What's good for Gooch should be good for golf

The LIV Golf star could win the U.S. Open, but first he has to get in.

Nobody has ever accused the U.S. Open of displaying the best and deepest field in professional golf. It isn’t designed that way.

There are always the dreamers, the wanna-bes and used-to-bes, the ones who fight their way through 36-hole days of local and sectional qualifying for the privilege of having their heads beaten in by the likes of Oakmont and Bethpage Black. That’s part of the charm, to see Andy Dillard birdie the first six holes at Pebble Beach in 1992 before he returned to everyday life, and went 0-for-9 in Open qualifying after that.

Sgt. Orville Moody went through both stages of qualifying in 1968 and then won the whole thing, at Champions Golf Club in Houston. Four years before that, Ken Venturi scooped up years of injury and disappointment, shoved them into his golf bag and won the Open at Congressional, near Washington, including 36 Saturday holes in the most brutal heat that the DMV can summon. 

The triumphant qualifier is the only warm and fuzzy aspect of the Open, a tournament run by the stuffiest of shirts or, in the phrasing of columnist Bob Verdi, the Dukes of Dandruff. Although the U.S. Golf Association is a more professional organization than it once was, you can occasionally spot its seething contempt for the PGA Tour’s finest, especially when it sets up a green in Free Solo fashion.

Next month, Los Angeles Country Club opens its tightly-locked doors to the U.S. Open and, by all accounts, will display a rugged, unspoiled challenge to the world’s best. But one of the world’s best players might wind up talking to the hand.

Talor Gooch just won back-to-back tournaments on the LIV Tour. He won a PGA Tour event at Sea Island, Ga. in the fall of 2021. He was 31st in the Official World Golf Rankings at that point and has upped his game since then. Yet because he joined LIV, he is no longer eligible for ranking points. And because of that, he is currently 60th, which happens to be the cutoff to get an exemption from U.S. Open qualifying.

Some people see nothing wrong, or discriminatory, about that. Gooch knew that he could be banned from PGA Tour events and maybe even major championships if he went to the dark side. He did so anyway. Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia and others did the same thing. But nobody is making it rain like Gooch. He opened the event in Adelaide with twin 62s and won that, then repeated the next week in Singapore. Counting his team earnings, Gooch made $9.1 million in two weeks. In 121 PGA Tour events over five years, he had banked $9.2 million.

The Australian taxman helped himself to 47 percent of Gooch’s first-place money in Adelaide, which came as a shock when he looked up his bank statement. But by then Gooch was fighting another system. 

The Masters had welcomed Gooch because he finished 29th in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup point standings in 2021-22, even though his final tour event in 2022 was at Colonial in May. The top 30 players qualify for the Tour Championship, and that brings a Masters invitation. They also qualify for the PGA Championship, which comes along in two weeks at Oak Hill in Rochester, N.Y.

And once upon a time the top 30 were buzzed into the U.S. Open. But, earlier this year, the USGA surreptitiously changed “qualified” to “qualified and eligible” when it came to the Tour Championship. LIV players were ruled ineligible. Therefore, Gooch needed to go through sectional qualifying to make it. Understandably he never registered for that process, figuring the USGA would get in line with the other majors.  So now he is dependent on remaining 60th in the world rankings, which means he’ll need a good week at Oak Hill to tee it up at LACC.

You can accuse Gooch of chronic naivete. He’s also trying to have his cake and eat it, too, along with the truffles, eclairs and strawberries Arnaud. But it is easy to understand why he’s feeling targeted. Can you really have a major championship and arbitrarily ban one of the plausible winners, just because he chose to chase his golf dreams in a different arena? Apparently so, because the world of professional golf, so collegial and chummy during placid times, turns out to be just as petty and juvenile as the world outside.

Gooch and LIV colleagues Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford filed a restraining order to enter the FedEx Cup playoffs but were denied. Then Gooch entered the BMW DP World (European) Tour PGA championship at Wentworth, outside London, and was ripped, particularly by Jon Rahm, for denying a spot to a Euro Tour regular who, ordinarily, would have made the field. Gooch responded by finishing fourth, with a Sunday 64 and an eagle on the 72nd hole. That pushed his world ranking to 35th. It allowed him to withstand the subsequent erosion and hang onto 60th. So, no regrets there.

But the trip to Wentworth left some bruises. Billy Horschel, who with Rory McIlroy has been the harshest critic of LIV, asked Gooch and other LIV interlopers why they were dropping in. Gooch replied with a well-researched tweet that listed Horschel’s forays onto the DP World Tour. And when the PGA Tour bulked up its own purses this year, Gooch succinctly tweeted, “You’re welcome.”

Which brings us to the oft-begged question: Who is Talor Gooch?

Well, he didn’t drop the “y” in his first name because people kept asking him, “Why?” He was born like that, the son of a former ballplayer in the Texas Rangers organization. He learned the game on a public course in Midwest City, Okla., where dry, hardened green complexes helped sharpen his short game. Gooch got a ride to Oklahoma State, where he regularly qualified to play tournaments as a freshman on perhaps the most talented team in college.

He has had his eye on major championship since he was five, and since his sister was born during Tiger Woods’ run to the 1997 Masters title. That is what befuddles his critics. Why endanger those dreams for this? Gooch was making a perfectly splendid living on the PGA Tour and had possible Ryder Cups in his future. There were resounding guffaws when Gooch compared the hearty-party atmosphere at the first LIV event to the bedlam found at Ryder Cups. Uh, how would he know? Gooch hurriedly apologized for that one.

Basically Gooch is responding to a chance to make an untold tonnage of cash for playing only 54 holes per event, with no cut, and doing it only 14 times a year. Maybe you’d rather see him do something else. Maybe you’re offended by the flood of Saudi money (and you weren’t offended when the PGA Tour was regularly dealing with China). You’re entitled to those opinions, but Gooch is entitled to pursue his career the way he wants. And he doesn’t need the USGA contorting itself to keep him out. Neither does golf.

Beyond all that, why this constant cat-fight? LIV Golf never was capable of bringing down the pillars of the PGA Tour. For every Talor Gooch that the Tour loses, it welcomes the arrival of a Sam Bennett, who contended for the Masters as an amateur, or a Cameron Young or a Will Zalatoris.

A pro golfing career is much harder than it should be. There aren’t enough opportunities or tournaments or avenues for all the deserving talent. LIV Golf, for all its tawdriness and for all of Greg Norman’s and Phil Mickelson’s hyperbole, is another place to play, and when it lures someone from another tour it creates yet another. It’s a threat to Jay Monahan’s Xanadu, but not an existential one.

Meanwhile, Talor Gooch has reached an exalted level in modern society. He is trending. But he’d rather play.

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