US Ryder Cup team captain Zach Johnson swerves thorny issue of LIV selections

Is there even a level playing field any more? Or, is it a case of the goalposts moving?

When it comes to eligibility for playing in the Ryder Cup in Rome later this year, there is a new dynamic at play when it comes to players plying their trade on the LIV Golf circuit, with the Americans at this point seeming to have the stronger hand over the Europeans in how the cards have been dealt.

While the likes of Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood and Sergio Garcia have been put out of bounds in respect of playing any part in Luke Donald’s Europe team, there is not a like-for-like at play when it comes to the United States team, even if the likes of Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed are no longer PGA Tour players.

Europe eligibility

Any players seeking to qualify for Europe must be eligible members of the DP World Tour (aka the European Tour); yet, the flip side of the coin, is that players seeking to qualify for the USA aren’t required to be members of the PGA Tour, as the USA shareholders in the Ryder Cup are the PGA of America and, so, those American players competing on LIV are entitled to earn qualifying points whenever they play in the Majors.

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A look at the scoreboards dotting the landscape around Oak Hill Golf Club this past week only served to confirm that more Americans of status are playing LIV than their European counterparts.

Poulter, Westwood and Garcia, indeed, weren’t even in the field. In contrast, the names of Koepka, DeChambeau and Reed all occupied places towards the top end of the scoreboard.

All of this has presented problems of a kind for USA captain Zach Johnson, even if he insisted, time and time again at Oak Hill, that he doesn’t “speak in hypotheticals”.

Johnson may not yet have attended a LIV event and doesn’t seem to have a great desire to do so, and might need his children to help him find the non-mainstream television channel that covers the start-up tour’s tournaments. But the reality is that Koepka & Co are in the frame when it comes to earning automatic places and, indeed, are entitled to believe that their names should be in the mix for captain’s picks.

“I think the luxury of me being captain [is] I’m still relevant and prevalent out on the PGA Tour and that’s where my status holds. So for me to abandon that on a week where I could be out there and go where the bulk of my players are certainly going to come from there, I don’t know, what time will tell, but the bulk are going to come from there [the PGA Tour] and it would be irresponsible on my behalf and inappropriate if I were to leave what I am trying to do as a competitor and as a leader,” said Johnson.

‘Too premature’

When asked about the prospect of selecting LIV players among his picks, Johnson went into protective mode: “I think it’s too premature, frankly irresponsible, to even have any sort of opinion about that. I think given where we are at right now, there’s a lot of points out, number one. Number two, you have a bunch of elevated events [on the PGA Tour]. Shoot, number three, if you go back on history, there’s names right now that probably on both tours that we’re not even mentioning that could have a chance given what’s from us.

“So, I haven’t even begun to discuss picks with anybody that I trust in my circle, specifically the vice-captains. I feel like it’s irrelevant to even discuss … I’ll say this: the guys that are on the PGA Tour that make that team, they have direct ownership in that collectively.”

If all that sounds a bit confusing, even if putting the head in the sand to an extent, the reality is set to trump any hypotheticals. The reality is that Koepka, certainly, and another couple of his LIV cohorts, are likely to be part of Johnson’s team. All of which can only strengthen the USA.