Is There a New Power Team in LIV Golf? Bubba Watson's RangeGoats Have Entered the Chat
Is it fanciful to talk about the RangeGoats GC defeating Fireballs GC to win its first LIV Golf team championship?
It may seem a little early in golf’s ecosystem to analyze the importance of Talor Gooch leading his team after a one-shot loss in LIV Adelaide last week to a second bite of the apple and a first win at LIV Singapore.
It may not seem important that the 4Aces were off the podium for the first time this season, or that Gooch is the first player to win consecutive LIV Golf events in the circuit's short history with a one-hole playoff win over Sergio Garcia. He now looks ahead to the next event in two weeks in his home state of Oklahoma.
There's a lot to unpack from an interesting Sunday of golf at Sentosa Island, Singapore, but LIV is nothing if not interesting and Gooch, along with his team, is the focus out of LIV’s fifth event in 2023.
If you're Gooch, everything is falling into place as you hoped after leaving the 4Aces at the end of last season and joining Bubba Watson’s newly named RangeGoats.
In a limited career of 118 events on the PGA Tour before joining LIV Golf, the 31-year-old had just one win, at the RSM Classic in 2022.
Now, after just five events in 2023, Gooch has won twice and raked in an impressive $8.937 million—$1.787 million per event or $595,800 per round.
“You just try to bottle it up and make it last as long as possible,” Gooch said after his win. “I know that I'm not going to continue playing this level of golf forever. So, you just enjoy it while it comes and try to make it last as long as you can. And when it goes away you try to get back on the train as quickly as possible.”
The money was clearly a motivator for Gooch and the others to make the leap from the PGA Tour to LIV, but is it possible that answer is too simplistic?
Is there something behind playing for a team? Are some players just wired differently and want that camaraderie?
“The opportunity to be on a team and have this back and forth, have some locker-room talk, go to dinners with each other, support each other, push each other, it's, I think it's like Harold (Varner) will say, that's how you grow in life,” Gooch said. “That's how you grow as a golfer. That's how you grow as an individual. And so, for me that was such a cool and unique aspect for LIV that I was excited about.”
Wins at any level are important and if you believe in the team concept that LIV is promoting, a team’s first win is huge.
For RangeGoats Captain Watson, this win not only means a $3 million deposit in the team’s coffers, but the opportunity to tell a better tale to potential sponsors and grow the stature of the team and the individual players.
“We're trying to grow a business, right? We're trying to grow a franchise. But not only a franchise, but we’re also trying to start a league,” Watson said during the winners' press conference. “Right now, we're all not wearing the team uniforms. We're working on that. So, there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that all these other sports leagues have done for years.”
Watson also pointed out that LIV Golf still has not had its first birthday, as it launched last June, so from that standpoint LIV has overachieved, but Watson is cognizant as well of all the work yet to be done.
But for now, the four RangeGoats can celebrate a win on a long plane ride back from Singapore knowing that they have accomplished just one small task in what they hope is a long history for the team whose name and logo still baffles many.
“We knew it was coming and it was only a matter of time,” Gooch said. “I was just saying to Thomas (Pieters), you know, he isn't playing his best golf, but that's what makes this team so good I think is we don't have to all be firing on all cylinders to go out and win. Any one of us at any point in time can go win back-to-back out here.”