LIV Golf has officially withdrawn its application for Official World Golf Ranking recognition, according to Sports Illustrated’s Bob Harig, with the breakaway league claiming that the repeated failure to recognise LIV players’ accomplishments in the league means that the rankings no longer have legitimate basis.
Harig cites a letter sent by LIV CEO Greg Norman to LIV players ahead of this week’s event in Hong Kong in which Norman writes that any potential “resolution which protects the accuracy, credibility and integrity of the OWGR rankings no longer exists.”
LIV first applied for OWGR accreditation in July 2022, shortly after staging the first event in London, but were last October formally denied with the OWGR stating that LIV’s lack of player pathways and combined team and individual formats meant it came up shy of the requisite standard
“We have made significant efforts to fight for you and ensure your accomplishments are recognized within the existing ranking system,” Norman continued. “Unfortunately, OWGR has shown little willingness to productively work with us.”
LIV announced its ‘Promotions Event’ to be held late last year in an effort to ensure pathways onto the tour for three qualifiers, plus the winner of the Asian Tour’s International Series Order of Merit, but Harig suggests that an unnamed LIV official said that “attempts to get clarity on what was necessary to meet the criteria were unsuccessful.”
The OWGR board at present consists of seven members; a representative from each of the four major championships, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, outgoing DP World Tour CEO Keith Pelley and Keith Waters, a DP World Tour executive who oversees the Federation of PGA Tours, however Monahan, Pelley and Waters had all recused themselves from voting on LIV’s application, leaving the four major championships’ representatives to make the decision.
“We are not at war with them,” said OWGR board chairman Peter Dawson, the former CEO of the R&A, when quoted by the Associated Press upon LIV’s bid being denied last year. “This decision not to make them eligible is not political. It is entirely technical. LIV players are self-evidently good enough to be ranked. They’re just not playing in a format where they can be ranked equitably with the other 24 tours and thousands of players to compete on them.”
The lack of 36-hole cuts, 72-hole tournaments and field averages of 75 players or more were not necessarily grounds for dismissal, said Dawson, but the lack of week-to-week turnover and the lack of promotion and relegation at season’s end were the bigger issues.
There is little doubt that several of LIV’s players are among the game’s elite and their world ranking does not reflect that, and we’ve seen that the major championships retain the desire to have the best players in the world competing as witnessed by the news that Joaquin Niemann has received an invitation to both The Masters and the PGA Championship, even though his world ranking would generally exclude him from qualification. The fact that Augusta National made no reference to Niemann’s LIV accomplishments, choosing instead to reference his Australian Open victory in December was interesting, but the invitation itself is proof that there is no desire to intentionally exclude LIV players not otherwise exempt.
But Norman, according to Harig, has suggested that because LIV players have been left out in the cold for so long, making up for lost ground would prove extremely difficult.
“The rankings are structured to penalize anyone who has not played regularly on an “Eligible Tour” with the field ratings disproportionately rewarding play on the PGA Tour,” Harig claims that Norman wrote. “This is illustrated by the fact only four players inside the top 50 are not PGA Tour players (Jon Rahm (3), Tyrrell Hatton (17), Brooks Koepka (30) and Cam Smith (45)) and by the precipitous decline of LIV players generally, notwithstanding extraordinary performances in LIV events.
“Even if LIV Golf events were immediately awarded points, the OWGR system is designed such that it would be functionally impossible for you to regain positions close to the summit of the ranking, where so many of you belong.”
As the silence surrounding the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s involvement in PGA Tour Enterprises – the collaboration between the PGA Tour and the Strategic Sports Group that the PIF were believed to also be buying into – becomes deafening, quite what this means for men’s professional golf in the long term is hard to say, but this suggests that any potential agreements are still distant and that bad blood still remains.
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