Fred Couples skeptical how LIV pros would rejoin PGA Tour

Brooks Koepka wants to return to the PGA Tour, Fred Couples says. 

But the 1992 Masters winner is also skeptical of how LIV Golf pros would come back, should a financial deal be struck between the Tour and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, which also funds LIV. Seemingly, an agreement would allow LIV pros, many of whom once played on the Tour, a chance to play Tour events again. 

But would they be let into the Tour’s Signature Events, created after LIV started play in 2022? Those events feature big purses and limited fields — and Couples wondered what that would look like with additional players. 

“I talk to Brooks Koepka all the time. I love Brooks Koepka,” he said. “And, I’m not going to say anything extra except I talk to him all the time — where are you playing next and, you know, when you going and all this stuff — and he wants to come back, I will say that. I believe he really wants to come back and play the Tour.

“But for me personally, there are a lot of guys that are going to be pushed out. … I don’t know how you get an Elevated Event with 72 or 77 people and bring seven superstars in. What do you tell those other seven? And I go, you know, bye-bye.” 

Couples’ comments came via a recent interview with Dave Mahler and Dick Fain of Seattle-based KJR 93.3 FM — which you can listen to in full here — and they continue a series of thoughts on LIV by the World Golf hall of famer. Couples has often jabbed the series, and his primary beef has been with those LIV signees who have taken digs at the PGA Tour, but he also has aired grievances about LIV’s funding and format.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand it,” Couples said of LIV at the Masters in April. “Maybe I’ll go to one [LIV event] and see what it’s really, really like. I know how great they are as players. I get it all, and I get the 54 holes and you drive a cart to your tee and shotgun. That’s easy to pick on. Sometimes I’ve picked on comments that people have made, and I’ve picked on comments that they talk about the Tour, which I’ve said I have now 44 years invested in, and I don’t want anyone picking on a tour that I think is very good.

“Now, everything can get better, but let me tell you, if the LIV tour is better for golf, I’m missing something there. But again, I’m not here to bash them anymore.”

Couples’ comments also come as the talks between the PGA Tour and the PIF appear to be making progress on the deal agreed to in principle in June of 2023. One of the sticking points, presumably, has been what Couples noted: what tournaments would look like if the sides come together. 

“We’re trying to get a Tour right now with the younger players, and it’s really succeeding,” Couples said during the interview. “… The Tour’s age is going rapidly lower and lower and lower. And even the kid Luke Clanton, I think he had another great round today. … But he’s a superstar. But no one really — you know, people in Seattle, if you said, who’s that, they don’t know. … They’re not Jon Rahm or Cam Smith or Brooks or Dustin [Johnson], but they’re going to be.

“And so for us to throw them a bone to come back on the Tour, I don’t think … I know or really at this time tonight anyone knows.” 

Longtime CBS announcer Jim Nantz, who was also interviewed by the radio station, also wondered what events would look like if a deal were to be struck, along with “this team golf concept that seems to be so important to the LIV leader in Yasir Al-Rumayyan.” Nantz then said that he believed golf was in a good spot and that the PGA Tour had leverage in the negotiations. 

“I think the game is fine,” Nantz said during the interview. “You know, we’ve gotten almost kind of almost conditioned to say, when can we settle this thing? When can we settle it, like the Tour is ailing? I don’t believe it’s hurting. Now I realize there’s some firepower, star power that left and ran off for the money, but we’ve developed — I say we — the PGA Tour has developed stars in the meantime. I mean, we got guys like, just like in the last few weeks, we got a guy named Ludvig Aberg. We’re finding ways to make the PGA Tour a pretty interesting watch. The ratings come off the West Coast, by the way, we’re up almost 20 percent.

“So, I mean, I don’t think that the game is hurting as much. I don’t think the Tour, to me — and then nobody’s asking me to get involved in negotiations — the Tour should not be desperate right now. I think that there’s a lot more leverage on the PGA Tour side right now than the LIV side.”

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