Narin An made four straight birdies around the turn and finished with an 8-under 64 Thursday for a one-shot lead in the CME Group Tour Championship.
Xander Schauffele pledges ‘allegiance’ so that you can PGA Tour despite talks with Saudi league
Ben Jared/PGA TOUR provided by Getty Images
It feels like each and big player in actively playing golf announced their opinion about the Greg Norman-led Saudi golf league last week. For the most part, players stated their loyalty to the PGA Tour, including some now we knew about ( Tiger Woods , Rory McIlroy , Justin Thomas , Jon Rahm, to name a few) and some suspected of pleasurable offers from the Saudis (namely, Dustin Johnson ).
But one top-10 player kept quiet in the course of the cacophony of require, one with an Olympic properly medal is his room: Xander Schauffele . Given their silence, speculation swirled that may Schauffele might be the first big-name pro to follow Phil Mickelson to the new domestic league. But on Wednesday, Schauffele put that speculation unwind.
In a statement on screen on Twitter, Schauffele confirmed his “allegiance to the PGA Tour” after stating any speculative articles “required[d] a response. ”
But it’s not quite as simple as that. Schauffele opened his statement developing, “at no point maintain I taken any approach or made statements to allow them to suggest that I would entertain their SGL as an alternative to the PGA Tour. ”
However , in the next paragraph, this particular four-time PGA Tour receiver revealed his team sometimes meet with representatives from LIV Golf, the organization behind currently the upstart league, “to will due diligence on this matter. ” Ultimately, Schauffele says that team came to the conclusion that “the SGL isn’t close to the latest finished product or particular. ”
One you use question that statement has the door open for is it: if the SGL was nearer to a “finished product” without doubt Schauffele bid farewell to the PGA Tour ?
For now that question are moot, which he made sure in his closing statement, authoring, “My allegiance to the PGA Tour, my belief by using positive changes at the baton of being implemented at the PGA Tour, in particular when it comes to answered back intellectual property rights, size of purses and overall visibility, never wavered. ”
You can read Schauffele’s full-blown statement below.