Steve Stricker said older LIV Golf players could be a lift for the PGA Tour Champions, but he also made clear why their return would be complicated: they left on their own. In an interview last week, Stricker said players such as Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Pat Perez, Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson “would be hits here on the Champions Tour.”
The comments land now because LIV Golf’s future is uncertain. On Tuesday, LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil could not guarantee the rest of the season would happen, and that has accelerated the search by some of its stars for other places to play pro golf. If the league folds in the coming weeks or next year, the players most likely to need another home are the ones who are closest to the age cutoff for the senior circuit, not the ones still capable of jumping back to the PGA Tour or DP World Tour.
Stricker, 59, is hardly speaking from the outside. He is a fixture on the PGA Tour Champions, where he has won 18 times and captured seven senior major titles, after a career that included 12 PGA Tour wins and a 2021 Ryder Cup captaincy. He also serves as the player-host of the American Family Insurance Championship in Wisconsin, which gives his view extra weight inside a circuit built for players over 50.
That is why his answer was more than a simple endorsement. Stricker told Jim Owczarski of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that “There’s two ways of looking at it, right? Sure, to have the guys that are 50 now, or close to it, like Lee Westwood, [Ian] Poulter, Pat Perez, some other guys [Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson], they would be hits here on the Champions Tour. This tour could use that,” before adding, “they did leave,”
The friction is obvious. The PGA Tour owns and operates the PGA Tour Champions, and its punishments and restrictions for LIV players extend to the senior circuit, so a warm welcome is not the same thing as an open door. Older LIV Golf players may soon be looking for somewhere to play, but even if the league disappears they could still run into the same barriers that have followed them since 2022. Stricker’s point is that they would help the product; the unanswered question is whether the sport’s power structure will let that matter.
