Pablo Torre

But the estimations of how much

the piff has lost on Liv.

Is there a back of the envelope math that you feel like makes sense?

Oh, yeah.

So the reason I wanted to bring Alan Shipnuck, our journalist friend, back on the show is not to just throw dirt on the apparent grave of live golf, the subject Alan literally wrote the book about and has covered as closely as anybody.

I wanted to have Alan back on because by understanding how boring old golf became this geopolitical soap opera, I suspect that we might find something out about the future of sports in general.

Because when Liv first launched, the premise of spending $5 billion in less than five years was not an indictment.

It was an advertisement.

This is what Saudi Arabia can do.

That was what was so eye-opening as much as anything.

The Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, the public investment fund, at the discretion of Yassir al-Rumayyan, who was the head of it, but above him, of course, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, deploying their sum total of...

about $900 billion that they had to distribute.

And they chose the PGA Tour, the most country club traditionalist sports organization in America, arguably, as their first big project.

But at some point late last year, it began to look like Saudi Arabia's unlimited budget, which had reportedly also guaranteed $125 million to Bryson DeChambeau, for instance,

might actually have limits after all.

And by the end of February, President Donald Trump, the golfer-in-chief himself, who was scheduled to host two live events at his courses this year, also decided to do this.

Liv's executives tried to dismiss Saudi Arabia's collateral financial damage from the war as just a flesh wound.

But in April, the Saudi Public Investment Fund finally presented its new five-year plan, a plan which focused on, quote, maximizing financial returns and strengthening investment efficiency.

sounding more like McKinsey than the money waterfall that would eternally keep sports properties in America going up and to the right.

In fact, this plan ultimately reduced Saudi Arabia's international investments by 10%, at which point I started monitoring what the sports industry was thinking about the war in Iran.