When many of the LIV Golf signees rationalized their jump to the Saudi-funded rival tour as being able to spend more time with family, the excuse often was met with skepticism and eye rolls.
Well, Sergio García apparently meant it, though with a decidedly different twist.
García, the one-time heir apparent to the late Seve Ballesteros as Spain’s standard bearer on the European tour, where he won 15 times plus a Masters title, didn’t stick around long at last week’s BMW PGA Championship. Garcia shot 4-over 76 in the first round of the DP World Tour’s event at Wentworth Club in England, then withdrew. The tour disclosed no reason for the early exit, but García’s wife, Angela Akins García, offered a clue via Twitter from the football sidelines of her alma mater, Texas, which played host to No. 1-ranked Alabama in Austin.
Though the Longhorns didn’t quit in the manner of García, they lost on a last-minute field goal, 20-19.
LIV Golf returns to action this week in suburban Chicago, which might conflict with García’s rooting interest in Texas football. The Longhorns play Saturday night at home, but perhaps García can make it back to Chicago in time for the final round.
The Hero Cup, a team match-play event, will debut Jan. 13-15 at Abu Dhabi Golf Club in the United Arab Emirates, but not without some hurt feelings among at least one descendent of European golf royalty.
The DP World Tour announced last week that 10-man teams from Great Britain and Ireland and Continental Europe will be selected by Luke Donald, captain of Europe’s 2023 Ryder Cup team, with an eye on gaining experience for next year’s Ryder Cup matches against the Americans.
The late Seve Ballesteros’ son Javier said the “new” match-play event is merely a rip-off of the defunct Seve Trophy on what was then known as the European Tour.
“I heard nothing more about it until only one day before the announcement was made, when ET contacted me to let me know there was a ‘new’ match play event – being this an exact copy of The Seve Trophy – and wanted my dad to be involved in some way,” Javier Ballesteros, the oldest of the late Seve’s three children, wrote on Twitter. “We obviously said ‘no.’ We don't want anything out of this, but only The Seve Trophy back, not a copy of it. We believe our dad deserves something better from The European Tour, given the unconditional support he always gave to The European Tour and the legacy he left behind.”
Guy Kinnings, the DP World Tour’s deputy CEO, said in a statement: “The final arrangements came together very quickly to enable us to stage a team event in early 2023. I was personally in touch with the Ballesteros family before the announcement to brief them, and we intend to discuss further with them. We honor Seve's legacy in many ways. His name adorns one of our main meeting rooms at our Wentworth HQ, we changed the name of our players' player award to the Seve Ballesteros Award in 2017 and I remember in the 2018 Ryder Cup in France where the last thing our players saw before they left the locker room to go on the course was Seve's Ryder Cup bag with the phrase written above it, ‘This is why you are here.’ We respect Seve's legacy every single day, and we will continue to do so.” (READ MORE).
U.S. captain Davis Love III and International counterpart Trevor Immelman completed their teams for next week’s Presidents Cup, but they came at the task from opposite directions.
Love made his six captain’s picks from a position of strength contrasted with Immelman, who had to complete his team after some high-profile defections.
When Australia’s Cameron Smith and Chile’s Joaquín Niemann signed with LIV Golf recently, further depleting the Internationals’ talent pool, Immelman had to dig a bit deeper to fill out his roster. Five of his six picks – South Africa’s Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Australia’s Cam Davis, South Korea’s K.H. Lee, Colombia’s Sebastián Muñoz and Canada’s Taylor Pendrith – are Presidents Cup rookies, which actually could be a benefit for a squad with a lot of bad memories. The Internationals have lost eight consecutive editions of this biennial series and trail 11-1-1 overall. South Korea’s Si Woo Kim, a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, returns after having played in 2017.
