Staff WriterIf you were scripting a comeback at LIV Golf Adelaide, even the most imaginative screenwriter would have toned this one down for realism. On a sun-soaked Sunday at The Grange, Anthony Kim – missing from the top level of the game for 12-and-a-half years – outgunned Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau down the stretch to win the individual title, and in the process turned LIV Golf’s travelling circus into a full-blown redemption story.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. After injuries and personal struggles exiled him from competitive golf for over a decade, Kim resurfaced in 2024 with LIV Golf, a curiosity more than a contender. The swing still looked familiar, but the scores initially did not. Early starts were rust-scraping expeditions, more archaeology than artistry, as he tried to unearth the swagger that once terrified leaderboards.
What never went missing was his mantra. Thanks to his “1% better every day” determination, the 40-year-old has been edging steadily towards something special. At The Grange – The Grange Golf Club – he finally kicked the door in. His first victory of any kind in nearly 16 years came in the final group against two of the best players on the planet, who simply couldn’t keep up with his iron play and molten-hot putter.
“I’m very overwhelmed with this feeling right now,” said Kim, who began the week working out visa issues to get into Australia, then officially signed with 4Aces GC just before the tournament started. “But my plan is to keep getting better and start winning some more trophies.”
Ripper GC Gives Adelaide Its Home Win
If Kim’s solo heroics provided the Hollywood script, the locals supplied the party. The hometown heroes of Ripper GC delivered a team victory that went down just as well as the comeback of the year.
Captain Cameron Smith, Elvis Smylie, Marc Leishman and Lucas Herbert rallied past Rahm’s Legion XIII by two shots, giving Ripper their second home win in three years in Adelaide. Leishman set the pace with a 7-under 65, Herbert and Elvis Smylie added matching 3-under 69s, while Smith closed with a tidy 2-under 70.
“Unreal. So good,” said Smith, whose team also won last week’s season opener in Riyadh, becoming the first LIV Golf outfit to claim the opening two tournaments of a season. “We had a training camp before the season, and this was our goal, to win this event, and we did it. It’s pretty special when you tick off a goal this early in the season.”
For the Ripper boys, LIV Golf Adelaide wasn’t just another stop on the schedule. It was their major, their pilgrimage. And like all good homecomings, it ended with silverware and sore heads.
The Sunday Surge: From Five Back to Untouchable
While the locals were busy roaring for Ripper, Kim was quietly assembling one of the great closing salvos in recent memory. He started the final round five shots behind Rahm and DeChambeau. By the time the dust – and confetti – settled, he’d signed for a 9-under 63, reached 23 under for the week, and turned the supposed marquee duel into a one-man show.
DeChambeau faltered early with two bogeys, while Rahm clung to par like it was a flotation device. Kim, though, was the one who caught fire. Birdies at 4, 5, 7 and 9 hacked the deficit down to a single stroke as the trio reached the turn. Rahm was level for the day; DeChambeau limped in with a 4-over front nine that effectively ruled him out.
Then came The Watering Hole – the par-3 12th, LIV’s answer to a football terrace. With the noise already rattling around the grandstands, Kim stepped onto the tee and delivered a laser to just inside 17 feet. The putt that followed might as well have been struck with every scar tissue he’s accumulated over the past decade.
Sensing the moment, he rolled it right into the middle.
The crowd detonated. Kim uncorked a colossal fist pump, the sort of reaction normally reserved for lottery wins and miracle recoveries. Years of frustration, doubt and rehab seemed to come out in that single punch of the air. It wouldn’t be the last. Birdies at 13, 14, 15 and 17 turned a comeback into a coronation.
“I’m too old to be reacting like that because I think I pulled something in my hip,” Kim joked. “But I will say that that was all the lows that I went through in my life that I got to dig out of. Every putt that went in, I felt the struggle, and I was overcoming it. It was therapeutic out there to fight through it and come out on top.”
DeChambeau never recovered, stumbling to a 2-over 74 and out of the picture. Rahm hung around, but on this particular Sunday he was playing the role of awestruck witness rather than destroyer-in-chief, eventually finishing solo second for the second straight week.
“In a weird way, as a competitor, I probably shouldn’t say this, but that was a joy to watch,” Rahm said of Kim. “To see that image on 18 of him hugging his wife and daughter, any man with a soul is going to have a soft spot for that. I was almost tearing up.”
He wasn’t alone. For a player many had written off as a ghost story, Kim’s resurrection hit hard.
“I was able to produce some good golf today. I knew it was coming,” Kim said. “Nobody else has to believe in me but me, and for anybody that’s struggling, you can get through anything.”
What the Locker Room Thinks: “A Fairy Tale, It Really Is”
If you want to know what a win really means, listen to the players who were supposed to beat you.
Cam Smith: “It’s so good. If it wasn’t one of us this week, to have him win here in Adelaide at our premier event is pretty cool. I’m so happy for him. He’s worked hard. I actually played with Anthony his first round back in Saudi a few years ago, and it was scrappy to say the least, and I was very skeptical at the start. But what he’s been able to do over the past couple of seasons and dig deep and grind out and then do what he did today is pretty special. Congrats to him. I’m so happy for him.”
Leishman, who has seen enough golf and enough life to spot a story when it’s staring at him, went even deeper.
