Will captain Mike Weir be behind the 8-ball when his International Team tries to win the Presidents Cup for the first time since 1998?
The answer is a definitive “yes” as Weir was given no leeway regarding taking LIV Golf players for his 2024 team that will play in September in Canada.
Unlike the Ryder Cup, where Brooks Koepka played for the losing American team in Rome, Weir was told he need not look at the 54-hole LIV Golf League for players like Joaquin Niemann (maybe the hottest player in golf), Louis Oosthuizen or Cameron Smith, to name just a few potential LIV players that could fit on Weir’s 12-man team.
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf remain rivals atop professional golf and have yet to come together despite last summer's “framework agreement” between Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and LIV Golf chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan. The 2022 Presidents Cup also was played without LIV golfers, as the Saudi-backed league had launched a few months prior.
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“It's just an unfortunate situation that we're in right now, and they are not eligible as of now,” Weir said. “I've been told they're not eligible, they're not going to be eligible. And hopefully going forward, maybe in Chicago in 2026, they are. It is a shame. I mean, we want the best players.”
The PGA Tour, which owns the Presidents Cup, seems uninterested in putting on the best show possible as the Internationals have been the Americans' whipping post for decades.
And while the Canadians are rabid fans and will support Weir and his team at Royal Montreal, he will clearly be captaining a lesser team than if he could tap LIV players.
“As a big broad picture, you want the best players,“ Weir said. “Definitely you want everybody. And right now, it's hard to define, right? When you're playing three rounds over there, it'd be like, the NHL guys playing two periods and with music tunes playing. They might be great players, but how do you define that?”
Yet, Weir wants the best players and throughout his Presidents Cup interview he continually talks about getting everyone back.
That may happen in the future, but in September and for the second Presidents Cup, the Internationals will be playing with a deck stacked against them and captain Weir, like Trevor Immelman before him, will have little to do to counter the imbalance.
