He’s older now, scarred, weighed down by a lifetime of what-ifs, but on Sunday in South Australia, golf learned that swagger has no shelf life. The Anthony Kim you remember – the talent and magnetism, the myth that calcified in his absence – turned out to be real after all. That unrestrained confidence, the same energy that had him drenched in champagne at Valhalla all those years ago, was still there. The world was his then. For one improbable round at LIV Golf Adelaide, it was again.
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The day was more than him, too. For five seasons, LIV Golf has been trying to manufacture a moment like Kim’s first victory in 16 years. They’ve thrown billions at aging champions and promising youth, orchestrated team drama that nobody asked for and promoted themselves with the desperation of someone insisting a party is fun. They’ve had Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau show that majors could be won off its non-competitive confines, while DeChambeau turned into one of the sport’s most compelling figures. Yet the Saudi-backed league struggled to garner interest, attention and importance. Nothing broke through the noise of the controversy that engulfs it.
Yet this weekend, LIV Golf officials finally got their manufactured moment. But as it turned out, they couldn’t manufacture it at all. They just had to wait for it to happen.
Kim’s win at age 40 matters to anyone who remembers what he was and mourns what he became. This was supposed to be impossible, a comeback not just from injury but from complete professional extinction. It was the kind of redemption narrative that writes itself, the kind of moment that transcends the mechanics of how it came to be. For once, LIV didn’t have to force it. The story was simply, genuinely good.
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LIV’s vocal fans (real and bots) took to social media, claiming it was a day that could only happen at LIV. They’re right, though not for the reasons they think. LIV’s guaranteed money model created space for a comeback that the meritocracy of traditional golf couldn’t accommodate, or wouldn’t.
For years, Kim existed only in YouTube clips and message board speculation. When he resurfaced on the course in 2024, his swing looked like someone trying to remember a language they hadn’t spoken in years. He was, by any objective measure, among the worst golfers competing at the professional level, kept in the field only because LIV operates more like an exhibition than a meritocracy. The league’s structure allowed Kim to collect checks while rediscovering his game at a pace that would’ve gotten him laughed out of Monday qualifiers on any other tour. He disappeared entirely for stretches in 2024, only to return in 2025 and eventually be relegated, even as LIV realised it needed to maintain some pretence of competitive standards. Yet it was this platform that made Sunday possible. Sometimes the problematic thing enables the meaningful thing and we have to sit with that discomfort.
Related: Anthony Kim’s message after his improbable victory was both raw and inspirational
If anything, that context made what Kim did more remarkable. After two years of struggle, something has clicked. He finished third in LIV Q School to earn his way back on the tour. In Australia, he was making the putts that once tortured him, displaying the ball-striking that defined him, closing out a tournament in a way that felt both shocking and somehow predetermined. For stretches, you could squint and see 2009 – the aggressive lines, the fearlessness, the gusto and joy.
Mostly, you saw something harder won: competence reclaimed not through natural talent alone but through sheer will and whatever quiet work he’d been doing when no one was watching. It reminded us why sports matter in the first place. We don’t watch for predictable outcomes or tidy narratives. We watch for the possibility of resurrection, for proof that time and failure aren’t always final, that the wilderness doesn’t have to be permanent. Anthony Kim spent more than a decade there – physical, professional, psychological. Sunday offered evidence that some things can be recovered, even if they’re never fully restored.
But we can’t ignore what underwrites this moment. Every LIV event is a soft-power exercise; the money that paid for Kim’s comeback comes with strings attached to geopolitical reputation management. LIV exists to make us feel exactly what we felt on Sunday: that the sports story matters more than where it happens. That’s the entire point. We can acknowledge the genuine achievement while recognising we’re being used in the process.
The honest response to Kim’s win isn’t to pretend it didn’t happen or to sanitise where it happened. It’s to acknowledge the whole complicated mess: the genuine athletic achievement, the legitimate emotional resonance and the deeply problematic stage on which it all unfolded. We can feel something about Kim winning again, even as we refuse to let that feeling obscure the larger questions about what golf has become and who profits from our nostalgia.
He won. It mattered. And it happened somewhere that forces us to ask what we’re willing to accept in exchange for the stories we want to tell ourselves. That’s not a clean ending, but it’s an honest one.
