More than three years ago, while the PGA Tour contorted itself to deal with the existence of LIV Golf, a simple theory emerged. The messenger was Rory McIlroy.
The Designated/Elevated/Signature Events were novel and their field construction was becoming clear. Players who didn’t quite feel like they were in the upper echelon of the PGA Tour were concerned there may not be a spot waiting for them. (Sound familiar?) McIlroy was in his (roughly) 12th month as the Tour’s undisputed Speaker of the House and clarified why the new system would work just fine.
“This tour was built on meritocracy,” he said at the 2023 Genesis Invitational. “This tour was built on if you shoot the scores, you can move up the levels and play the biggest events. That’s not going to be taken away.”
It was a message for PGA Tour players then and it’s sneaky a message for LIV golfers now: You can always just shoot the scores.
We’ll soon know how many spots on the PGA Tour’s Championship Series, ready to debut in 2028, will be reserved for top performers on the DP World Tour. It might be three; it might be five; it almost surely won’t be the standard 10. But this week’s exodus of interest in LIV Golf 2.0 makes that game of musical chairs all the more fascinating.
Let’s say there are just three open spots on that chairlift across the Atlantic. Let’s say Jon Rahm snags one, naturally, and let’s guess that Joaquin Niemann snags another. Are you betting on Sergio Garcia, newly released from his LIV contract, to nab the third?
Maybe there will be five slots instead. Does Garcia beat out fellow Spaniard David Puig and all his youthful energy? And a bunch of up-and-coming Spaniards will play the DP World Tour next year, all 15 to 20 years younger than Garcia (several he recruited to play for his LIV team).
The pathway narrows with every additional LIV golfer that joins the hunt. But the opportunity will not have changed much. You can get in if you shoot the scores — but they haven’t been so kind to Garcia lately. There was his Open Qualifying attempt this summer, where he shot four under in the morning and then had some bad lasagna ruin his afternoon. There was the U.S. Open qualifying two months earlier, where he missed out by two shots.
There was that faraway 2025 event in Macau where the top three finishers earned spots in that year’s Open. He missed a 3-footer on the last, forcing him to qualify via his performance in LIV events. That all worked out, sure, but we won’t forget how little “shoot the scores” exists at LIV events, where last-place finishers still cashed $125,000 checks.
This is not to say that we’ll doubt Garcia’s ability to make it happen. It is simply an acknowledgement that his pursuit will be fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. For at the end of the day, he is a different breed. He’s often delivered, and never lacked for confidence. Just this week he declared his hope to be on Luke Donald’s 2027 Ryder Cup team, an invite that will likely only happen if his scores are so good that they force Donald’s hand.
But Garcia’s immediate future — and how we think of it — stretches beyond that. Think of how his contemporaries have positioned their legacies these last few years. Justin Rose has contended in numerous majors, nearly bagging a Masters. Adam Scott is playing like a top 25 golfer on the planet, with five straight top 20s (and counting). All three are 46 years old and constantly invoke each other when discussing their generation of players. They all have their one major, have all won countless times globally, but only one left for LIV Golf and created some serious distance in those associations. (Temperaments aside, too.) And now, at least it seems, Sergio will have a chance to make good on that decision in an arena people will actually be watching. He just has to shoot the scores.
“>
