Let’s start here: Anthony Kim is back. I mean, really back.

Not just playing pro golf. Not just being a husband and a father. Not just being alive, which for many years was hardly a given as he battled addiction and thoughts of suicide without so much as touching a golf club.

Anthony Kim is back as in a winner, after a stunning final round at LIV Golf’s event in Adelaide, Australia, where he stared down LIV’s two best players, got the crowd in his corner and rode a wave of emotion, fist pumps and old-school confidence to a title that once seemed not only impossible, but absurd to even contemplate.  

“No one else has to believe in me but me,” Kim said with tears in his eyes moments after stepping off the final green. “For anybody that’s struggling, you can get through anything.”

In sports, it’s an old saw to declare an upset victory “improbable.” But Kim’s return to the winner’s circle, after essentially disappearing for more than 12 years before joining LIV Golf two years ago, is utterly gobsmacking.

MORE: Final results, payouts from LIV Golf Adelaide

Kim, who looks much older than his 40 years, entered Sunday’s final round in Australia five shots behind co-leaders Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, who are inarguably LIV Golf’s top two players and (until now) its two biggest stars.

It was easy to imagine Kim functioning as a third wheel on Sunday while Rahm and DeChambeau duked it out. But the raucous crowds—Adelaide is LIV’s best-attended event—got behind Kim immediately, and he fed off it. Kim went shot-for-shot with DeChambeau and Rahm for the better part of four hours, and there’s really no other way to say it: he absolutely demolished them.

He seemed to get stronger as the round went on. He made his first birdie on the 4th hole, then added birdies on 5, 7 and 9 to whip up the fans and pull within a shot of the lead. He then birdied five of his final seven holes, including four in a row on 12 through 15. And he punctuated each putt with a fist pump and primal yell. Rahm and DeChambeau had no idea what hit them. Frankly, no one did.

AK DOES IT AGAIN 😱

He is now the SOLO leader of LIV Golf Adelaide 2026 🔥#LIVGolfAdelaide | @4AcesGC_ pic.twitter.com/xFECiVAONq

— LIV Golf (@livgolf_league) February 15, 2026

Kim canned one more birdie putt on 17 to take a three-shot lead to the 18th, making that final hole a coronation that he parred to finish off a bogey-free 63. A shell-shocked Rahm shot 1-under 71 to finish second, three shots back. A dazed DeChambeau tied for third after a 2-over 74.

It’s hard to contemplate, much less calculate, the scope of Kim’s comeback, but here are a few numbers: On Sunday morning the golf stats site Data Golf gave Kim a .3% chance of rallying past LIV’s two heavyweights and winning the event. This was Kim’s first professional title since he won the PGA Tour’s Houston Open … in 2010. That was 5,795 days ago. In Kim’s first year on LIV Golf, he finished that 2024 season ranked 56th out of 57 players. Last year he finished 55th.

It’s easy to forget—and young fans today would be forgiven for not even knowing—but there was a time when what happened to Rahm and DeChambeau in Australia was pretty much what happened to anyone who got near Anthony Kim when he was on a heater. At age 23, Kim starred on a victorious 2008 U.S. Ryder Cup team, and he capped that week by pasting Sergio Garcia 5 & 4 in their head-to-head singles match. That was a time when the U.S. Ryder Cup team could never beat Europe and no one did that to Garcia.

Kim never won a major championship and has just three PGA Tour titles, but he always had swagger and was an obvious rising star. He played Nike clubs like Tiger Woods and wore big, blinged-out belt buckles. He still holds a record at the Masters for birdies in a single round, with 11 in 2009. He was one of the players I was most excited to cover when I started full time on the golf beat in 2010. He and I were set to connect once, at the Tour’s Doral event in 2011, but it didn’t pan out and I later heard rumblings that he’d been hitting the Miami nightclubs that week.

I thought about all of this while watching him on TV Sunday morning as he drained putt after putt over the final holes in Adelaide.

The culmination of Anthony Kim’s return to golf

It really is surreal. Kim didn’t appear on so much as a milk carton for 12 years before suddenly signing with LIV two years ago. That was a splashy moment that carried the whiff of a publicity stunt, thanks in part to a hype video where Kim woofed that he was joining the tour to “bust everyone’s ass.” Later he would reveal that he’d passed through dark times after injuries prompted him to fade off the PGA Tour in 2012. When he joined LIV, Kim didn’t play on a team for two seasons and competed as an individual “wild card.” LIV fields topped out at about 50 players, but he didn’t crack the top 20 in a single event. At the end of last season he was relegated off the tour, but he shot 5 under over 36 holes at LIV’s offseason qualifying event to grab one of three open spots for this season.

That Kim played his way back onto LIV Golf fair and square was perhaps the first signal his form was returning. In LIV’s season-opener last week in Riyadh he tied for 22nd, a personal best. A few days before the Adelaide event began, LIV’s 4Aces team signed Kim to a contract, which meant he was no longer a free agent. It was also a sign that his fellow competitors saw value in him.

But this win is still a shock, and it will reverberate.

It’s also probably the best thing that could happen to the LIV Golf league. LIV made several changes ahead of this season, including a move to 72-hole events and expanding its field sizes. It also received accreditation from the Official World Golf Ranking, and players who crack the top 10 in its events now receive ranking points, which can unlock access to major championships. But Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed recently left the league, which was a hit to LIV’s quest for relevance, and it had also hoped for a better deal from the OWGR. Even with Rahm and DeChambeau still onboard for at least one more season, LIV Golf seemed wobbly.

Kim’s comeback is unlike anything golf has ever seen. There are, after all, very few golf pros who play tournaments while considering themselves fortunate just to be alive. And no one sits out 12 years and returns to do anything of significance. Now Kim is clean and sober and a winner again. When he tapped in his final putt, his young daughter, Bella, sprinted across the green to embrace him. “Best moment of my life so far,” Kim said in his emotional winner’s press conference. “I just want her to know that no matter how bad your day is, if you keep fighting you never lose. Hopefully she takes that with her for the rest of her life.”

COMEBACK STORY COMPLETE 🏆

ANTHONY KIM WINS LIV GOLF ADELAIDE 2026#LIVGolfAdelaide pic.twitter.com/w3TmrMeuiP

— LIV Golf (@livgolf_league) February 15, 2026

Some may say LIV Golf doesn’t really matter because the events have no history, the fields are flimsy and the participants are paid shills for a Saudi Arabian regime with a horrendous human rights record. That’s valid, but before Adelaide if I had told you that Anthony Kim played Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau in 18 holes of any kind of golf, even miniature golf, spotted them five shots apiece and then won handily, wouldn’t that result stop you dead in your tracks?

Anyone who flipped the channel away from the Olympics to watch Kim close out his win in the wee hours on Sunday morning witnessed his passion. LIV Golf may not matter to all of us, but it means a lot to Anthony Kim. On Sunday in Australia he faced his demons, his aging body, his years of rust and two of the best golfers on the planet, and he busted all of their asses. It really was something to see.

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