to get it done. We'll see if it works.