Brooks Koepka’s prodigal return from LIV begins the healing the PGA Tour needs
And, less than 24 hours before Koepka's first comeback tee time, Patrick Reed was welcomed back, too.
If you’ve never heard the parable of the “Prodigal Son,” you can watch it unfold in real time over the next few months on the PGA Tour.
LIV defector Brooks Koepka is back.
It’s the biggest moment in golf since Phil Mickelson announced he was joining the renegade league on June 6, 2022. Koepka, a five-time major championship winner, an all-American success story, is the first LIV player to kneel and beg forgiveness of the men that he betrayed.
This is biblical, if you will, in its importance to the golf world.
Briefly: Jesus, in Luke 15: 13-31, tells a tale in which the younger son of a rich man asks to have his inheritance immediately, so he can seek his fortune in the world. The son soon squanders the money, the economy collapses, and he hits rock bottom feeding pigs (sorry, LIV fans). The son then crawls back home, hoping his father will hire him as a servant. Instead, the father rejoices at his son’s return and calls for a feast, featuring a fatted calf.
In this analogy, Koepka is the son. New PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp is the father — or, perhaps the stepfather, considering Jay Monahan ran the Tour when Koepka followed dozens of other LIV defectors, all of whom Monahan banned, and who remain banned by Rolapp.
The feast of the fatted calf? That would be the Farmers Insurance Open, Koepka’s first tournament during his season of mild penance. It begins Thursday at Torrey Pines in San Diego. Harris English is the defending champion. Two-time major winner Xander Schauffele, ranked sixth, and U.S. Open champion J.J. Spaun, ranked seventh, lead a 147-player field that includes 25 of the top 50 players in the world.
But make no mistake: This is Brooks Koepka’s party.
But he’s bringing guests.
About 24 hours before Koepka’s marquee comeback tee time, golf’s biggest brat, LIV dud Patrick Reed, announced that he will return to the PGA Tour, too. Reed, who won just once on LIV, on Wednesday said in a statement that he will leave LIV and compete on the DP World Tour until Aug. 25, when he will be eligible to play in PGA Tour events. His DP performances have him ranked 29th in the world, which, along with his lifetime exemption as a Masters champion, virtually assures him entry to all four majors this year.
The parameters of Reed’s imminent return are murky, and he has applied to return to the PGA Tour in 2027 as a past champion (he has nine wins), but he is not subject to the hastily constructed Returning Player Program (RPP) that Koepka’s interest spurred and targets only the biggest names on LIV.
One of the facets of the program produced a 147-player field at the Farmers. It would have been a 144-player field, but according to Rolapp’s RPP, the Tour couldn’t kick out an actual qualifier to add Koepka. However, adding Koepka made it necessary to add two other players to balance out the three-player groups. That meant alternates Lanto Griffin and Jackson Suber got spots.
The eventual return of Reed indicates that Rolapp is eager to build his business and to siphon talent from LIV, no matter how bad the optics or how minor the love. Reed, who won the Dubai Desert Classic last week on the DP World Tour, is a far less formidable presence than Koepka. Further, he has a reputation as a longtime cheater with a bad temper, a potty mouth, and little time for fellow competitors.
Rolapp might not kill the fatted calf for Reed, but, as Rolapp knows from his NFL days dealing with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, every sport needs villains.
With a 12:32 p.m. EST tee time Thursday and a 1:38 p.m. tee time Friday, Koepka will be part of the featured group with Ludvig Åberg, an inoffensive rising Eurostar, and Max Homa, the PGA Tour’s social media genius.
The program is open to any LIV player who won a major from 2022-25 and has been away from the PGA Tour for at least two years, a group that includes only Koepka, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and Cameron Smith, all of whom have, so far, decided to stay with LIV. They have until Monday to change their minds, and then the application window closes.
So, for the foreseeable future, it’s the Brooks Koepka Returning Player Program.
As a punitive measure, the program restricts Koepka earning power from ancillary means, such as FedEx Cup bonus money and the Player Equity Program, for varied periods of time; makes sure that Koepka doesn’t bump anyone from any field; requires that he plays in at least 15 events this season; and demands a $5 million donation to charity.
None of this is especially “punitive” for the likes of Koepka, who reportedly made $165 million in signing bonus and winnings on LIV, added to his $43 million he made on the Tour.
Why does this matter?
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Because it is the first real, tangible, important step into reconciling the best LIV players with the best players in the world, which is what fans deserve.
