LIV reportedly adding PGA Tour winner, young pro as new season nears

With the start of its fifth season one month away, LIV Golf has reportedly agreed to add two players to its roster. 

Tom Kershaw of The Times reported Tuesday that Thomas Detry and Elvis Smylie will join the breakaway league. 

Detry is the 57th-ranked golfer in the Official World Golf Rankings and won last year’s Waste Management Phoenix Open in a runaway. 

“It’s incredible,” Detry said after the win at TPC Scottsdale, his first on the PGA Tour. “It’s what dreams are made of. That last walk on the last hole was incredible. Everything goes so quickly that you don’t really have time to enjoy it — luckily, my caddie was there to tell me to enjoy the moment. It’s pretty special.”

Less than 12 months later, Detry reportedly will join LIV in the Saudi-backed league’s highest-ranked signing since it added Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton in 2024. Per Kershaw, Detry will join the 4Aces alongside Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed and Thomas Pieters, with Harold Varner III moving over to Smash GC. 

Smylie is a 23-year-old Australian whose biggest win to date came at the 2024 BMW Australian PGA Championship; he would be a natural fit to join the Australian team of Ripper GC, which parted ways with Matt Jones after last season. Jones is in the field at this week’s LIV Promotions Event. 

The reported signings of Detry and Smylie comes at the end of a rocky offseason for LIV, which saw the breakaway league lose Brooks Koepka, who left the league to spend “more time” with his family. 

Koepka’s exit and the uncertainty surrounding his potential return to the PGA Tour have created several unanswerable questions about the future of LIV and the fractured state of professional golf. 

Rory McIlroy said if it were up to him, he’d welcome Koepka back onto the PGA Tour should the five-time major champion wish. But McIlroy also acknowledged that the decision is more complex than that. 

“Does it make sense if Brooks wanted to play the PGA Tour again to get him back as soon as possible? Absolutely,” McIlroy told The Palm Beach Post on Friday after his Boston Common Golf team won their TGL match over Los Angeles Golf Club. “What Brooks has done in the game of golf, it would be good for everyone to have him back.

“It’s hard (because) you can’t treat one person differently than you treat others,” McIlroy said. “And as much as the Tour would like to treat Brooks differently, it sets a legal precedent, because of the lawsuits that have been going on and everything else behind the scenes. He’s still exempt on Tour because of his major wins. That’s not the hurdle. The hurdle is how they have treated others that have tried to come back, serve suspensions, or whatever it is. That’s the difficult thing.”

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Koepka’s decision to leave LIV also put Bryson DeChambeau’s contract renewal under the microscope. 

The two-time U.S. Open champion has said that he wants to re-sign with LIV, but it’s clear that he understands he has more leverage now than he ever has after Koepka’s exit. 

“It’s a scenario that is very unique,” DeChambeau told Flushing It. “With Brooks leaving, it definitely throws in some unique things. And look, I mean, like I’ve said all along, I want to do this, I want to grow team golf across the globe. But it has to be right. And there’s a lot of things that have to be done in order for it to be right, you know? 

“Things have got to change. Things have got to improve. And I think [CEO Scott O’Neil] has done a fabulous job with the year that he’s had. And I think this year’s going to be even better, now he’s got the right people in place, and he can run the organization the way he wants to do this here. So it’s going to be interesting to see, especially with the new branding coming on. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. I don’t run this thing at all. I don’t really have much say, to be honest with you. Which is funny, but it is what it is, right? And, you know, I sometimes wish I had more say, but that’s life and I don’t run the organization and I trust them to do that.”

This offseason has also seen LIV make the move to 72 holes and add another spot in the league in an effort to earn Official World Golf Rankings points. 

LIV still has several spots to fill in its 57-man league. Three spots will be up for grabs at this week’s Promotions event. The breakaway league added Laurie Canter this offseason. Canter, who played on LIV when it first burst onto the scene, earned his PGA Tour card via the DP World Tour this year but elected to return to the Saudi-backed league instead. Scott Vincent and Yosuke Asaji earned spots by finishing in the top two in the season-long standings of the Asian Tour-based International Series. Victor Perez also joined the Cleeks GC this offseason.

The next season begins in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on February 4-7.