Scottie Scheffler: The unseen ‘victim’ of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf divide | Opinion
The damage the creation of LIV Golf has done to the state of the professional game will take at least a decade to recover, and none of the major players involved appear genuinely motivated to fix it.
The genesis of the split is the same reason why there is little urgency: Money. All of the major players involved are too rich to move faster than necessary, which currently is the pace of a dead turtle.
“The game” and its history have no place in the discussion. The game is a vehicle not just for money, but obscene money.
Between the Saudi Arabian government’s desire to diversify its bank account, Greg Norman’s blind ambition to stick it to the PGA Tour, Phil Mickelson’s need to cover “expenses,” and the Tour’s previous/current stance about LIV Golf’s existence, the whole thing is the train wreck that people do not want to watch.
This week, the PGA Tour makes its annual return to Fort Worth with the Charles Schwab Challenge. Unlike last year, when the LIV tour and PGA Tour went head-to-head on the same weekend, the CS Challenge is the only pro tournament on the calendar this weekend.
Despite the efforts and desires of the White House, because that’s a solid use of our government’s time, to arrange an agreement between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, such a deal is no closer today than it was when the two agreed to merge, in June of 2023.
LIV Golf’s impact on PGA Tour great Scottie Scheffler
This fissure created consequences globally, right down to a specific player who deserves better. Highland Park’s and Texas alum Scottie Scheffler is a great guy who is on a run that ranks among the best in the history of the sport, and because the top players in the game are spread between two leagues he doesn’t get his due.
Scheffler should be showered with feline-level adulation, but it’s just not quite Tigerish. He has 15 wins on the PGA Tour, two Masters and a PGA Championship. He has seven top 10 finishes this season alone.
Coming off his PGA Championship win the previous weekend, Scheffler is the top ranked player in the world. The “problem,” and the following is a first-world, elite country club problem, the rankings really only include fellow PGA Tour members.
The World Golf Ranking technically includes players on the LIV tour, but it does not factor in their achievements and statistics compiled in LIV tournaments. It’s why LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau, who finished fifth at The Masters and second at the PGA Championship, ranks 10th.
With DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed, Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, Bubba Watson and other former PGA Tour regular contenders all on the LIV tour, their collective absence from many of Scheffer’s wins unintentionally slaps a small asterisk on those achievements.
The one person it doesn’t bother? The winner himself.
“Do I think the results would have changed? Who knows?” Scheffler said Wednesday at Colonial after his nine-hole Pro Am round. “I only get to compete against those guys four times a year (in the Majors). That was their choice (to go to LIV Golf) not mine.
“At the the end of the day, I am here competing and doing the best I can. That kind of stuff, what’s the point of me thinking about it? We get four chances to compete against them, and last week went well. I’ll get a chance here in a few weeks (at the U.S. Open).”
LIV and the PGA Tour merging
The question golf fans everywhere have remains if and when these tours will agree to merge, or at least set up a scenario where the “name” players play in the same tournaments more than four times a year.
“I’m not on the board but I trust our leadership and the players that are leading those roles and weighing those decisions,” PGA Tour pro Davis Riley said Wednesday at Colonial. He won this tournament last year. “Maybe we would have liked to happen sooner than it has, but at the same time I trust the people in front of us making sure that when it does happen it happens properly.”
He doesn’t know.
A player, like Scheffler, would know. If he wants to know.
“I don’t really know. That’s for the higher ups to decide,” Scheffler said. “I’ve said it a few times this year: If you want to figure out what’s going to happen with the game of golf, go to the other tour and ask those guys. I’m still here on the PGA Tour. We had a tour where we all played together, and the guys that left it’s their responsibility, I think, to bring the tours back together; go see where they’re playing this week and ask them.”
He sounds more like an increasing number of PGA Tour players, and executives, who recognize that while they do not have the Saudi money, they have more power in this negotiation than previously thought.
LIV has endless funds, which bought a handful of big names, but the lack of visibility to its events is acting as a drag that was not properly considered. At this point you may need an APB on Dustin Johnson. Without visibility, the LIV players can’t find the type of endorsement deals they enjoyed on the PGA Tour.
With a handful of high profile players on contracts with LIV that are thought to expire after 2026, there is considerable thought they may ask to re-join the PGA Tour. So an agreement that evolved from ridiculous to inevitable now looks like it may never happen.
There are winners in this, but the real loser remains golf.
This story was originally published May 21, 2025 at 4:18 PM.
