The LIV Golf rebel and former world No 1 on his Ryder Cup captaincy ambitions, golf’s civil war and why he doesn’t trust the PGA Tour
As the golf world fizzes at the approach of the season’s first major, next week’s Masters Tournament, Lee Westwood offers a case study in the tensions keeping the sport’s divided powers apart, notwithstanding the theoretical softening in relations.
Westwood has not given up his dream of captaining Europe in the Ryder Cup, despite no longer being a member of the DP World Tour (aka European Tour), despite being subject to unpaid fines of £857k for contesting unauthorised LIV Golf events, and despite the rules forbidding resignees from holding office.
Westwood, former world No 1 and, after Rory McIlroy, the tour’s top prize-money winner, has been in contact with the DP World Tour, via its player relations director Stuart Cage, in a bold attempt to set aside the past and reach some sort of compromise that reflects the much-changed political landscape.
Encouraged by the current discussions ongoing between all the main parties in golf – the PGA Tour, the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia (financial backers of LIV Golf), the Strategic Sports Group (investors in the PGA Tour) and the DP World Tour – aimed at ending golf’s civil war, the idea of representing Europe once more has taken hold.
Cage, a contemporary of Westwood’s during the early years of their respective playing careers and subsequently at ISM, the sports management company to which he was attached and where Cage supervised the first professional steps of McIlroy, was an obvious place to start.
However, Westwood claims he has been given little encouragement by the tour’s senior management, who insist the only way back for him is to pay the fines and serve the tournament suspensions as Sergio Garcia did, and accept that, should he play future LIV tournaments without permission, he could be subject to further sanctions.
The negotiations are thus at an impasse. “I’d love to be Ryder Cup captain,” Westwood told The i Paper. “They sounded me out for Italy. I thought you can’t go from playing in one to being captain in the next. I feel you should at least give yourself a chance to play another one.
“Also, I knew LIV was on the horizon, so I didn’t want to put myself in the position Henrik [Stenson, appointed captain for Rome] found himself in. So, for a few reasons it didn’t feel like the right time. If I was asked to be captain at Adare Manor [2027 venue] I would jump at the chance. But certain things have to change. Rapprochement is necessary. I don’t know that the PGA Tour are willing to give up anything, I don’t think they are willing to bend at all.”
Westwood suspects the DP World Tour’s stance is heavily influenced by the PGA Tour, the senior partner in the strategic alliance into which the two tours entered in late 2020, and then bolstered in June 2022 to meet the challenge presented by LIV. His view is informed by history and the disclosure in court documents that revealed how in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, one advisor to the PGA Tour had assessed their European counterparts as a “borderline distressed asset”.
Lee Westwood says he would love to be Ryder Cup captain (Photo: AP)
“The relationship with SSG [Strategic Sports Group, who invested $1.5bn in the PGA Tour] has put pressure on the PGA Tour’s relationship with the European Tour. You can’t tell me that a private equity firm coming into the PGA Tour is going to want any of their money spent on a borderline distressed asset. I don’t know how smooth that relationship is.
“I think the European Tour are realising the PGA Tour is all about one interest, that it’s a leopard that can’t change its spots. When all this started I did warn Keith Pelley [former DP World Tour chief executive] not to trust the PGA Tour because they are only in it for themselves.”
The DP World Tour emphatically refutes Westwood’s characterisation of the relationship, and point out that the tour is not only underpinned by PGA Tour cash, but that the relationship is supportive, collaborative and unified – illustrated by the PGA Tour’s assistance in helping the DP World Tour secure key tournament title sponsors such as FedEx for the French Open. Moreover, the DP World Tour states that their position towards Westwood is governed entirely by the rules, which were agreed by the membership of the DP World Tour, ie the golfers and the Tour Westwood left behind.
The Tour claims there is no personal animosity towards Westwood despite the schism created when he and other big brand names joined LIV. The DP World Tour also accepts the mood has shifted from bitterness to reconciliation and Westwood would be welcome to return on the condition he, like other players, abides by the sanctions laid down in the Tour’s rule book, in other words serves his suspensions and pays his fines.
Ah, the fines. Westwood lost his appeal against the sanctions and resigned his membership as a result. As did others, including Ian Poulter, Garcia and Stenson. However, to further his Ryder Cup ambitions Garcia agreed to settle his sanctions, serving a period of suspensions and paid his fines, a sum similar to that owed by Westwood, and rejoined. Though he is subject to further sanctions for playing LIV events without permission, he is entitled to appeal knowing this is unlikely to be heard until after the Ryder Cup in New York.
