There is no spinning bankruptcy. The entrails of a failed vanity project lay scattered about the floor of a New Jersey court. What was LIV Golf met a fitting end, its critics would argue, a bloody conclusion predicated on irrational spending that proved unsustainable in a time of war.
It was never about golf for Saudi Arabia, which blew $5bn (£3.7bn) torching the sport’s ecosystem over a four-year period. In the context of these wild Trumpian times, the launch in Hertfordshire already feels like an episode from a distant historical epoch.
Big sport was the big idea, a key policy driver in the repositioning of Saudi Arabia as a contemporary, forward-thinking state, far removed from the medieval theocratic autocracy from which it was trying to disassociate.
Alongside football, Formula One, tennis and boxing, golf was identified as a heavyweight normaliser.
What could be more civilising than 18 holes on a Sunday? Fancy a knock? The great deceit, of course, was that the only golfers taking part were professionals, persuaded to leave the established tours for eye-watering sums, even by PGA Tour standards.
