There Was No Way Augusta National Would Ever Ban LIV Golfers From the Masters
Augusta National announced Tuesday that LIV golfers are eligible to win a green jacket, a decision that should have surprised absolutely nobody, and can be explained, in part, in two words: Sandy Lyle.
Lyle is on the official list of invitees to the 2023 Masters. He will be 65 when the azaleas bloom. Last year, he shot 82–76 to miss the cut for the seventh straight year. Nobody thinks Lyle has any chance in the world at contending next year, including Lyle, but he will be invited because he won the Masters in 1988 (during the Reagan Administration!) and past champions get to play as long as they don’t totally embarrass themselves on the course, which Lyle has not.
A tournament that wants Sandy Lyle to keep playing is not going to tell Dustin Johnson to stay the hell away.
Smith, three times a top-five finisher at the Masters, now plays for LIV Golf. But by virtue of his 2022 British Open win, he’s set for the next five years at Augusta.
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In a way, the Masters was one of professional golf’s original disruptors: an invitational with no affiliation with a governing body, and with what is, objectively speaking, an obnoxious name, that went out of its way to attract media attention and became the biggest event in the sport. Of course, we don’t think of the Masters that way because it has been an Establishment event for all of our lifetimes. Augusta National prizes tradition. It cultivates tradition. It wants every “patron” who walks the “grounds” to feel that tradition.
There was never any chance of Augusta National’s disinviting past champions that play on the LIV tour. There was also never a real chance of Augusta National declaring that LIV golfers who haven’t won the Masters are ineligible for the next one.
There were certainly people in golf who would have liked to see ANGC make a stand like that—as an invitational that basically answers only to itself and the rule of law, the Masters has more power to change its ground rules than any other major. But it was never going to happen, for two reasons.
The first reason is that ANGC wants the Masters to be the best tournament in the world. That’s a subjective title, of course, but most U.S. fans and most pro golfers would put the Masters No. 1. The only real knock on Augusta National is that, because of various exemptions and the relatively small field size, its talent pool is not as deep as the other majors. ANGC was not going to compound that criticism by weakening the field even more. A Masters that bans Cameron Smith and Brooks Koepka is a lesser golf tournament. More admirable, some might argue. But not better.
The second reason is that, while Masters chairman Fred Ridley and his confidantes surely don’t like the Saudi government’s invasion of professional golf, it’s also not their problem. They don’t run a tour. Nobody poached their stars.
If ANGC wanted to stand up and try to stop LIV, the time to do that would have been last spring, when PGA Tour players started jumping to LIV and the Tour immediately banned them. Augusta National could have done the same, and made it clear that anybody jumping to LIV was forfeiting a chance at a green jacket. I don’t think it would have stopped many from jumping, but that tactic would have made more sense then than it does now.
Banning LIV golfers now would hurt the Masters. This might shock you, but Augusta National is not really in the habit of trying to hurt the Masters.
LIV Golf remains a gross exercise on a lot of levels, mostly because it was built on blood money with no sensible business plan. The future remains unclear. The cabal that runs the Official World Golf Ranking will have some say (in this case, the cabal is on the right side of history). The PGA Tour still has tactics it can use to try to damage LIV. We will see what happens when LIV golfers start dropping so far down in the rankings that they are ineligible for certain majors, or when the first LIV contracts expire, or if somebody just says they hate playing LIV golf and want to go back to the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour/LIV Golf cold war will end someday, somehow. But it’s not really the Masters’ war, which is why Augusta National has not tried to end it.