When LIV Golf burst onto the scene in 2022, it promised that those who joined would receive Official World Golf Rankings points. The breakaway league applied for points when it launched in 2022. In October of 2023, then-OWGR chairman Peter Dawson announced that LIV’s application had been rejected, citing concerns about the league’s structure and format, with the lack of a clear promotion and relegation pipeline into and out of the tour being a sticking point.
“It is entirely technical,” Dawson said at the time. “LIV players are self-evidently good enough to be ranked. They’re just not playing in a format where they can be ranked equitably with the other 24 tours and thousands of players trying to compete on them.”
In May of 2024, LIV formally withdrew its application. That application was recently resubmitted as LIV tries to secure OWGR points for its players again.
Hudson Swafford, who played on LIV in 2022 and 2024, recently joined GOLF’s Subpar podcast to discuss LIV Golf’s trials and tribulations in its hunt for OWGR points.
“100 percent. Like I was very down, like I couldn’t believe it when we went into a player meeting and they were like, ‘we’re withdrawing our application.’ Like, why? You’re just giving up? We came over here on the consensus that you were going to fight for us. So just kind of like through our hands up like, ‘well, we didn’t get it.’ No, that’s kind of bulls—t,” Swafford told co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.
Swafford said he spoke with Dawson at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in 2024, and that Dawson, who is no longer the chair of the OWGR board after he handed it over to Trevor Immelman, pointed to LIV’s closed shop format as the reason it was hard to give ranking points.
“He said he would love to give LIV world ranking points but at the beginning — we were talking about the turnover with the cut at 24. That was half the guys at the time. He’s like, I think that’s kind of harsh. I don’t even need to see that kind of turnover. He was talking about maybe 35 or 38 guys keep their card but that’s a hard cut. If you’re not there, you get relegated, you’re out, you go to the Q-school,” Swafford recalled. “He goes, if we had definitive turnover and we knew that and we knew that guys weren’t getting hand-picked to be on LIV or because you were with a certain agency then you were on LIV, that took away some of the credibility. He said that if there was a true cutoff and everybody abided by those rules and you had to go to a Q-school, then the talks would be real. Like LIV’s not personally for me, that’s what he was telling me, because he’s a traditional golf guy, but [he loved] that there’s new competition and it’s traveling around the world. It’s bringing golf to areas of the world that have craved it and haven’t had access to it. He liked all of those components and he wanted to give world ranking points, but I don’t know the communication because I wasn’t in the small meetings about that, but it just seems like things could have changed to get those world ranking points.”
While LIV still does not receive OWGR points, the major championships have started to open up pathways for LIV golfers who are not already exempt into their championships. The USGA and R&A both created an exemption to go to the top player in the LIV Golf individual standings who is not otherwise exempt. The Masters has given special invitations to Joaquin Niemann, and the PGA of America reserves the right to invite any player they want who they believe is deserving of a spot in the PGA Championship.
But Swafford, who has said he is suspended by the PGA Tour for taking part in LIV, believes that players on LIV are deserving of some points given the quality of the players in the field. “I think that if you finish in the top 10 on LIV, then you’ve had a really good season over there against a very competitive group of guys,” Swafford said. “I think they should be awarded something [to get into the majors]. and I think the majors are taking to that now. They are not naive to it. Half the guys who have played in the majors for the last decade are over there. I think they are addressing that. My last year, they were being very proactive with majors about inviting LIV guys based on some criteria over there. It needs to happen. How you get World Ranking points over there, I’m not sure, but I do think they deserve it in some manner.”
To hear more from Swafford, check out the entire episode below.
