Bryson DeChambeau has lauded LIV Golf for saving his career and has opened up on suffering devastating family heartbreak just months after his departure from the PGA Tour. DeChambeau made the switch to LIV Golf in June 2022, following a seismic shift in the golfing world as the Saudi Arabian-backed breakaway organisation lured away top players from the PGA Tour.
The 30-year-old was one of the golfers who made the move despite facing backlash from media and fans. DeChambeau detailed how his switch to LIV Golf had initially painted him as a villain for joining the breakaway group.
However, it provided him with a career lifeline after he lost his dad, Jon DeChambeau, a former PGA Tour pro, at the age of 63 due to complications with diabetes. DeChambeau told the Telegraph how his perspective on golf changed afterwards.
"When my father passed, as it is for everyone, that was a huge deal to me and I started to realise the eminence of life like, at some point, it's all going to end," he said. "So yeah, you've got to be gracious with the time you have.
"You know, I'm always going to be a person that wears my emotions on my sleeve and yeah, I try to continue to do better with that. It made me see that at some point in time, you have to be ok with failing and messing up and you can laugh at yourself once in a while. There's more important things."
DeChambeau explained how the switch to LIV Golf had given him the chance to escape and reset following the loss of his dad. "It would have been impossible for me to have come this far again without LIV," he added.
"It gave me the time to get healthy and develop. I came to LIV and suddenly there were players in the same boat as me. Because they were getting stick as well not from the LIV fans but seemingly everywhere else. I was not alone in being disliked and could share these feelings with my team-mates and my colleagues.
"But slowly that has changed and whether it was the thing with the PGA Tour [the 'framework agreement'] people are coming around to what we are all about. It's about moving an inch and ideating a mile. We have come a long way and we continue to move progressively in small incremental amounts. It's just going to domino at some point."
DeChambeau triumphed in his second major in June, clinching the U.S. Open title for a second time after edging out Rory McIlroy in a nail-biting final hole. In a touching moment, an emotional DeChambeau dedicated his victory to his late father, saying: "First off, I wanna say Happy Father's Day to every father out there. Unfortunately, my dad passed [away] a couple years ago, and this one's for him."