That contrasts markedly with Love’s picks. Though four are match rookies – Max Homa, Billy Horschel, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Young – the first-timers own 16 PGA Tour victories among them, including Horschel’s triumph at the 2021 WGC Match Play. Love also tapped Kevin Kisner and Jordan Spieth, both of whom have competed in the Presidents Cup and are regarded as exceptional match-play competitors.
The 14th Presidents Cup will be Sept. 22-25 at Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina (READ MORE and MORE).
The automatic qualifiers were determined for each team after the BMW Championship in late August, before Smith and Niemann defected (READ MORE).
Scottie Scheffler added another superlative to a season full of them: PGA Tour Player of the Year.
Scheffler, the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, won four times this season, including the Masters Tournament, his first major title. He won a ballot of his peers on tour, with Cameron Smith and Rory McIlroy as the other finalists.
Scheffler was surprised with the award during a guest appearance on the set of ESPN’s “College GameDay” football preview show in Austin, Texas.
The voting was not the only off-the-course setback for Smith last week. He also lost his prime parking spot and playing/practicing privileges at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, where he won the Players Championship in May, because of his departure for LIV Golf, according to a report by Golfweek’s Adam Schupak.
Smith, 29, of Australia, won three times this year, capped by his victory in the 150th Open at St. Andrews. PGA Tour players who competed in at least 15 FedEx Cup events in the 2021-22 season were eligible to vote (READ MORE).
Two college teammates from Holy Cross pulled off a stunning double play on golf’s rarest phenomenon: the albatross.
Christian Emmerich and Owen Egan, who were paired together in a recent practice round at Blackstone National in Sutton, Massachusetts, made back-to-back double-eagle 2s on the same hole. What are the odds? Various gaming experts have pegged making an albatross at anywhere from 1 million- to 6 million-to-1. But twice in a row? Think Powerball.
Playing the 494-yard par-5 eighth hole at Blackstone National, Emmerich, a senior from Swampscott, Massachusetts, cut the dogleg right and faced a 180-yard second shot, which he holed with an 8-iron. “We all went crazy,” Emmerich told Sean Melia for a story on AmateurGolf.com, “including our coach (Steve Napoli) and the third member of our group, Matt Williams.”
Egan, a sophomore from Winchester, Massachusetts, who faced an even shorter approach, followed Emmerich by jarring a gap wedge from 120 yards.
“We saw it disappear,” said Emmerich, an all-Patriot League performer last season, “and I threw my bag in the air and we all ran around high-fiving and going insane.”
Holy Cross could use some mojo this year. The Crusaders, who opened the fall schedule last weekend at the Ryan T. Lee Memorial Collegiate in Kensington, Connecticut, were No. 281 in the Golfweek college rankings.
TAP-INS
Despite flooding that ravaged Mississippi’s capital and disabled the city’s water supply, the PGA Tour’s Sanderson Farms Championship will be played this month as scheduled, the tournament director told Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser newspaper. Steve Jent said the Country Club of Jackson, which has hosted the event since 2014, has avoided the worst of the water crisis because it operates a self-sufficient water system supplied by a nearby aquifer (READ MORE).
Carson Kim of Yorba Linda, California, and Juan Velasquez of Colombia earned the final spots on the U.S. and International teams, respectively, for the Junior Presidents Cup. The matches will be played Sept. 19-20 at Myers Park Country Club in Charlotte, North Carolina (READ MORE).
Matthew Lin of Orinda, California, and Madeline Bante of Englewood, Colorado, were named recipients of the USGA-AJGA Presidents’ Leadership Award for their volunteer work (READ MORE).
The Shinhan Donghae Open, the only tournament sanctioned by the Asian, Japan and Korean tours, has been extended by three years, through 2025, officials announced at Koma Country Club in Nara, Japan (READ MORE).
Eddy Putra has been appointed general manager of the Asia-Pacific Golf Confederation, the APGC announced. Putra, 52, of Indonesia, has served as the APGC’s chief referee since 2016 (READ MORE).
Staff and Wire Reports