BROOKLINE, Mass. — Circumstance. S. Open week needs to be a celebration of American actively playing golf. Its courses, its internet players, and its history. This year, has been a week consumed on another topic above all else: most of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf, together with existential questions it creates about the future of golf.

And so, on the event of this year’s national championship, some powers that be revealed the issue head on.

With the first LIV tournament hosted last week — this can be PGA Tour’s subsequent “indefinite suspensions” handed to all players reacting — curiosity immediately shifted to the USGA. Would America’s governing physique follow suit, and prohibition players playing in the LIV event from participating over the Country Club? Ultimately they didn’t, and on Wednesday, USGA TOP DOG Mike Whan explained work reasoning.

“Whether we all like it or not, in Feb 30 guys played for the same promoter in Saudi Arabia large acceptable release from the PGA TOUR, and for years the actual DP World Tour has received an event there, same marketer, ” he said. “We also had to ask the question, if you’re going to put of the fact that kind of clause in, so, who gets in, we’ve reached go back to 9, 300 employees and played last week though who played ever, through which, sponsored by. It becomes a very slippery slope to try to operate that across 9, 400 people. ”

Ultimately, Whan said completely was simply too complex a talk to to make a week before the tournament.

“At the final of the day we ran this fact championship by asking on their own, did those people disqualify their businesses from the 2022 Open? And we believed the answer to that was no, and that’s the decision our company made, ” he says.

As for the future? That is more unclear, but each phase remains on the table.

“It would be a lot of hypotheticals for me to get what LIV is going to be by the time we’re referfing to this next year, but as we would do any year, we’re visiting definitely reevaluate field factor. We would any year, ” he said. “We uses a look at what the landscape just like. ”

Given plainly, could he foresee a future where LIV gamers are banned from the You. S. Open? Consider on how he responds a shot across the bow.

Whan replied same matter-of-factly, with a one-word reaction: “Yes. ”

Luke Kerr-Dineen

Golf. com Contributor

Luke Kerr-Dineen is the Game Improvement Editing tool at GOLF Magazine but also GOLF. com. In his in your he oversees the brand’s game improvement content occupying instruction, equipment, health and fitness, spanning all of GOLF’s multimedia podiums.

An alumni of the You can also use Junior Golf Academy aid University of South Carolina–Beaufort golf team, where he been very useful for them to No . 1 using the national NAIA rankings, Lomaz moved to New York in 2012 to assist you to pursue his Masters college degree in Journalism from Columbia University.   His work has also was in USA Today, Playing Digest, Newsweek and The Every Beast.