In LIV Golf, Bubba Watson Is Taking His Shot at Being a Leader
Last June, a few days after undergoing surgery for a torn meniscus that he suffered during the 2022 PGA Championship, Bubba Watson sat down with his 10-year-old son, Caleb, in their Pensacola home to watch the LIV Golf event at the Centurion Club in London. For weeks, the 44-year-old two-time Masters champion had wrestled with whether to stay on the PGA Tour, where he had amassed a level of fame and fortune he thought unimaginable for a working-class kid from Bagdad, Fla., or join the upstart tour backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Watson observed his son watching the YouTube telecast of the tournament. The boy was mesmerized by the team leaderboard. He didn’t care that Charl Schwartzel was leading the individual competition, but only that the South African team, the Stingers, were blowing away the field in the inaugural event of the series. It was a cathartic moment for the elder Watson.
“I think of myself as a businessman and when I saw Caleb’s reaction, I knew who LIV was targeting,” he told me. “It’s not the 60-year-old falling asleep on Sunday afternoon. It’s the younger generation. That’s when I knew they had a product.”
Bubba Watson is the captain of the RangeGoats, a name he chose with a nod to his upbringing in Bagdad, Fla.
Jasen Vinlove/USA TODAY Sports
A month later, Watson joined LIV Golf, ending weeks of speculation about his plans. On Friday, he will make his playing debut on the tour in the first round of the Mayakoba opener at the El Camaleon Golf Club in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Watson is the captain of the RangeGoats, which includes Harold Varner III, Talor Gooch and Thomas Pieters. They are one of 12 teams vying for the $5 million team purse and the $20 million individual purse.
“It will be a challenging year because I want to prove to myself and my team and the world that I can still golf,” Watson says. “I still have a lot to offer to the game of golf.”
Since early last year when PGA Tour players began defecting to LIV Golf, they have given a range of explanations for joining the new tour. Explanations range from some believing that only competition would push the PGA Tour to do more for its players, to players saying they were doing it for the money, to those wanting a shorter schedule, to those driven by a desire to play team golf.
Watson is in the camp motivated to build a regular place for a team format in professional golf. An entrepreneur at heart with numerous business interests in Pensacola, Watson loves the idea of building something from scratch. He helped do it as a co-owner of the Pensacola Blue Wahoos, a Double-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins, and now he wants to do it with LIV Golf.
“If you’re doing it for money then it’s really not the right reason to do it,” he says. “Professional golf needs a team event. Change in the game is good. Competition is good. You do what you believe is right. You’re not going to make everybody happy. Nobody is trying to end the PGA Tour. LIV is 48 guys trying to make a league.”
Team formats have always had a formidable place in the game. In 19th-century Scotland, Old and Young Tom Morris, Willie Park Sr., William Park Jr. and others competed in high-stakes matches that were the precursors to what would become known as the Open Championship. During the 1910s and 20s, the Lesley Cup Matches—the annual battle of east coast supremacy between teams representing Boston, New York and Philadelphia—was one of the most significant events in amateur golf.
“We tend to think of the Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup and the Solheim Cup when thinking about team competitions,” said Rand Jerris, a prominent golf historian and the former director of the USGA Golf Museum and Library. ”But truly these types of events have long been played at all levels of the game, amateur and professional.” In those early team matches, Jerris says, it was less about personal reward and glory than it was about pride for a club or a city or country.
Yet individualism has been vital for the growth of the game. There has been a succession of great players from Bobby Jones to Ben Hogan to Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods that have defined each generation of the sport. “From the origins of professional golf, you have a strong association between head to head competition and large purses,” Jerris says. “That carried directly into the establishment of the Open Championship. The R&A still proudly uses the language 'the Champion Golfer of the Year.' The result of all of this is that individual accomplishment has high prestige.”
On the PGA Tour, players have earned the privilege to play the elite team competitions like the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup with their individual performances. Watson’s experience in four Ryder Cups and two Presidents Cups have burnished his desire for team competition. Even when he didn’t qualify for the 2016 Ryder Cup matches, he lobbied successfully for a vice captaincy. Few players have relished the excitement of these team matches more than Watson. Now for what he always said he never did for money but for the pride of being a part of a team, he can also get paid handsomely. It was reported that he received in excess of $50 million for joining LIV Golf, but he says these numbers for him and other players are grossly inflated.
In 2023, Watson plans to play all 14 LIV events and the Masters. Earlier this month, he missed the cut in the PIF Saudi International, his first event since the PGA Championship. He says he doesn’t have any knee pain, but that he still needs to get accustomed to trusting it during his swing. He has played in every Masters since 2011, but he became worried that he might miss his favorite tournament as speculation grew that the major championships might join the PGA Tour and suspend LIV players from their events.
When Watson told Caleb and his 8-year-old daughter, Dakota, that moving to LIV Golf, could mean that the family might not go to Augusta in April for the Masters, the children smiled and said, "Dad, we’ll go wherever you go.” Their support was reassuring for Watson.
“I would have been heartbroken if Augusta National said we couldn’t play,” he says. “But I always believed that they would do the right thing and let us play.”
With the Masters more than a month away, Watson’s focus now is on making an impact in LIV Golf as a team captain. Lately, he's been inspired by his wife, Angie, who is the head coach of a girl's high school basketball team in Pensacola. The leaner LIV schedule, he believes, will give him more time to grow communities in Pensacola and those of his three teammates.
“With this team event, I can be a leader and help lead some guys in a positive way, but hopefully they can help me grow in a positive way too,” he says.
Watson has already made his presence known by naming his team the RangeGoats. The name is an ode to his modest upbringing in the Florida panhandle and to a driving range he owns in the area. But despite the humble nickname, he has great ambitions for himself and his team.
“It doesn’t matter what golf tournament I go to,” says Watson, who has 12 PGA Tour wins. “I want to win as an individual because that means that our team is better.”