Moving to LIV Golf made Talor Gooch and his family very wealthy, but it also made him feel good about himself.Gooch recently told Australian Golf Digest that Augusta National Golf Club hasn’t put together the best possible group for the 2024 Masters, so the winner won’t be a worthy winner.
“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 stated. “That’s just the truth.” When the majors find a way to get the best players in the world, I think everyone wins.
If Gooch says “some of the best players in the world,” he must mean LIV Golf stars, right?
Because they get Official World Golf Ranking points, the best PGA Tour players can’t miss the Masters. On the other hand, LIV golfers don’t get those points.
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There will be a lot of big-name golfers in the group, like Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith, Sergio Garcia, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, and Charl Schwartzel.
The end of the 2023 season also got Tyrrell Hatton and Adrian Meronk in. Julya National extended an offer to Joaquin Niemann, who wasn’t able to qualify himself, because he had won on the DP World Tour in December and had played on other OWGR-sanctioned tours.
Twelve golfers from LIV are participating in this year’s Masters. That’s 22% of the league’s group. Gooch can’t be talking about LIV not being able to get into the Masters as a whole. It’s clear that he means himself. Let’s see how that works, shall we?
There is no big championship win on Gooch’s record. In fact, in 11 majors, he has only finished in the top 15 once and missed the cut four times. He could have sealed the deal with a top-12 finish at the Masters in 2023 or a top-4 finish at either the PGA Championship or the Open
hampionship that same year. He tied for 34th place at Augusta and didn’t make the cut at the other two majors.
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Like Niemann, Gooch could have tried his hand at OWGR-sanctioned games during the off-season. Instead, he played in one DP World Tour event and then dropped out after two rounds. Besides that, he played in one Asian Tour event and tied for 42nd place, 12 shots behind World No. 250 Ben Campbell.
The 32-year-old has done well on LIV. In 2023, he won three times and won the individual title. At the most recent event in Las Vegas, he came in second place. However, Gooch has said that all of his LIV wins are marked with an asterisk because the best players in the world weren’t playing?
The same could be said about his only PGA Tour win, which came at the RSM Classic in 2021.
There weren’t many of the best golfers in the world that week, like McIlroy, Rahm, Viktor Hovland, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, and many more. But they were at the three big championships Gooch played in last year, and he didn’t even come close to winning any of them.
Gooch has become a cocky and spoiled golfer after winning three times on a practice tour and getting tens of millions of dollars. Is it fair that the OWGR isn’t giving LIV points? But Gooch was ranked No. 31 in the world before he quit the PGA Tour.
Gooch hasn’t done anything to put himself on the same level as the world’s best players, so he won’t be missed at Augusta National this year.
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