The Tour suffered from the absences of superb players in their primes such as Koepka, Rahm, DeChambeau, young Chilean star Joaquin Niemann, who has been the cream of the LIV Tour, and even Mickelson, whose game is garbage but whose name still would sell tickets on both the PGA and Champions tours.
The careers and games of all of the LIV players suffered, playing benign, inferior courses in 54-hole tournaments against laughable competition.
The game also lost personalities to LIV obscurity: Koepka’s surliness, Rahm’s earnestness, Dustin Johnson’s goofiness, Mickelson’s buttery condescension, and DeChambeau’s energetic petulance which, thanks to YouTube, has somehow transformed into energetic affability.
None of the LIV stars has sworn to never return to the PGA Tour, but no one is better suited to begin reconciliation than Koepka.
When he joined LIV in 2022, in contrast to most players who were clearly interested in only the sportswashing money offered by the Saudi-backed rival tour, Koepka was cast as a reluctant defector — a massive talent who feared that the injuries he’d been dealing with for months might derail the career of the most promising player since Rory McIlroy.
Koepka, mellowed by years of insignificance and decline, seemed repentant when he addressed his return at a Farmers news conference Tuesday. He was less like the Koepka who belligerently denied cheating at the 2023 Masters, when his caddie told Koepka’s playing partner which club Koepka had used, and more like the Koepka who, in 2018 at Shinnecock, won a second consecutive U.S. Open: reflective, appreciative, mature.
There are reasons for that.
Since winning the 2023 PGA Championship, which keeps him qualified for all majors, Koepka has finished inside the top 25 of his last eight majors just once. In 2025, he finished tied for 30th in the LIV rankings among just 52 regular players, many of them the definitions of “washed” and “obscure.” Koepka’s game is poor, and, at 35, time is running out.
His family life has changed, too. His wife, Jena Sims, suffered a miscarriage last fall.
Koepka, who has a 2½-year old son named Crew, enjoys fatherhood, and the international nature of the LIV Tour, combined with playing DP World Tour events in Europe to accumulate world golf ranking points, made a normal family life more difficult than he’d imagined.
“Just having my family around’s really important. I’ve grown up a lot over the last few years, and especially the last few months,” he said.
The timeline of his decision seems dubious on its face, both from him and the PGA Tour.
Koepka said Tuesday that he negotiated his release from LIV, finalized on Dec. 23, before contacting any PGA Tour entities regarding reinstatement. He said only then did he contact Tiger Woods, the chairman of the PGA Tour’s competition committee, and, voilá, just 19 days later, over the busiest holiday season of the calendar year, the PGA Tour had devised a comprehensive Return to Play protocol for the Koepka crowd.
It took five years for these guys to agree on how to limit golf ball flight. So, yeah.
The machinations that led to Koepka’s return are far less important than the reality of Koepka’s return. In many ways, Koepka was the PGA Tour’s biggest loss to LIV.
Rahm was more dynamic, DeChambeau was more interesting, Koepka was the best player, was the best athlete, was American, and was a major championship-winning machine.
Does McIlroy win eight times in Koepka’s absence? Does he complete the career Grand Slam last April if Koepka’s in good form?
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More significantly, does Scottie Scheffler win 17 times, including three majors, if Koepka’s not honing his skills against Pat Perez on a burned-out course in Indiana? (Notably, Perez, Kevin Na, and Hudson Swafford also have been reinstated, sort of, pending unspecified penalties. Perez plans to join the Champions Tour when he turns 50 in March, pending penalties and fines.)
Maybe Koepka delays Scottie’s ascension, and maybe he slows Rory’s roll. Maybe not.
He isn’t likely to make much noise any time soon, especially at Torrey, where he’s missed four of five cuts at the Farmers.
At any rate, the game will be better for the presence of Koepka’s talent. His penalties aren’t nearly harsh enough, considering the hundreds of millions of dollars players like Sheffler, McIlroy, Rickie Fowler, Jordan Spieth, and Justin Thomas left on the table by declining LIV offers, but that isn’t Rolapp’s main objective.
Rolapp, the NFL’s former chief media and business officer, oversaw much of the growth of the most lucrative league in the history of the planet. Don’t expect Monday to be the last chance for the biggest LIV stars to return. Rolapp clearly will do anything he needs to do to accommodate the return of any player who can help the PGA Tour heal.
Just after noon on Thursday, Koepka, the prodigal son, begins that healing.