AUGUSTA, Georgia: Augusta National Golf Club chairman Fred Ridley has said the Masters won’t be afraid to use special invitations to ensure that top LIV golfers remain part of the tournament.
In a further sign of the thaw between golf’s wrangling powerbrokers, Ridley, who struck a conciliatory tone, even refused to completely rule out having direct access in the future for LIV players to qualify.
There are 13 members of Saudi-backed LIV Golf in the Masters this year, including defending champion Jon Rahm, but the vast majority qualify via being former Masters winners or winning other majors.
With the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) not awarding any points for LIV competitions, it is increasingly difficult for their players to break into the majors via spots in the top 50 in the year-end rankings.
Augusta National is on the OWGR board and Ridley said it remains “the legitimate determiner of who the best players in the game are” but offered a reminder that the Masters is not an open championship.
“We’re an invitational, and we can adjust as necessary,” said Ridley who highlighted the special invitation given to LIV’s Joaquin Niemann, who won the Australian Open.
“We thought he was deserving of a special invitation,” Ridley said. “Now, historically, and as stated in our qualification criteria, we consider international players for special invitations. But we do look at those every year and I will say that if we felt that there were a player or players, whether they played on the LIV Tour or any other tour, who were deserving of an invitation to the Masters, that we would exercise that discretion with regard to special invitations.”
Ridley said such an invitations would be “subjective consideration based on talent, based on performance to those players.”
“Our goal is to have, to the greatest extent possible, the best field in golf, the best players in the world,” said Ridley.
“Having said that, we never have had all the best players in the world because of the structure of our tournament. It’s an invitational. It’s limited field. It’s a small field.”
The Masters invites past champions and leading amateurs to play in the tournament as well as having a qualification structure and special invitations.
LIV withdrew an application to the OWGR after failing to reach an agreement on how their tournaments might be rated and Ridley was asked if Augusta would consider some way of LIV players qualifying through their own structure.
While casting doubt on how that would work, he did not rule it out.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think it will be difficult to establish any type of point system that had any connection to the rest of the world of golf because they’re basically, not totally but for the most part, a closed shop.
“Those concerns were expressed by the OWGR, but I don’t think that prevents us from giving subjective consideration based on talent, based on performance, to those players.
“I would not foreclose that we would consider that in the future.”
Ridley also addressed the question of declining PGA Tour television ratings in the USA and the question of whether that was collateral damage from the rift within the sport.
While noting that fragmentation in viewing habits impacts many sports, he said golf did appear to be suffering more than others.
“I will acknowledge that, if you look at the data this year, golf viewers are down on linear television while other sports, some other sports are up. So you can draw your own conclusions,” he said.
Ridley echoed the view of several players on both sides of the divide that there needed to be more events with the elite playing each other.
“Certainly the fact that the best players in the world are not convening very often is not helpful,” he said. “Whether or not there’s a direct causal effect (on ratings), I don’t know. But I think that it would be a lot better if they were together more often.”
