Seven LIV golfers and a caddie who were stranded in the war-torn Middle East earlier this week made their way safely to Hong Kong Wednesday morning local time on a private jet paid for by their LIV stablemate Jon Rahm, a source close to the situation told GOLF.com.
The players — Caleb Surratt and Tom McKibbin, who play on Rahm’s Legion XIII team, along with Thomas Detry, Sam Horsfield, Anirban Lahiri, Adrian Meronk, Lee Westwood and caddie Terry Mundy — were stuck in Dubai, where airports were closed and flights have been canceled in the wake of retaliatory attacks by Iran on Israel and several of its Persian Gulf neighbors, including the United Arab Emirates.
Several of the players have homes in Dubai and were trying to get to Hong Kong for this week’s LIV event, which begins Thursday. But leaving Dubai became challenging when the city came under siege by Iranian air strikes. “It was terrifying,” Surratt told Golf Channel, speaking of the scene in Dubai over the weekend, when the unrest was at its most intense. “But since then, it’s been OK. It was bad Sunday and Monday here with missile interceptions.”
LIV Golf itself was exploring various options to extract its players, the source said, including a plan to route the group through London. “LIV did a great job in trying to get everybody out of there,” the source said. (LIV officials declined to comment for this story.) But Rahm was also working his own channels, and his offer — to charter a private jet out of neighboring Oman — provided a more direct route to Hong Kong.
“Do whatever you have to do, but get them out of there,” the source said Rahm told his Legion XIII associates.
Rahm and his team arranged the flight via Rahm’s partnership with the private aviation company, VistaJet, the source said. The plan was officially set in motion when airspace opened in Muscat, Oman’s capital city, on Tuesday morning local time. (An eighth LIV player, Laurie Canter, also was in Dubai, but the source said Canter arranged his own plans to fly himself and his family out of Oman.)
Step one was getting out of the UAE, which required ground transport. The source said Lahiri, who lives in Dubai, took the lead on lining up a vehicle to get them to the UAE-Oman border. The 280-mile drive from Dubai to Muscat typically takes about four and a half hours but, the source said, “it turned into a lot longer simply because of a lot of people were trying to do the same thing, so the traffic and amount of people crossing the border, it just backed everything up.”
When the players arrived at the border, they transferred their bags and clubs to a bus, which took them to the airport in Muscat where their plane was waiting for them on a busy tarmac.
After a brief refueling delay, the jet took flight at 12:02 a.m. local time Wednesday and landed in Hong Kong roughly eight hours later, at 11:19 a.m. local time, leaving the players just over 24 hours to acclimate and ready themselves for LIV’s third event of the season. All eight players who flew in from Oman are on the tee sheet and are expected to play.
Asked about the vibe among LIV officials and players at Hong Kong Golf Club, the source said, “There’s a lot of a relief just knowing that they’re going to see their teammates today and they’ll be able to compete alongside of them starting tomorrow.”
