Anthony Kim’s Adelaide Victory Shows What LIV Golf Actually Needed All Along

I’ve been covering professional golf for 35 years now, and I’ve learned that the most meaningful moments in this game rarely announce themselves with fanfare. They sneak up on you. Last Sunday in Adelaide, Australia, one of those moments happened when Anthony Kim defeated Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau to claim a LIV Golf event victory—and frankly, it tells us something important about what LIV has been missing in its desperate scramble for legitimacy.

Let me be clear: this wasn’t just another tournament result. This was a comeback story with real teeth. A 40-year-old man who’d vanished from professional golf for 12 years, battling demons we can now acknowledge—alcohol and drug addiction alongside serious injuries—returning to the winner’s circle after 16 years away. That’s not something you can manufacture with a $300 million check or slick marketing.

The Credibility Problem Money Can’t Solve

Here’s what strikes me most about this whole LIV narrative: the league has been operating under the assumption that meaning flows downward from capital. Sign the biggest names. Offer the biggest checks. Create the biggest pressure moments. But what actually happened in Adelaide suggests the opposite—that meaning sometimes emerges from the margins, from the places where genuine human struggle intersects with genuine second chances.

For a league that has been trying to buy meaning through $300 million checks to Jon Rahm (or what some believe could be $500 million) and Bryson DeChambeau, LIV Golf found the essence of it without a swoop of a pen on Sunday when Anthony Kim was triumphant over the two aforementioned stars in Adelaide, Australia.

That passage nailed it. In my years caddying for Tom Lehman and covering the PGA Tour since the late ’80s, I learned that authenticity matters more than purse sizes. People care about who you are and what you’ve overcome. They care about the narrative arc—the lowest lows and highest highs. Kim had that in spades, and when he beat two of the tour’s biggest names in a 72-hole format, something shifted.

The Structural Changes That Actually Matter

Now, here’s where the analysis gets interesting. LIV Golf made two significant modifications this offseason, and I don’t think the importance of these decisions can be overstated—especially for a league that’s been criticized as gimmicky and unsustainable.

First: They expanded the qualifying field in their promotions event, moving from the top two finishers to the top three. Kim finished at 5-under—one stroke behind Bjorn Hellgren and six back of Richard Lee—but crucially, two strokes clear of those tied for fourth. In any previous season, Kim would have been left out entirely.

Second: They expanded tournaments from 54 holes to 72 holes. This is massive, and here’s why: the old format rewarded hot streaks and punished consistency. Fifty-four holes is a three-day sprint. Seventy-two holes is an actual test.

This is proof that making changes when a situation necessitates it can have a significant trickle-down effect. You may not notice it the first day, the first month or the first year, but it compounds in the background as life marches on.

I’ve seen tour adjustments come and go over three decades, and most of them are cosmetic. These aren’t. The shift to 72 holes legitimizes the format in ways that matter to serious golfers. And opening that third qualifying spot? That’s not just charitable—it’s smart business because it creates pathways for stories like Kim’s to happen.

What This Means for the Tour Wars

Having covered 15 Masters and watched the PGA Tour navigate every crisis imaginable, I can tell you this: LIV’s real competition isn’t PGA Tour events. It’s the question of whether golf fans believe what they’re watching matters. And that’s harder to buy than any player.

Kim’s victory matters because it wasn’t ordained. He earned it. He earned his spot in the league through the promotions event. He earned his win by shooting the best golf when it counted most. He beat the guys who got the mega-deals, and he did it in a format that actually resembles traditional professional golf.

Kim is the personification of change, and it may have taken him 12 years to get back to golf and 16 years to reenter the winner’s circle, but the jubilation he and the golf world shared Sunday is impossible to put a price on

That’s the insight the source gets right. You cannot price that jubilation. The fist pumps, the birdies thrown at two of the tour’s brightest stars, the validation that sometimes people can come back from anywhere—that’s the stuff that builds legitimacy over time.

The Real Lesson for LIV

LIV Golf’s fundamental problem has never been the players or the money. It’s been the legitimacy question. Does this tour *mean* something? Does winning here mean something? For four years running the 54-hole format with celebrities and team drama, the answer was debatable.

Now, with a 72-hole format, with an expanded qualifying path that rewards merit, and with a genuine comeback story that captured the sport’s imagination, there’s an opening. Not a guarantee, but an opening. That’s real progress.

In my experience, golf is at its best when it tells true human stories within fair competitive structures. Anthony Kim’s week in Adelaide did both. For LIV Golf, that might matter more than any check ever written.