Masters 2023: Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka tee it up together just like the good old days

AUGUSTA, Ga. — It started, as all peace accords do, with a bit of back-channel diplomacy. Brooks Koepka had just won the LIV Orlando event, making him the all-time leader in LIV Golf wins (two). His phone buzzed Sunday night, and waiting there was a congratulatory message from Rory McIlroy, standard-bearer for the PGA Tour and avowed opponent of all things LIV.

In the course of their texting, McIlroy asked Koepka to meet for a pre-Masters practice round on Tuesday, and shortly after noon, the two teed off — along with amateur Gordon Sargent — under low gray skies.

When the history of LIV Golf is written, the McIlroy-Koepka Masters summit might be the moment that the two sides began to move toward the middle. Or it might just be a couple friends out for nine holes of golf on an April afternoon, whichever. Either way, Tuesday afternoon was a reminder of what the LIV-PGA Tour split has cost the golf world … and a potential road map for a way back.

For all the talk in the media, on Twitter and from various high-strung personalities on both sides of the golf divide, the truth is that most of the players who have defected to LIV still get along quite well with their former PGA Tour colleagues.

“I think everybody forgets that we see each other in off weeks and play with each other and talk with each other,” Koepka said after his round. “There's an open line of communication there between me and him. I think we're both pretty honest in where we're at.”

Koepka was very much the exception rather than the rule, though, so far at Augusta National. For the most part, LIV players stuck with their own through the first two days of practice. There’s been a deliberate attempt from both sides to cool down the rhetoric that characterized LIV’s first, fiery days.

“You know, it's OK to get on with Brooks and DJ [Dustin Johnson] and maybe not get on with some other guys that went to LIV. It's interpersonal relationships, that's just how it goes,” McIlroy said earlier in the day. “This week and this tournament is way bigger than any of that, I feel, and it's just great that all of the best players in the world are together again for the first time in what seems to be quite a while.”

The distance weighed on Koepka’s mind, too. “We haven't played with these guys in a long time, so just getting out to go play with them has been nice because it's been a lot of just seeing everybody,” Koepka said. “It's been probably, I don't know, eight months since we've seen a lot of guys.”

Seeing Koepka smile on the course is as rare as seeing a patron run at Augusta National; if it happens at all, it sure doesn’t last long. Yet there he was Tuesday, walking up fairways alongside McIlroy, grinning like the last eight months of golf’s civil war had never even happened.

“We're still close with these guys,” Koepka said. “Everything's been good, man. We're still the same people.”

Virtually everyone involved is looking to lower the temperature, at least for this week. Sources close to several LIV players told Yahoo Sports the goal this week is to show respect for Augusta National, and Augusta National is returning the favor. There are no dramatic LIV-PGA Tour rivals pairings, no McIlroy-Phil Mickelson or Sergio Garcia-Tiger Woods groupings that would spur, in the club’s eyes, the wrong kind of publicity.

The McIlroy-Koepka thaw comes at a crucial moment for LIV. While six LIV players have won the Masters and thus have exemptions into infinity — or until they’re asked by green jackets of the future to stop playing, whichever comes first — the other 12 in the field this week are looking at Masters tenures in terms of years at best, days at worst. Koepka himself, for instance, is in the fourth year of a five-year exemption he still enjoys from winning the 2019 PGA Championship. Without another major win or strong performance, he’ll be looking at the end of his Masters run next year, an unfathomable thought for a four-time winner still in what should be the heart of his career.

The key question going forward is how a thawing of personal tension will affect the ongoing corporate tension between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour. Both sides have invested far too many billable hours and consultants’ fees to simply shake hands and reunite just because a few players are still texting one another. Just hours before McIlroy and Koepka teed off, news broke that the DP World Tour, the PGA Tour's international equivalent, won a major legal victory against LIV that will make most LIV players' attempts to return to Augusta that much tougher in years to come.

But that’s a matter for next week or next month. For now, the consensus opinion appears to be: Enjoy the reunion. Enjoy the moment. And bring home a green jacket if at all possible.

Just like a normal Masters.