PGA Tour-LIV Golf divide: Former main champion Tom Watson points warning on doable deal to reunify males’s recreation | Golf Information

Former Masters champion Tom Watson is unconvinced a deal to deliver PGA Tour and LIV Golf League gamers collectively and reunifying the lads’s recreation shall be doable.

The boys’s skilled recreation has been fractured because the introduction of LIV Golf, backed by the Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund [PIF], with gamers from the PGA Tour and DP World Tour becoming a member of the circuit since its launch in 2022.

A framework settlement to deliver the excursions nearer collectively was signed in June 2023 however has but to be finalised, leaving LIV Golf gamers ineligible from that includes on the PGA Tour and limiting the world’s high gamers going head-to-head outdoors of the majors.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan stated final month that the involvement of President Donald Trump in discussions made the prospect of reunification “very actual”, though Watson as not as optimistic when discussing the subject at The Masters.

“I do not see an actual working mechanism for the 2 excursions to get again collectively,” Watson stated in his press convention, following his position as honorary starter at Augusta Nationwide. “I feel that is one of many causes you have not seen an settlement since June two years in the past.

“The one factor I do know is that Scottie Scheffler in his speech on the previous Champions Dinner on Tuesday night time stated, ‘I am glad we’re all collectively once more’. So the gamers wish to get collectively.

“It is actually as much as the powers that be to see if there is a framework wherein the 2 excursions can cooperate. I do not see that framework occurring.

“Possibly they’re smarter folks than I’m however the important thing aspect of the PGA Tour, and the one factor that’s required of you is to get permission to play in a competing event, conflicting occasion rule.

“That is there to guard the sponsors of our PGA Tour, in order that the fields aren’t depleted of all the nice gamers as they go and play different tournaments. I do not see that the 2 excursions can get collectively.”

Any change imminent?

The launch of LIV Golf noticed the PGA Tour change their schedule and enterprise mannequin, with extra Signature Occasions and document prize purses, with Grand Slam champion Jack Nicklaus believing the swap has been a hit.

“LIV pushed the PGA Tour into performing some issues that had been just a little untimely for the PGA Tour,” Nicklaus stated. “However the PGA Tour is doing superb.

“They’ve modified their construction. The gamers now personal a bit of what is going on on. Their plan of bringing together with their elevated occasions and their plan of bringing younger gamers alongside within the different tournaments has been very profitable. We’re making new stars for the sport.

Would I like to see all of them come collectively? Certain, I feel all of us would. However I feel the PGA Tour is the Tour, and that is the place most of your good gamers are, and I feel it’s extremely wholesome regardless of which manner it goes, however clearly we would all wish to see everyone collectively.”

There are 12 LIV Golf League gamers within the area for The Masters, together with seven former champions, though event chairman Fred Ridley confirmed that there are not any plans to introduce an additional class for these competing on the Saudi-backed circuit.

“We now have traditionally thought of particular instances for invites for worldwide gamers, which is how Joaquin Niemann was invited the final couple of years,” Ridley defined.

“We really feel we will cope with that difficulty, whether or not it is a LIV participant or a participant on another tour that may not in any other case be eligible for an invite, that we will deal with that with a particular invitation.”

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