Oh, the sweet smell of gaslighting in professional golf. Here we are in 2025, and the PGA Tour’s media mouthpieces are at it again, peddling their tired narrative that LIV Golf is some rogue upstart begging for scraps at the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) table, without a single tweak to its “flawed” format.
Take the recent AP wire story, which smugly declares, “LIV Golf has applied again to be included in the Official World Golf Ranking, without any indication how it will operate differently from when its first application was rejected nearly two years ago.” That, folks, is called peak gaslighting. As if the OWGR’s rejection back in October 2023 was some noble stand for “fairness” rather than a blatant power grab by the old guard desperate to cling to relevance.
Let’s unpack this farce, shall we? The AP dutifully parrots the OWGR’s excuses: LIV was denied because it’s a “closed shop” and because individual scores might be “compromised” by counting toward team results.
Puh-leeze! If this isn’t the pot calling the kettle Saudi-funded, I don’t know what is.
First off, the “closed shop” complaint? Just laughable. The PGA Tour is the ultimate members-only club for the elite, where top players lock in their spots through FedEx Cup standings, sponsor exemptions, and a web of invites that make it nearly impossible for outsiders to crash the party.
Sure, there’s the occasional Q-School or Monday qualifier, but let’s be real, it’s about as open as a vault at Fort Knox.
LIV, with its 54-player fields and promotions event offering spots is no more “closed” than the PGA’s signature events, where fields are handpicked (hello, Rickie Fowler) and cuts are optional.
But hey, when you’re the OWGR, stacked with board members from the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, and other entrenched entities, why not weaponize hypocrisy to protect your monopoly?
And then there’s the team format excuse, which might be the most absurd fabrication.
The OWGR frets that individual competition is “potentially compromised” because scores count toward team results. As if LIV players are out there sandbagging holes or playing match play shenanigans.
Newsflash: It’s straight-up stroke play for individuals, with teams simply aggregating the best scores from their four-man squads. No one’s altering their putts to boost the team. It’s math, not magic.
The OWGR happily ranks players from two dozen other tours with quirky formats (including match play), field sizes, and rules (shot clocks), but LIV’s innovative twist of adding up four individual scores? Suddenly, it’s an existential threat. Yeah, sure.
This isn’t about technicalities; it’s a classic pretext, corruption disguised as bureaucracy.
The OWGR, under the thumb of PGA Tour allies, rejected LIV in 2023 not because the players aren’t “self-evidently good enough” (as even former OWGR chair Peter Dawson admitted back then), but because recognizing LIV would expose the crumbling facade of the traditional tours.
Top LIV stars like Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and Joaquin Niemann are plummeting in rankings without points, while PGA Tour no-names feast on diluted fields.
It’s a hoax, plain and simple — one that’s forcing LIV’s middle class players like Dean Burmester and Lucas Herbert to grind through red-eye flights and Open qualifiers just to tee it up at majors.
Meanwhile, the AP and its ilk spin this as LIV’s stubborn refusal to change, ignoring that new CEO Scott O’Neil has explicitly said the application “addresses the outstanding questions” for a “more global, all-encompassing, and accurate ranking system.”
The real mess? This petty blockade is starving fans of the best golf possible, all to prop up a corrupt system that’s more interested in gatekeeping than growing the game.
LIV’s reapplication isn’t desperation, it’s a mic drop, forcing the OWGR to confront its own obsolescence. If they reject it again on these bogus grounds, it’ll only confirm what we already know: The rankings aren’t “official”; they’re officially rigged.
Long live the revolution. Or at least, long enough to watch the old boys’ club crumble under its own weight.
