As the 44th Ryder Cup draws nearer, it appears that some of the LIV defectors are experiencing mixed feelings and even a hint of regret.
Sergio Garcia was pining for the old days when it was revealed recently that he made a last ditch gambit to be considered for selection in Rome.
As you may recall, the Spaniard had been in the first wave of players to quit the established tours in 2022, making it exquisitely clear in the aftermath that his decision was taken more in anger than in sorrow.
Unlike his Team Europe compadres Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter, he ignored the £100,000 fine from the DP World Tour for appearing in the maiden LIV event in London. He subsequently flounced out of last year's BMW Championship in Wentworth after one round to attend a college football game in Texas.
Therefore, it was mildly surprising to learn that Garcia had made desperate overtures to return to the Team Europe fold, offering to pay the £700,000 worth of fines he had incurred and agreeing to play in events of the Tour's choosing for the remainder of 2023.
This borderline Costanza-esque move failed to win over the Tour elders, who have taken a more implacable stance than the Americans and insist that his abrupt resignation last year guarantees his omission.
As a result, it will be the first time since 1995 [Philip Walton's moment in the sun] that none of Garcia, Westwood and Poulter will feature in a Ryder Cup.
This will be a jarring moment for younger golf fans, for whom the Ryder Cup has principally been about watching Ian Poulter strut around like Caesar, while highly-vaunted Americans visibly wilt in the glare of his game-face.
There is some irony in that the LIV players are mostly excluded given that the breakaway tour initially sought to replicate some of the Ryder Cup's theatrics and energy.
In his interview with Sky's Jamie Weir last year, Greg Norman touted the team dimension of LIV, arguing that these yet-to-be created franchises would soon become very valuable for the players involved.
The Shark envisioned a glorious future of 'Arsenal/Bears/4 Aces fan' Twitter bios, where Majesticks and Ironheads ultras would be engaged in pitch battles outside the local Hooters.
This hasn't happened as yet. Last February, the LIV golf stars appeared in an ad promoting their teams, an enterprise so embarrassing it's difficult to believe there wasn't serious duress involved.
In an effort to stave off the air of contrived naffness, LIV have tinkered with some teams to give them a more nationalistic flavour and thus greater gravitas, which is sorely lacking. Hence, the Stingers are an all-South African quartet, the Rippers all-Australian.
This country hasn't sent over enough renegade talent to form our own team, thus Graeme McDowell has had to join up with Martin Kaymer, Richard Bland and Bernd Weisberger in a miscellaneous European outfit called the 'Cleeks'. ["A cleek was a long iron from golf's earliest days – but there's no way this team is stuck in the past," says the team blurb on the LIV website. "This is a team with its eyes firmly on the future, but with an attitude that's all about dominating now."]
On balance, the Europeans appear to be less impacted than the Americans - probably fortuitously so given how lop-sided the 2021 match proved to be.
The absent European legends were already veering into has-been territory, before the Saudi-sponsored Tour stepped in to help them make it official.
The US, on the other hand, are notably weakened by the schism, with A-listers Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau watching at home.
DJ accumulated the maximum five points in Whistling Straits and formed an unbeatable partnership with Collin Morikawa.
DeChambeau's fairly novel approach to the game was perfectly suited to fourballs, where the safety net afforded by a partner left him free to have an almighty cut on the par-5s and the drivable par-4s.
Captain America Patrick Reed, a divisive enough figure in the team room even before the Saudis got involved, will also be far from the Italian capital, unable to repeat his heroics of 2016.
But the LIV Tour will have their own standard bearer in Rome, their most relevant player Brooks Koepka forcing his way into the team.
Brooksy may be the biggest winner of the whole LIV disruption. As we saw in Netflix series Full Swing, he was in a terrible funk for much of 2022, preoccupied with his struggling game and unable to take much interest in his wife or her outfits.
He moped around his futuristic looking mansion in Jupiter, Florida (Jupiter, Florida is to professional golfers what Monte Carlo is to Formula 1 drivers) pondering how he could return to being the man he once was.
Since then, he's taken the Saudi lucre, recovered his form and won another major. He's playing as infrequently as he always wanted and still turning up for the big ones. He has lost nothing and gained much from the venture, an enormous wad of cash not being the least of it.
His considerably less talented brother is also now a kept man on the back of it. That this brazen nepotism is surely holding back Smash GC's chances in the LIV Golf League probably doesn't perturb Brooks too much.
Such was Koepka's form in 2023 that he came mightily close to qualifying automatically, even despite his LIV Tour commitments. Indeed, when it came to it, he wasn't even the most contentious US selection, that honour going to Justin Thomas, who on 2023 form would struggle in the captain's prize in Elm Green and appears to have been picked primarily on the strength of his frat boy bonhomie.
Tiger Woods' former coach Hank Haney, now best known to golf Youtube surfers as the chap who pops up in the ads promising to fix your slice in five minutes or less, castigated the Thomas selection as evidence that Team USA was a 'boys club'.
Haney is a staunch defender of the LIV Tour on social media, prone to lashing out at the 'Corrupt Golf Media' for its pro-PGA stance. He gives little enough credit to Zach Johnson for reaching across the divide in this instance, remarking "they didn't want to take any LIV players, but couldn't avoid taking Brooks."
The bullet-proof golfing rationale for Koepka's selection hasn't satisfied the really stern moralists of the anti-LIV contingent, with the likes of Brandel Chamblee upset that any rebel players were considered at all.
But following the shock deal announced during the summer, the direction of travel is heading towards re-unification and rapprochement.
While it might be too late for him, Garcia claimed Keith Pelley told him the whole matter may be smoothed out by next year.
With the Saudis and the golf establishment now co-operating, the future of the money-burning LIV tour remains highly uncertain and it may yet be recalled as a bizarre aberration akin to Donald Trump's USFL project.
By 2025, the schism may be recalled as a bad dream and the LIV players who are not already populating the seniors tour may be back in their rightful place, giving it large on singles' Sunday.