Fellow LIV players, Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton, who unlike Westwood and Garcia have never resigned their DP World Tour memberships, continue via the same principle, hoping that any deal between the factions resolves all the issues in a sensible way. Westwood claims that putting back the appeals process for the Ryder Cup big hitters amounts to special treatment, which feeds his resentment and frustration.
“I don’t have a relationship with the European Tour. I have £857k worth of fines that I appealed against. The appeal went the way of the tour so I resigned my membership because I wasn’t prepared to keep getting fined. I would love to sit down with them and carve a way to come back together. I have supported the tour since the early 90s. During Covid I was one of the few to support their tournaments. Everybody was going back to America to play there because it was easier. I played all the little ones, but they just seem to have forgotten that.
“The tour have not treated everyone the same way. They have not treated Rahm and Hatton the same way they treated me, Poults [Poulter] and Stenson and the like. They have manipulated the situation. They haven’t paid their fines either, but their appeal dates have been pushed back until after the Ryder Cup. They have basically kicked the can down the road for those players. They keep fining them but they will be eligible for the team. This is another aspect that has to be addressed if we ever sit around the table.”
Westwood and Garcia have been fined by the DP World Tour (Photo: Getty)
A spokesperson for the DP World Tour said: “We have been consistent in our administration of our members’ regulations which, as the Sports Resolution Panel stated, is ‘necessary and proportionate’ to protect the rights and collective interest of the Tour’s membership.
“The fact remains, any player is able to be a member of the DP World Tour provided they comply with the members’ regulations each player signs up to. Some players have done that and remained in membership, while others have returned to membership and fulfilled their outstanding sanctions.
“In terms of appeals, our disciplinary process, set out in our members’ regulations, gives a member the right to appeal against any sanctions imposed and continue to play while that appeal is pending. Some players have exercised that right recently, the same as a number of players did in 2022-23, including Lee Westwood.”
The possibility of a meeting remains slim until there is a breakthrough in a negotiation that began in June 2023. Some will have little sympathy for a player who left for a handsome reward. Others might see the value of reconciliation, given the desire of the major powers to heal a division that has hit the sport hard, damaging golf’s reputation as well as its prospects.
The first major of the season, the Masters, brings the world’s best players together in the second week of April for the first time since The Open last July. This week, Westwood and LIV pitch up across the Georgia state line in Miami, where LIV’s big power brands, including Masters champions Rahm, Garcia, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson and Patrick Reed, plus major champions Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, will compete on a course owned by the President of the United States.
Donald Trump has already met twice with the PGA Tour leadership and PIF chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan, once in the White House. The event at Trump Doral offers the prospect of another summit to accelerate the process. Westwood, however, wonders if concluding a deal is beyond the gift of the world’s most powerful figure. “He’s a keen golfer but I don’t think he has that kind of influence. What can he do? He can’t force the PGA Tour to make a deal. I don’t think the PGA Tour want the deal. To do a deal both sides have to move on a few things but I don’t think they want that.”
The stumbling blocks remain the accommodation of the team format on which LIV is predicated and the rehabilitation of LIV golfers into an ecosystem peopled by perhaps understandably resentful PGA Tour and the DP World Tour members demanding financial reparations of some kind.
Should a miracle happen, Westwood believes there are lessons to be learned from the shorter LIV 54-hole format, one that sees the whole field start and finish at the same time via a shotgun mechanism using all 18 tees simultaneously. Furthermore, Westwood rejects the idea that the shorter format eats at the integrity of the sport, claiming, if anything, the intensity is greater.
“It feels exactly the same as it does contending in any tournament. The difference at LIV is you only have three rounds. You can’t ease your way into a tournament the way you can over 72 holes. You have to come out fast. You used to have three rounds to catch up, now you have only two. That’s a huge difference.
“The guys are much more aggressive. There is no hitting an iron down the fairway. You have to go for everything. You see the guys at the top of the leaderboard, the likes of Brooks, Rahm, Waco [Joaquin Niemann] and Tyrrell, these guys go for everything, there is no backing off.”
Instead of heading to Augusta, where 15 years ago he finished second to Mickelson, despite outplaying the winner for much of their final round, Westwood is heading to the Alps to ski, a late passion for which he never had time at his peak. “I might watch the last nine holes,” he said. “To be fair, Masters Sunday is always one of the best days in golf.”
The more so, since, for now at least, it is one of only four tournaments a year where the best face the best. An arrangement that serves the interests of none.
