Masters honorary starters Nicklaus, Watson and Player call for an end to golf’s damaging divide

Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, and Tom Watson perform their honorary starter duties at the 2024 Masters.

Masters honorary starters Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, and Gary Player used their post-tee shots media address at Augusta to call for an end to the divide in men’s professional golf.

As the game reunites for the year’s first Major, and for the first time in 2024, the three men, who have 34 Major Championships and 11 Green Jackets between them, voiced their concerns over the current state of the game as they discussed the world’s best players reuniting for The Masters.

Men’s golf has become fractured since the arrival of LIV Golf in 2022 with more and more big names taking huge cheques to move to the Saudi-backed Tour, relinquishing their rights to play in PGA Tour events.

Jon Rahm, the defending champion at this week’s Masters, is the highest profile player to make the move, believed to have been paid somewhere in the region of $400m to defect to play in the limited-field, no-cut, 54-hole events. LIV players compete for huge sums of money at every event, forcing the PGA Tour to up purses considerably. The levels of money now available in the game, coupled with its fractured nature, is turning many fans off with PGA Tour viewing figures significantly down for 2024 and LIV still struggling to gain any real numbers for its events.

Watson said he’d used Rahm’s Champions Dinner on Tuesday to remind the room how good it is when they all reunite.

“I’m looking around the room and I’m seeing just a wonderful experience everybody is having. They are jovial. They are having a great time. They are laughing. I said, “Ain’t it good to be together again?” the two-time Masters champion revealed.

“I hope that the players themselves took that to say, you know, we have to do something. We have to do something.

“We all know it’s a difficult situation for professional golf right now. The players really kind of have control I think in a sense. What do they want to do? We’ll see where it goes. We don’t have the information or the answers. I don’t think the PGA TOUR or the LIV Tour really have an answer right now.

“But I think in this room, I know the three of us want to get together. We want to get together like we were at that Champions Dinner, happy, the best players playing against each other. The bottom line; that’s what we want in professional golf, and right now, we don’t have it.”

Nicklaus said he wants to see the “best players play against each other all of the time.”

“That’s what I feel about it,” the six-time Green Jacket winner shrugged. “And how it’s going, I don’t know, I don’t want to be privy to it. I talked to Jay (Monahan, PGA Tour CEO) not very long ago, and I said, “Jay,” I said, “don’t tell me what’s going on because I don’t want to have to lie to the press and people that ask me questions.”

“I said, “How are you doing?” He said, “We’re doing fine.” I said, “Okay, that’s all I want to know.”

“If Jay thinks we’re doing fine, we’ll get there, I think we’ll get there. And I certainly hope that happens, the sooner the better.”

Monahan had famously said the PGA Tour would never work with LIV Golf before shocking the world last year when he appeared on television with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), to announce a merger between the two rivals.

Talks around the merger are ongoing with plenty of ill feelings still present and fears the fallout may continue for years. Player, who also called for a severe golf ball rollback, described the confrontation as “unhealthy” and called for a rapid conclusion. But he believes many players will need to be compensated first.

“But “It’s a big problem because they paid all these guys to join the LIV Tour fortunes, I mean, beyond one’s comprehension.

“Now these guys come back and play, I really believe the players, that if they are loyal, should be compensated in some way or another; otherwise, there’s going to be dissension.”

LIV Golf chief Greg Norman was seen at Augusta on Wednesday having paid to attend as a patron. The Great White Shark chatted with players and fellow patrons as he walked the grounds. Norman wasn’t invited to last year’s tournament because Master’s chairman Fred Ridley wanted to keep the focus on the players and the event.

This year’s Masters sees 13 LIV players tee it up, including Rahm, Phil Mickelson, Joaquin Niemann, Bryson DeChambeau, and Brooks Koepka. LIV has signed seven Masters champions since its inception with ten Green Jackets between them.

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