PGA Announces The Best Field In Golf*
A last minute invite to Talor Gooch upends the world ranking order along with the PGA Tour's stranglehold on producing major berths. Greg Norman must be elated.
What kind of gift do you get a leathery Floridian perpetually mired in a mid-life crisis?
Asking here for Greg Norman’s relatives.
You know, a guy who had everything before he downscaled. Whose ego is fueled by a constant need for attention? Who wakes up every day hoping to jam a finger in the PGA Tour’s one remaining good eye? All while wondering why the governing bodies refuse to send him free tickets?
The shadow of a man who once creamed a golf ball as long and straight as anyone but who now dreams of destruction while luring 18-to-25 y.o. brats to watch 12 seconds of golf so they’ll talk up the Bonecrushers to their 45-65 y.o. former-brats-turned-dads seen as important “decision-makers”?
I’ve got just the gift!
On Tuesday and less than a week before the PGA Championship gets underway outside Lousiville, those wacky PGA of America rabble-rousers delivered a plum gift under Norman’s Christmas tree: a major exemption based solely on decent play in LIV events.
Frisco’s navy-and-drab gold set has a propensity to show the Corleone’s and Stracci’s of golf that they do things their own Fifth-of-Five Families way. They like to waive the one-ball rule even if it hasn’t mattered for two decades and now allow the same rangefinders banned in every other men’s major. All just to grow someone’s bottom line.
The PGA of America also loves to join forces with the PGA Tour in fighting a few watered-down Rules of Golf proposed regulations in the name of, what else, “growing the game,” even as the game has…grown and needs sustaining. And a game featuring a bland power-dominated pro version needing some regulation to bring back the occasional snap hook off-center-miss-only-traveling-270. You know, the kind of shot reminding Patrick Cantlay he’s NOT the next CEO of Goldman Sachs merely biding time on the PGA Tour.
I digress.
The latest PGA of America outlier project is a head-scratcher given that it will let LIV Commish Norman tell his players how he told-you-so while damaging the PGA of America’s already-depleted partners at the PGA Tour. By issuing a last-minute PGA Championship “special invitation” to Talor Gooch (and seven other more deserving LIV players), the quarter-zip major has done enormous, maybe even fatal damage to their supposed partners at the PGA Tour and the Official World Golf Ranking (where the PGA holds a board seat).
The same Tour the PGA of America is joined at the hip with. And where the current PGA president, John Lindert, sits on the ever-growing, weirdo PGA Tour Board a whopping three weeks into struggling to welcome Rory McIlroy back. And the same world ranking system hanging on to whiffs of dignity, power, and a algorithmic integrity, minus most of the gravitas stripped away now that the ranking no longer accurately reflects a complete list of the world’s best.
On Tuesday, several players from LIV received invites to next week’s PGA Championship based largely on admirable efforts to score ranking points via their scores outside of Saudi Arabia’s tacky upstart league. But in giving one obvious exception to this effort—a peak Dan Jenkins-conceived point-misser named Talor Gooch—a last-minute invite, the PGA all but blessed LIV’s 54-hole, Studio 54-infused sham Tour that (mostly) plays by the Rules of Golf.
The Gooch case is different from all of his LIV peers because he’s not only made little effort to accrue points in non-LIV 72-hole events, he says he will not attempt qualifying for the “Open” majors even after raking in millions and saying ridiculous things about asterisks on wins just because he’s not been invited to the party. Last week, Gooch dug in on his point-missing ways by saying he will not try to qualify for the 2024 U.S. Open or Open Championship even as 35 of LIV’s 54-or-so players are entered in the U.S. Open qualifying. A similar number of players are (again, admirably) expected to try for The Open.
Gooch is entitled to do whatever he likes. But he’s also entitled in a terribly unattractive way. His hubris is even more amazing given that he’s never finished in a major championship top 10 after 11 starts. One Masters T14 constitutes his moment of quadrilateral glory.
This doesn’t make him a bad person. But it does make his hubris just a wee bit much. Worse than his refusal to attempt qualifying, Gooch has shown little desire to earn ranking points while the disruption he contributed to is sorted out.
His 2024 LIV performance record is also something to sneeze at: 15th-2nd-8th-22nd-13th-29th-4th. 🥱
Gooch’s efforts at playing outside of LIV over the last year consisted of equally “eh” results:
What a valiant competitor!
With the PGA of America rewarding someone who only wants to stay inside the safe confines of the LIV cocoon, the organization has legitimized the PGA Tour’s rival and all but guaranteed that future major championship spots should go to players based solely on performances in 54-hole team events once deemed unworthy of World Ranking sanctioning.