LIV Golf: Billy Horschel, the defending winner, called the LIV Golf competitors at the BMW PGA Championship “hypocritical” and said they shouldn’t have been permitted to compete at Wentworth.
This week could feature up to 17 LIV Golf players, including those from the breakaway circuit who can now compete on the DP World Tour after having their suspensions “temporarily stayed” pending the conclusion of a hearing in February 2018.
Many players competing this week had bad opinions of Abraham Ancer and Jason Kokrak because they were among those who benefited from an exemption category to play, providing them with the chance to accumulate world ranking points not available within LIV Golf.
“There’s a mixed feeling out here,” Horschel said. “There’s some guys that hate it; don’t think the LIV guys should be here. There are some guys that are sort of in the middle, and there are some guys that understand and feel that ‘hey, these guys have helped build the DP World Tour and the European Tour, and been part of Ryder Cups and helped the European Tour be so successful in The Ryder Cup’, and they are okay with it.
“My stance on this is that when those guys were trying to figure out whether they were going to go to the LIV Tour or stay with PGA Tour, DP World Tour, they had to factor in that they knew that world ranking points were going to maybe not come right away or not come in at all.
“They had to factor in that they knew they were going to be suspended from the PGA Tour and possibly DP World Tour; that they may not be in majors. By factoring that in, they factored in what the financial reward for them needed to be for them to leave these tours to go join that tour.
“If they didn’t or they were told something different from the LIV people, which it’s very clear LIV told those guys you will not be suspended from either one of those tours, you will still have access and we have looked at it and we are going to in our lawsuits; it’s sort of naïve for those guys to think that that’s how it was truly going to happen.”
