SOTOGRANDE, Spain – The second half of the 2023 LIV Golf League season starts this week at Valderrama.
Six regular-season events are left, followed by the Team Championship. Here are nine burning questions at the halfway point.
Will points leader Talor Gooch hang on in the second half?
Gooch won back-to-back starts in Adelaide and Singapore but has no other top-10 points finishes. Still, he’s been inside the top 20 in four other starts, and his worst result – a 36th in Tulsa – can be forgiven due to all his extracurricular commitments as the unofficial ambassador that week.
A year ago, Gooch finished 11th in the final individual standings with 56 points while playing for 4Aces GC. Now as a member of RangeGoats GC, he has 96 points, an impressive 40-point increase through the same number of starts.
He’ll start the second half with a 10-point lead over Branden Grace; 11 players are within 40 points of his lead. That means he could lose his outright lead this week if he finishes outside the top 24, and one of those players wins or produces a high result.
As Gooch’s former captain Dustin Johnson showed last year, the key to the Individual Champion race is not just winning, but consistency. Unless he produces a third win, Gooch will need to start turning those top-20 results into top 10s and top 5s.
Where is the DJ of 2022?
In LIV Golf’s inaugural season, Dustin Johnson was crowned Individual Champion after accumulating 135 points during the seven regular-season tournaments. Through the first seven events of the 2023 LIV Golf League season, Johnson has 69 points, barely half of last year’s total in the same span and is currently sitting ninth in the standings.
The 4Aces GC captain started this season slowly due to a pulled muscle in his lower back, but seemed to be back on track after beating Branden Grace and Cameron Smith in a playoff in Tulsa. But then he finished outside the points in DC, so … who knows?
Surely, the Johnson of last season will show up at some point, but it doesn’t appear that he’ll produce the same kind of dominating performance, in which he finished 56 points ahead of his closest pursuers. Even so, he just needs to finish one point better than everybody else to successfully defend his title. No one will be surprised if he does.
Which non-winner is most likely to win in the second half?
Stinger GC’s Branden Grace has three podium finishes this season – third place in Mayakoba, third place in Tulsa and runner-up in DC. If he keeps giving himself those opportunities, he’ll convert one of those into a trophy.
Ripper GC Captain Cameron Smith is in terrific form right now, with top-10 results in his last six worldwide starts. He comes off a fourth place at the U.S. Open and was the runner-up in Tulsa when he and Grace lost to Dustin Johnson in a playoff. Plus, Smith will return to the site of his LIV Golf win last season in Chicago.
Fireball GC Captain Sergio Garcia is one of the favorites this week at Valderrama, a course on which he’s won three times and has top-10 finishes in 14 of his 15 career starts. Garcia came close to winning on another course that he enjoys, losing in a playoff to Gooch at Singapore.
Crushers GC Captain Bryson DeChambeau struggled for most of the first half but seems to be putting it together now. He has top-10 point finishes in his last two LIV starts and has also been competitive in the two most recent majors.
Torque GC has won two team titles but no individual wins. Newcomers Mito Pereira and Sebastian Munoz each have a podium finish, and captain Joaquin Niemann will surely find his form in the second half.
Oh, and 21-year-old David Puig comes off a final-round 67 in his first major start at the U.S. Open.
