“It all comes back to winning and playing well and putting your team and your franchise in a position to succeed,” Gooch said. “We’ve had some struggles with the PBR team and you’re trying to figure out ways like, how do we succeed as a franchise? How do we win more games? How do we perform better? How do we put our players, our athletes in a position to thrive? That comes down to an organization being in a place to simplify things so that the players, athletes, coaches don’t have to worry about anything other than going out and playing the best they can.”
A huge Oklahoma City Thunder fan, Gooch also has taken note of how his hometown team rose to the top of the NBA with last season’s championship. He talks about the importance of the team’s culture, its executive team that has stayed intact, staffers who remained dedicated through the years. He illustrated his fondness for the team’s approach with a story told by the team’s top player, reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
“He talked about day one when he came into the facility, he saw all the basketball racks in the practice facility and noticed that all the Wilson logos on the basketballs were facing the same direction,” Gooch recalled. “He said he had never noticed such attention to detail within an organization. It’s little nuggets like that that I pay attention to because winning doesn’t just happen by chance.”
Success in LIV Golf, of course, comes from shooting the lowest scores. Gooch will control only one of the team’s four scores that count in each round, but he hopes the approach he applies to his own game can be extended to the team’s performance. He’s long referred to it as the Rule of 67 – if you shoot 67, everything else takes care of itself. When Gooch won the Individual Championship in 2023, 16 of his 39 regular-season rounds were 67 or better. And when he won LIV Golf Andalucía in 2025, his second-round 66 was just one of six rounds of 67 or better that week.
“Our team is going to be focused on shooting 67,” Gooch explained. “Whatever it takes to make that happen, that’s what we’re going to do. It’s a good way of making a very complex, very complicated system pretty simple.”
Of course, the phrase “67” has taken on a perplexing life of its own lately, as any confused parent of a teenager well knows. Said Gooch with a laugh, “Maybe I should have trademarked it.”
While Gooch was ahead of the curve in that regard, he’s right on track with his rise – or if you prefer, return – to captaincy. He’s exactly where he wants to be and the timing is perfect. He considers his career path to be very similar to LIV Golf’s trajectory.
“I’m way more prepared now, for all the obvious reasons,” he said. “And I think part of it is also the maturation of the league. In the beginning, there was so much turmoil, and I didn’t mind playing the villain in that role. It was easy for me to try to get people going with some of the comments I had.
“Now the more mature Talor Gooch is able to look at things a little bit differently with this new direction we’re going as a league. We still want to be different and make progress and gravitate towards different people, bring new eyeballs to this great game, but in a way that isn’t as polarizing. We want to do this in a positive way, and I’m excited for that. It’s going to be a fun journey, and I can’t wait to be a part of it.”