Marc Leishman: “As a dad, it’s pretty amazing what he’s done for his daughter. I think we all as dads, you play for your family and you play for your wife and your kids and all that, and your extended family. But for him to be able to change his life through golf in that way, it shows what a good person he is and what a strong person he is, what golf can do for your life.
“I don’t know, it’s pretty touching, actually, how good a story this is. I hope that people realize how it’s a fairy tale, it really is. Not just golf but life. You see his wife and his daughter run out on the green, and that’s as good as it gets. I couldn’t be happier for AK.”
Rahm, who has seen his fair share of fireworks, just shook his head.
Jon Rahm: “That was one of the craziest, best rounds of golf. Maybe two and three he had to make pars but after that it was absolutely flawless on a difficult golf course.”
When the guys who normally do the dismantling start sounding like star-struck fans, you know you’ve witnessed something that’s going to echo well beyond LIV Golf Adelaide.
AK’s Victory Lap: Frozen, Kangaroos and Koalas
For all the intensity inside the ropes, Kim is still very much Dad-mode off the course. Asked how he’d celebrate this career-rebooting win, he sounded less like a man about to paint the town and more like a Disney+ algorithm.
AK’S CELEBRATION: Anthony Kim, doting father to his young daughter Bella, was asked how he would celebrate the victory. “I might actually watch the movie ‘Frozen,’” he replied. “I don’t know, man. I didn’t plan this far. I planned to be contending to win golf tournaments, but I haven’t gotten this far.
But I’m going to enjoy my time here in Australia. We’re going to be here for two more days and we’re going to go see the kangaroos and the koalas, maybe some giraffes. So that’s my fun.”
It’s a safe bet that, somewhere between Elsa, a few marsupials and the odd giraffe, the scale of what he’s done might begin to sink in.
Record Crowds Turn LIV Golf Adelaide Into a Festival
On top of everything happening on the leaderboard, LIV Golf Adelaide 2026 quietly rewrote another line in the history books: it set a new attendance record for a professional golf tournament in Australia, with more than 115,000 spectators pouring through the gates over four days.
“I see on social media all the time that LIV has no fans, so it’s pretty nice to see that a few of them turned out this week, and you can see why. It’s clearly the best event,” said Lucas Herbert. “It’s been voted the best event in the world, and you can absolutely see why.
“There’s so many people out here. It’s such a great atmosphere. There’s so many kids out here, as well. I feel like between every green and tee, I’m high fiving kids the whole way down, which that’s what we did all this far. That’s what we really wanted to be here to make an impact for.”
The Watering Hole – already notorious as the noisiest par 3 in the Southern Hemisphere – turned into a cauldron all week, none more so than when Kim buried that birdie putt on Sunday. It looked less like a golf event and more like a music festival where someone accidentally built a major-championship-quality course in the middle.
Off the Course:
As a new attendance record was set, celebrities and fans of all walks of life were treated to day full of entertainment. FISHER, arrived early to countdown today’s shotgun start and enjoyed the crowd-favourite Watering Hole before his DJ set concluded LIV Golf Adelaide 2026.
By the Numbers: Stat Clinic at The Grange
Kim’s artistry was the headline, but the stats sheet from The Grange read like a roll call of sharpshooters.
Round 4 leaders
- Driving Distance: Josele Ballester, 346.9-yard average
- Longest Drive: Josele Ballester, 379.9 yards (17th hole)
- Driving Accuracy: Ben Campbell, Victor Perez, Sergio Garcia, Wade Ormsby, Carlos Ortiz, Miguel Tabuena, Cameron Tringale and Marc Leishman – all at 78.57% (11 of 14 fairways)
- Greens in Regulation: Charl Schwartzel, a perfect 100% (18 of 18)
- Scrambling: Anthony Kim (2 of 2), Tyrrell Hatton (3 of 3), Marc Leishman (3 of 3), Yosuke Asaji (10 of 10), Bubba Watson (1 of 1), Carlos Ortiz (2 of 2) – all at 100%
- Fewest Putts: Yosuke Asaji and David Puig, 22
- Bogey-free rounds: Anthony Kim (63), Marc Leishman (65), Bubba Watson (65), Dustin Johnson (68), Richard T. Lee (68), Charles Howell III (70)
Cumulative over the week
- Driving Distance: Josele Ballester, 323.1-yard average
- Driving Accuracy: Ben Campbell, 78.57% (44 of 56 fairways)
- Greens in Regulation: Anthony Kim, 83.33% (60 of 72)
- Scrambling: Cameron Smith, 76.67% (23 of 30)
- Fewest Putts: Cameron Smith, 99
- Fewest Bogeys: Anthony Kim, just 3 all week
Those last two numbers tell you everything you need to know: Kim didn’t just produce a feel-good story; he produced a cold-blooded clinic.
Some comebacks are tidy, linear things – a steady return to form, a win here or there, a nice documentary in the offing. This wasn’t one of those. This was messy, emotional and loud, the kind of week where a man who once disappeared into golf’s ether stood on the 18th green in front of a record crowd, hugged his family and reminded everyone why they fell for him in the first place.
At LIV Golf Adelaide, Anthony Kim didn’t just win a tournament. He reclaimed a life in golf that once seemed gone for good – and he did it in a way that will be replayed, re-shared and re-told for years.
