More than three years ago, as the PGA Tour wriggled to deal with the existence of LIV Golf, a simple theory emerged. The messenger was Rory McIlroy.
Designated/Elevated/Signature Events were new and their field construction had become clear. Players who didn’t feel good about being in the upper echelon of the PGA Tour were worried there might not be a spot waiting for them. (Sound familiar?) McIlroy was in his (about) 12th month as the undisputed president of the House of the Tour and explained why the new system worked well.
“This tour was built on meritocracy,” he said at the 2023 Genesis Invitational. “This tour was built if you shoot the scores, you can advance the levels and play the biggest events. It will not be taken.”
It was a message for PGA Tour players then and it’s a sneaky message for LIV golfers now: You can always just shoot the scores.
We will soon know how many spots on the PGA Tour Champions Series, set to debut in 2028, will be reserved for the top performers on the DP World Tour. It could be three; it can be five; it almost certainly won’t be the standard 10. But this week Exodus of interest in LIV Golf 2.0 makes this game of musical chairs more fascinating.
Let’s say there are only three seats open on that chairlift across the Atlantic. Let’s say Jon Rahm hits one, naturally, and let’s assume Joaquin Niemann takes another. Bet on Sergio Garcia, just released from his LIV contractto take the third?
Maybe there will be five slots instead. Garcia beat her fellow Spaniard David Puig and all his youthful energy? And a host of up-and-coming Spaniards are playing on the DP World Tour next year, all 15 to 20 years younger than Garcia (several recruited to play for his LIV team).
The course narrows with each additional LIV golfer who joins the hunt. But the opportunity has not changed much. You can get in if you shoot the games – but they haven’t been so kind to Garcia lately. There was his open qualifying attempt this summer, where he shot four under in the morning and then had some bad lasagna ruin his afternoon. There was qualifying for the US Open two months earlier, where he missed by two shots.
There was that distant 2025 event in Macau where the top three finishers earned spots in that year’s Open. He missed a 3-footer in the last, forcing him to qualify because of his performance in LIV events. That all worked, of course, but we will not forget how little “pull the scores” exists in LIV events, where the last place still collected $125,000 checks.
That’s not to say we owe Garcia’s ability to make it happen. It is only a recognition that his research will be fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Because at the end of the day, it’s a different race. He often delivered, and never lacked confidence. Only this week he he declared his hope to be on Luke Donald’s 2027 Ryder Cup team, an invitation that will probably only happen if his scores are so good that they force Donald’s hand.
But Garcia’s immediate future—and how we think—extends beyond that. Think about how his contemporaries have positioned his legacy in recent years. Justin Rose has competed in numerous majors, almost in bag a Master. Adam Scott is playing as a top 25 golfer on the planet, with five straight top 20s (and counting). All three are 46 years old and refer to each other constantly when discussing their generation of players. All of them have their major, they won countless times in the world, but only one left for LIV Golf and created a serious gap in those associations. (Temperaments aside, too.) And now, at least it seems, Sergio will have a chance to make good on that decision in an arena where people will see. He just needs to score.
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