LIV tour golfers insist it’s business as usual at 2023 Masters, but plenty is at stake

Cameron Smith moseyed his way around the driving range at Augusta National Golf Club on Monday, working through his usual practice routine as patrons lined the fences toward the course’s main entrance.

Smith has generally found comfort on these grounds. That comes with finishing T5 or better in four of his last five Masters outings. Still, there was a tension inside the reigning Open Championship winner.

“I really wasn’t sure what I was going to expect walking on to the range,” said Smith, whose drawn ample scrutiny for defecting from the PGA Tour to LIV Golf last summer. “But it was good to see some familiar faces and lot of smiles.”

Smith said Monday that he traded laughs and pleasantries with his PGA counterparts. He maligned the way in which the ongoing battle between his former and current employers has been portrayed. “Rubbish,” he called it in his thick Australian drawl.

That tracks. Augusta National is a haven to golf tradition. It oozes Southern hospitality. It’s a place that puts a premium on politeness.

But in a week that most often serves as a salute to the return of major golf, the inclusion in the Masters field of Smith and members of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf League looms large — whether that’s acknowledged publicly or not.

“For me, it’s the same,” said Columbia native and 2020 Masters champion Dustin Johnson, who flipped to the LIV tour last year. “All my buddies are still my buddies, and we play, and it’s still golf. So it doesn’t matter where you play at.”

The friction between the PGA Tour and LIV is complex, but the basics are this: With Greg Norman serving as its commissioner and Phil Mickelson providing a big name to build its roster of players around, the group teamed up with the Saudi Arabian government to create a new golf league promising massive purses, guaranteed appearance fees and smaller, no-cut fields.

In practice, LIV’s creation was widely regarded as an effort in sportwashing by the Saudi government and one that has created a legitimate crack in the foundation of the sport.

That’s brought its share of detractors.

The defections of players like Johnson, Mickelson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, among others, caused a stir. A meeting among the PGA Tour’s best remaining players in Delaware spearheaded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy followed in August. It led to a handful of new efforts by the PGA Tour to modernize and combat the league that suddenly threatened its 94-year existence.

The fight between the two leagues for a space the PGA Tour has largely occupied on its own has been discussed ad nauseum over the last two years. Still, here at Augusta National, questions and comments about a field that will include PGA Tour diehards and the perceived LIV rebels persist.

Former Masters winner Fred Couples (1992), who clapped back at LIV Golf during a speaking engagement ahead of the Hoag Classic in Newport Beach, California last month, was asked about his own feelings regarding LIV players being included in the field. He made clear he has no issue with players of the caliber of Johnson, Smith and DeChambeau appearing at Augusta. It’s the “rubbish” Smith later alluded to that has him fired up.

“I have no problem with any of them, just please do not bash a tour that I have 43 years invested in,” Couples said. “It bothers the hell out of me. They don’t bother me. They really don’t. They’re golfers. I’m a golfer. I respect them all.”

Is it foolhardy to try and assure normalcy amid the craziness that has enveloped professional golf over the last two years? Perhaps. But folks around the grounds Monday certainly tried.

Johnson, for example, played his Monday practice round with fellow South Carolinian Kevin Kisner. The pair grew up playing junior events in the Palmetto State and try to play at least one practice round per year together at Augusta National.

“We grew up together,” Kisner explained. “We were four-ball partners as kids in the state of South Carolina and played all the South Carolina Junior Golf stuff together.”

Yet it only takes a glance at Johnson’s shirt to see how times have changed.

Standing atop the podium, Johnson donned a blue polo emblazoned with the logo of his LIV-based team — 4Aces Golf Club. Smith said he’ll also wear his Ripper Golf Club logos unless told otherwise, noting it was “basically” a contractual obligation.

Johnson insisted on Monday there’s no different feeling this week at a tournament in which he’s finished T10 or better in six of his last seven appearances. His bank account — which reportedly nabbed a $150 million deal to join LIV — would tell otherwise.

So, too, will his form.

If LIV golfers, who functionally took on massive contracts to play less golf, don’t perform in the year’s first major, detractors will have another data point in one of their primary criticisms of the renegade league. That same logic also follows if Johnson, Smith and others vault themselves toward the top of the leaderboard by week’s end.

Smith, whose last major appearance came when he won the 2022 Open Championship shortly before leaving the PGA Tour, was the only member of the LIV contingent in the Masters’ 14 formal, pre-tournament player press conferences that began Monday.

It took four questions to get asked about LIV and whether he’s played enough golf to feel he can compete this week.

“I think before last year’s Masters Tournament, I played four times. I played four times this year,” Smith said. “I don’t think I’ve necessarily played less before the tournament. I think it’s more to do with my preparation before I started up. I feel like I’m tournament-ready.”

Smith’s rendezvous with his former competitors on the range is a nice moment following two years of contention between both sides. The Champion’s Dinner on Tuesday night — which Johnson and Garcia will attend — ought to be another breaking of bread.

Still, we’ll see how much comfort Smith and his compatriots find if they can’t measure up this week at Augusta National.