Golf tees up for bleak year of uncertainty
‘NO ANSWER’ FOR NOW ON HOW PGA-LIV RIFT CAN BE REPAIRED
Jon Rahm is the defending champion at this week’s PGA Tour stop at historic Riviera. But he isn’t anywhere near the Pacific Palisades neighbourhood of Los Angeles. He was in the country, though, seen at the NBA game between the Suns and Detroit Pistons in Phoenix on Valentine’s Day.
For golf, he will wait two weeks to tee it up half a world away near the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on a course that winds through the desert to the Red Sea.
Rahm is the third-ranked player in the world, though even if he wins his next LIV Golf event, he can’t hang onto that spot. He is the reigning champion at the Masters, where he will have an invitation as long as he cares to accept it. His life may be better, at least financially. His sport remains in upheaval and he’s a symbol of it.
Men’s professional golf is bifurcated, defined by who plays where — the PGA Tour or LIV Golf — and how infrequently they all come together. No one seems to be able to provide any details on how — not to mention an accurate timeline of when — the best players will regularly compete against each other again.
“We don’t even know in the longer term what that looks like,” none other than Tiger Woods told reporters leading up to this week’s Genesis Invitational at Riviera. He added, “There’s no answer to that right now.”
How’s that for specifics? So we await the Masters, which is no longer just the first major of the year. It’s the first opportunity to see the best players in the world — not by rankings, which have become irreparably skewed, but by ability — in the same field.
The division has taken what is already a niche sport and made it niche-ier. In a way, golf is reduced to a version of tennis: a sport in which four tournaments each year matter enormously to casual fans, and the rest is just watered-down filler. Even a PGA Tour’s “signature” event like this week at Riviera is without Rahm and the 2022 winner, Joaquin Niemann.
Last June’s “framework agreement” with LIV’S Saudi backers has still not been solidified. Furthermore, there’s some thought that if and when an agreement is reached, the likes of Rahm and Brooks Koepka playing in non-majors against Mcilroy and Scheffler will take time. Like, not only not in 2024, but not in 2025, either.
Which leaves the sport with not only an uncertain future but an unacceptable status quo, and some ridiculous fallout. Start with the Official World Golf Rankings.
It’s easy to deem the rankings irrelevant because LIV players get no credit for their finishes on their tour — a direct result of its 54-hole format. But “irrelevant” is inaccurate, because the rankings still have a direct impact on who we see at the best events, and they create obvious absurdities.
Koepka, a five-time major champion who tied for second at last year’s Masters and won the PGA Championship, is the 27th-best player in the world? Dustin Johnson won the most recent LIV event — and fell from 218th to 231st?
Yes, the LIV guys knew what they signed up for — or should have. But the impact isn’t just on those players. It’s on the majors, which are no longer guaranteed to have the fields they should given the current qualification methods.
Niemann, a 25-year-old Chilean with enormous potential, is the poster child for the plight. He kicked off LIV’S season by firing a 59 in Mexico, then beat Sergio Garcia in a playoff. But since bolting for LIV at the end of the 2022 season, he has fallen from 19th to 78th in the world rankings.
As a LIV player, the only way he can climb those standings is to play well in majors. But he can’t play well in majors unless he can get into majors. The Masters takes the top 50 in the world from both the end of the previous calendar year and the week before the tournament is held. Niemann has played a couple of times on the DP World Tour, which LIV players are allowed to do — and even won once — but it’s unlikely he can play there consistently enough to climb back into the top 50.
Now, exactly zero people — at least not named Niemann — will tune in or tune out the Masters based on whether Joaquin Niemann plays or doesn’t. But it’s unarguable that the Masters will have a slightly smaller and weaker field this year than it did last, and that trend will continue until and unless a solution to all this is worked out.
Indeed, as it stands now only 11 LIV players will be at Augusta, down from 18 a year ago — seven former champions who can play there for life; three recent major champions whose exemptions will expire unless they win more majors (Bryson Dechambeau, Cam Smith and Koepka); and Tyrrell Hatton, who departed for LIV this year but was ranked in the top 50 when 2023 concluded.
And so we wait, and wait, and wait for it all to be fixed. There are indeed complications, both personal and logistical. Among the most prominent: How the tour would compensate the players who could have left for lucrative LIV deals but stayed anyway. More than that, how would the tour treat a returning LIV player who was part of an antitrust suit against it in 2022 — an 11-player group that includes Phil Mickelson, Dechambeau and 2023 LIV player of the year Talor Gooch — as compared to a LIV player who merely resigned his PGA Tour membership and walked away quietly? (that applies to Johnson, Koepka and others).
“We’re looking into all the different models for the pathways back,” Woods said, “what that looks like, what the impact is for the players who have stayed ... and how we make our product better going forward. There’s no answer to that right now.”
There’s no answer right now. There’s no way to say when there will be an answer. The PGA Tour may well stage a riveting event this week at Riviera, next week in Mexico or next month in Orlando and at the Players Championship. But they won’t be the best events they could be. They won’t be what they once were.
So we’ll see you in April at Augusta for the Masters, the first golf tournament of the year that really matters.