LIV Golf’s one great issue in its Quixotic quest for legitimacy remains that its tournaments are not ranked by the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) body and its players cannot earn points to qualify for majors such as this week's Masters.
There is another way to Magnolia Lane, however, and it is this:
Be invited.
One line of reasoning that the OWGR - a body made up of those who decide whom can play in major championships - won't credit LIV with points is that it's not a meritocracy.
And it’s hard, though not impossible, to argue.
Martin Kaymer, to use one of several examples, is contracted to play on the LIV Golf league and cannot be relegated despite finishing worse in 2023 than Jed Morgan who was punted.
One pathway into LIV Golf appears to be: have people heard of you, as the ascension of the hard-living Anthony Kim would attest.
Yes, you do have to be very good at golf. And there's a tournament end of the year you can play your way into LIV, as three borderline anonymous chaps did, one was Kieran Vincent of Zimbabwe who has a brother Scott.
While the Vincent boys would not qualify among any ranking of the world's top-50 players outside those most likely to be in a thrash metal band from Harare, several LIV Golf players clearly are in that category and should be playing in tournaments that purport to pit the best against the best.
They just haven't been invited.
Talor Gooch, Abe Anser and Louis Oosthuizen satisfy this criteria, so does our Lucas Herbert when on form. And the OWGR people - made up of representatives from the USGA, PGA, R&A and Augusta National, to wit the people who run the majors - agree.
But, so sadly, they'll tell you as they told LIV, eyes full of salty crocodile tears, we wish it were otherwise but, cue very small violins, boo-hoo, LIV Golf is not a 'meritocracy'. We must have rules, you see, we're sure you understand. Come and see us when you've righted the ship.
And yet, as the invitation of the LIV Golf man who had a crack on the DP World Tour and won the Australian Open, Joaquin Niemann, shows, the green jackets can, and will, invite whom they like.
It is 'their' major golf championship. It is an invitational. If they wanted, they could have - I would posit should have - invited Gooch, Oosthuizen, Anser, Herbert, Harold Varner III at a pinch.
As they've been doing since 1934, the jackets have invited past champions, kid amateurs, one-time winners on the PGA Tour - shout-out human greyhound and champion of the Texas Open, Akshay Bhatia - and those in the OWGR top-50.
Bernhard Langer, 66, will be there, he won the Masters in 1985 and 1993. And that has merit, in a certain context. And he's also been killing 'em on the Senior Tour and ran T29 in the Masters four years ago.
But there are - factity-fact-fact - PGA, LIV Golf, DP World, Asian, Korn Ferry and Middle East and North Africa (MENA) tour players with a better shot at winning the Masters than Langer and other old boys such as, much as we love the languid power of his golf swing, Fred Couples.
Same at the other end. I love that the kid amateurs get a gig. And our Jasper Stubbs winning the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship at Royal Melbourne was highly meritorious.
But he's 5,000-to-one to win.
It's the same with the PGA Championship. It's run by the Professional Golfers Association of the United States, a body different from the PGA Tour.
The PGA invites into its major championship 20 people who work in golf shops and teach golf and who qualified in lead-up events.
Occasionally there’s a Michael Block who busts out the moves and everyone swoons and thinks, how very cool. And it absolutely was when our man aced 15 at Oak Hill. That was huge.
Mainly, though, these guys head back to Nebraska after 10 seconds on the telly.
Are they there on merit? Again - depends how you define it. They beat the best of their kind.
But are there professional 'tour' golfers with greater merit than Blocky and the shoppies?
Without question.
The governing bodies make rules to suit their tournaments. They have that power. The 'meritocracy' argument might hold water if their major championship were pure meritocracies.
A problem for LIV Golf is Greg Norman thrusting his groin into the OWGR's bailiwick, so to speak. For a man who can sell steaks by simply branding his name onto them, he's not been able to sell LIV Golf's quest for OWGR points.
And so he gave up.
Golf Australia magazine had a yarn with Norman last year and he insisted: “Our guys don’t care about the OWGR, alright?”
Alright, Sharky. Alright, old mate.
They do care about playing the Masters, though.
It just appears that those who haven't qualified because they're LIV Golf types and can't accrue OWGR points are willing to cop it sweet, at least for the time being, while the pay-off is a motherlode of money.
And all while playing less, practicing more, becoming a better player, seeing the world, and – hack up a fur-ball from your throat as you say it – growing the game.
We asked Cameron Smith about it for a feature piece on Herbert in our May issue, on the shelves Thursday with Herbert on the cover.
And while it was clear Smith didn't want to get into Gooch “asterisk” territory, he did tell Golf Australia magazine:
“All you have to do is look at the [LIV Golf] leader board, week in, week out. And if you don’t want those guys in your tournament, then I guess that’s fair enough.”
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