There’s a lot of talk these days as the PGA Tour tries to negotiate a truce with LIV Golf and heal the fractured professional game. Some of it concerns how the LIV defectors, suspended by the PGA Tour, might be able to return.
Only two tournaments into his new career with LIV Golf, Jon Rahm appears to be lamenting what he has sacrificed in jumping to the rival tour for a reported $300 million: the PGA Tour’s West Coast Swing, specifically the stop at Torrey Pines and his annual home game at TPC Scottsdale. He also mentioned the DP World Tour’s Spanish Open and season-ending championship in Dubai as events he hopes to continue playing, and said he would miss the flagship BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.
“I’m hoping that in the near future I can be back playing some of those events,” Rahm, who was suspended by the tour upon announcing in early December that he was headed to LIV, said before LIV played in Las Vegas ahead of the Super Bowl. “I would certainly love to go back and play some of them. If there's ever a way back and a way where we can play, even if it’s as an invite, I will take it. There’s certain events that are special to me that I would still love to support.”
Rahm, a Spaniard who played college golf at Arizona State and resides in Scottsdale, won his first pro title in 2017 at the annual Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego and added the 2021 U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.
As the reigning Masters champion, he holds a lifetime pass to Augusta National, and he will enjoy exemptions for years to come into the U.S. Open, PGA Championship and Open Championship.
Many other LIV players aren’t as fortunate. The money from Saudi Arabia’s sponsoring Public Investment Fund was designed to remove at least some of the sting for LIV’s failure to qualify for world-ranking points and pathways into golf’s biggest events. With the reality of slides in the Official World Golf Ranking, some LIV players tend to recalculate.
Upon winning LIV’s season opener two weeks ago in Mexico, Chile’s Joaquín Niemann expressed concern about his falling stock with the majors. “I want to win majors,” he said, “but I’ve got to get in first.”
Niemann dropped eight spots in the OWGR after his victory in Mexico, to No. 74, leaving him farther from the top 60 and a Masters invitation. However, there is a possible path to Augusta for Niemann, who won the Australian Open in early December, and Global Golf Post’s Scott Michaux is urging the Masters to pave the way.
Mexico’s Abraham Ancer isn’t lamenting what might have been.
“I’m happy where I’m at,” Ancer, who has dropped from No. 20 in the world to 155th in 1½ years with LIV, told Associated Press golf writer Doug Ferguson. “I want to play the majors. I’ll do anything I can to qualify.”
Meanwhile, PGA Tour players debate how the LIV guys might be able to return should the tour come to terms with the Saudis.
Those disparate views range from Rory McIlroy’s welcoming stance to Justin Thomas’ call for some sort of a penalty.
“I want the best product and the best players,” Thomas said. “I would say there’s a handful of players on LIV that would make the tour a better place, but I’m definitely not in the agreement that they should just be able to come back that easily.” READ MORE
LIV had golf’s stage to itself on Sunday, Feb. 4, with what proved to be a thrilling final-round finish in its season debut in Mexico, but fans hardly noticed.
With the final round of the PGA Tour’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am suspended – and ultimately canceled – because of inclement weather, CBS aired a rerun of eventual winner Wyndham Clark’s course-record 60 in the third round. That replay attracted 1.21 million viewers, or three times the 432,000 who tuned in to the CW Network to watch Jon Rahm falter down the stretch before Joaquín Niemann outlasted Sergio García on the fourth hole of a sudden-death playoff that finished in a darkness illuminated only by the electric scoreboard behind the 18th green at Mayakoba’s El Camaleón Golf Club.
On Saturday, CBS’ live coverage of the third round at Pebble Beach produced even more of a lopsided ratings victory, with 1.91 million viewers compared with LIV’s 168,000.
LIV can extract one bright spot from those numbers, however: The average audience for the final round at Mayakoba was nearly 50 percent bigger than LIV’s ratings last year. READ MORE
Adrian Meronk confirmed in an interview with James Corrigan of London’s Telegraph newspaper that he left the DP World Tour and signed with LIV because he was not picked for Europe’s Ryder Cup team despite a three-victory season. READ MORE
The Athletic, the sports department of The New York Times, asked its readers whether they believe the claim by LIV Golf’s Phil Mickelson that he has made 47 holes-in-one. Though the results are unscientific, they are as lopsided as a Russian election and capture a widespread skepticism among golf followers regarding Mickelson: 82.5 percent clicked the option, “No, I don’t believe him,” compared with the 17.5 percent who responded, “Yes, I do.” READ MORE
TAP-INS
The PGA Tour’s “strategic alliance” with the DP World Tour paid off last week when FedEx, which serves as the umbrella sponsor for the U.S.-based tour, announced that it will title-sponsor the DP World Tour’s French Open. Although the French Open dates to 1906 and is the oldest tournament in continental Europe, it has struggled with a revolving door of sponsors in the past decade. Alstom, HNA Group, Amundi and Cazoo have come and gone as sponsors since 2015. The tournament, to be played October 10-13 at Le Golf National this year, also has struggled with inconsistent slots on the DP World Tour schedule, and the 2020 and 2021 editions were scrapped because of the pandemic. READ MORE
E. Lee Coble, Bob Farren and Ashley Brown were named recipients of USGA award that recognize significant contributions to the game. Coble, of Richmond, Virginia, receives the Joe Dey Award for volunteerism; Farren, the director of golf course management at Pinehurst (North Carolina) Resort, wins the Green Section Award for his sustainable-maintenance practices; and Brown, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, earns the Herbert Warren Wind Award for her book “Serving Herself: The Life and Times of Althea Gibson.” They will be recognized at the USGA’s annual meeting on March 2 in Nashville, Tennessee. READ MORE
Toby Keith, country crooner and golf course owner, died February 5 after a long fight with stomach cancer. He was 62. Keith, an avid competitor on the celebrity golf circuit, owned Belmar Golf Club in Norman, Oklahoma, where he, wife, Tricia Covel, and the Toby Keith Foundation hosted an annual fundraiser to benefit the OK Kids Korral. The course also hosted the Oklahoma Sooners’ annual Schooner Fall Classic. Keith, who crafted a pro-American swagger as a singer, also wrote a golf song that parodied his golf game. READ MORE and MORE
The 72-player field for the Augusta National Women’s Amateur has been confirmed, officials announced. Rose Zhang, the 2023 winner, turned professional last summer and is ineligible to defend her title, but 2022 champion Anna Davis, an Auburn freshman from Spring Valley, California, returns along with 2021 ANWA champion Tsubasa Kajitani of Japan and No. 1-ranked amateur Ingrid Lindblad, an LSU graduate student from Halmstad, Sweden, to headline the field. READ MORE
The Cactus Tour, a women’s developmental tour based in Arizona, reinstated its policy that competitors “must be female at birth,” Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols reported. The move, announced February 7 to coincide with National Girls and Women in Sports Day, was made in the wake of transgender athlete Hailey Davidson’s recent victory on the NXXT Tour, a Florida mini-tour that awards its top finishers exemptions on the Epson Tour, the LPGA’s top feeder circuit. LPGA players voted to remove the tour’s “female at birth” requirement in 2010 in the wake of a lawsuit filed by Lana Lawless, a transgender woman. READ MORE
Compiled by Steve Harmon