In recent months, much of the discussion on the direction of the elite game has focused on how it can come back together, with talks ongoing between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund behind LIV Golf to address the issue.
Several players have also called for the fractures in the game to heal for the good of golf, including Bryson DeChambeau, who last week suggested "too many people are losing interest" in the sport. However, fellow LIV golfer Sergio Garcia doesn’t quite see it that way.
The Fireballs GC will compete in this week’s Masters thanks to his victory at the Major in 2017. The event is one of the few in the calendar where the world’s best from the PGA Tour and LIV Golf come together, but Garcia is unconcerned with the separation, and doesn’t even think the current crop of players are pivotal to the future.
Speaking to the media ahead of the event, he said: “I think the game is in a perfect spot. The professional game, maybe it’s a little more separated, mostly because of the media, not so much because of the players. But I think the game itself is in a great spot.
“I think that we have the most amount of people playing the game, which is great, and people have to realize one thing, that the future of the game isn’t us. We’re not the future of the game. Neither me or Rory, no. We’re not the future. We’re the present of the game.
“But the future of the game is those kids that are watching us play, that want to get into the game, that want to play and then maybe become professionals. I think that’s what sometimes people forget.”
Garcia then conceded that a united game would be beneficial, but that in some respects, the current situation is not dissimilar to other sports such as soccer.
“I mean, obviously the more togetherness that you get, the better it is for everyone. There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But there’s room for everyone. I don’t think that’s a problem at all. The same way that I love watching Real Madrid and La Liga, you like to watch the premiership and whoever your team is. Everybody can support whoever they have, and there’s plenty of people to support it.”
The 2023 tournament saw LIV golfers compete with their PGA Tour counterparts for the first time since making the switch to the big-money circuit, but any concerns over on-course divisions were quickly put to one side with a largely harmonious tournament, and Garcia doesn’t think it's different this year.
He said: “You guys love these things. You keep building up these things, and there’s nothing. There’s nothing. You guys love to kind of dig and just kind of try to make it sound like we get in the locker room and we’re fighting each other and stuff like that. It’s not like that. At the end of the day, it’s golf. We’re all trying to play the best way we can, and that’s it.”
Garcia gets his challenge for a second Masters title underway at 9.12am local time on Thursday in a group with PGA Tour pros Chris Kirk and Ryan Fox.
