A Masters asterisk? LIV champion says there should be

LIV Golf burst onto the professional scene with truckloads of very un-golf-like attitude, brash arrogance dropped like a boulder into placid Rae's Creek. Since then — and since the June agreement between LIV and the PGA Tour — the rhetoric has cooled into more a businesslike you-do-your-thing, we'll-do-ours coexistence.

Talor Gooch, the reigning individual LIV Golf champion, disrupted the calm this week when he declared that a victory at the Masters without certain LIV players in attendance wouldn't be a free-and-clear win. Several LIV players, including Gooch, are not currently in the field for April's Masters, and Gooch aired his views to Australian Golf Digest.

"If Rory McIlroy goes and completes his Grand Slam without some of the best players in the world, there’s just going to be an asterisk," Gooch said. "It’s just the reality. I think everybody wins whenever the majors figure out a way to get the best players in the world there."

The Masters has several criteria for inclusion, including a ranking in the Official World Golf Ranking's top 50 players. But since LIV events are not recognized by the OWGR for ranking purposes, players such as Gooch have dropped substantially in the rankings since they joined the breakaway tour.

Some LIV players, like Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed and Dustin Johnson, have permanent exemptions thanks to their prior victories at Augusta. Others, such as Brooks Koepka, Cam Smith and Bryson DeChambeau, have exemptions thanks to their recent wins at other majors. Joaquin Niemann just received an invitation thanks to his performance around the world; the invitation conspicuously did not mention Niemann's LIV affiliation.

It's understandable why Gooch would believe the absence of certain players would dim the luster of the majors. The truth, however, is that most of the world's top players are already in the majors, one way or another. That can, and will, change if young talent continues to flow toward LIV Golf, but for the moment, the system is working as it always has ... for the most part. LIV and the PGA Tour have turned golf into a game of musical chairs, and Gooch just happens to be the most glaring example of a player caught without a seat when the music stopped.

It's increasingly obvious that the Official World Golf Rankings are no longer a useful metric for tracking the "best" players in the game; the OWGR measures the best players in specific tournaments. In the wake of LIV Golf, several other methods of determining the world's "best" players have sprung up, most notably Data Golf. The Data Golf model incorporates performance, strength of field and recent history, regardless of tour, to arrive at a comprehensive combined ranking.

On Twitter, prominent golf analyst No Laying Up used Data Golf to break down the statistical merits of Gooch's argument:

Of Data Golf's top 50 players, the only ones not already qualified, or in position to qualify, for the Masters are Beau Hossler, Gooch, Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Rasmus Højgaard and Stephen Jaeger. With all due respect to Gooch, et al., that's not exactly a Masters-shattering lineup. If, for instance, Sergio Garcia's 2017 Masters win doesn't carry an asterisk because Dustin Johnson was out with an injury — and it shouldn't — there's no way a LIV-less Masters should come with any sort of downgrade.

Gooch is the most notable example of the bargain that players struck to go with the riches of LIV. Yes, the money is life-changing ... but unless you're coming in with existing exemptions, you're neither entitled to invitations to the majors, nor likely to get them. To quote Don Draper, that's what the money is for.

Unless and until the majors change their criteria for inclusion, LIV players without other exemptions will have no choice but to to accept their second-class status in the world of professional golf. They have opportunities to qualify into certain majors, and as Niemann has shown, opportunities to impress the decision-makers at others. And, of course, they still have those paychecks.