In the face of several LIV Golf players being excluded from the Masters, one of those snubs is calling into question the legitimacy of men’s golf’s major tournaments.
Talor Gooch, one of LIV Golf’s top players, did not receive an invitation to the Masters, as Augusta National has continued to use the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) as a guide to quantify invitations. The OWGR has rejected awarding ranking points to LIV golfers for their performance in that circuit. The result is that several of the world’s more prominent players who are without automatic qualifiers for invitations to majors like the Masters have been absent from those events.
‘If Rory McIlroy goes and completes his (career) Grand Slam without some of the best players in the world, there’s just going to be an asterisk,’ Gooch told the Australian Golf Digest in an interview. ‘It’s just the reality. I think everybody wins whenever the majors figure out a way to get the best players in the world there.’
McIlroy, 34, has won all majors except the Masters, with his top finish in the tournament being a second-place finish in 2022.
Augusta National sent three special invites for the 2024 field, with only one of those going to a LIV Golf player, Joaquín Niemann, whose performance in European Tour-sanctioned events qualified him for the invitation.
‘It’s not surprising,’ Gooch continued. ‘I think the majors have kind of shown that they’re not getting on board with LIV. ‘Jaco’ went outside of LIV and played some great golf and they rewarded him for that. So hopefully the day will turn when the majors decide to start rewarding good play on LIV. Hopefully that’ll be sooner than later.’
Gooch, who is currently ranked 449th in the OWGR, isn’t the only LIV golfer to decry the exclusion of LIV players from golf’s top tournaments.
‘I think the Official World Golf Ranking has got itself into a real hole,’ LIV Golf’s Lee Westwood told the Australian Golf Digest. ‘It’s got itself to a point where it’s obsolete, really, if I’m being completely honest. It’s managed to be so stubborn that it no longer ranks all the best golfers in the world fairly. And it’s gone so far that I don’t see how it can come back from the hole that it’s in because you can’t backdate them.’
Westwood called on major tournaments to devise another system to include LIV golfers, many of whom have won several major championships in their careers.
‘You’ve got to find another way of doing it,’ he said, ‘otherwise you lose credibility as a major championship, don’t you?’
