After several digs at Cameron Smith by former Fred Couples, the reigning Open Championship winner has brushed the 1992 Masters winners’ comments aside.
Having already called out the critics who don’t believe LIV is “real golf” earlier this week, Smith said he was doing a “good job of letting golf be golf.”
He just isn’t sure why Couples has twice had a crack since Smith left the PGA Tour for LIV Golf in September- just months after winning the 150th Open at St Andrews.
“Considering I’ve never met him, he’s been very strong on me,” Smith told News Corp Australia at LIV‘s Orlando tournament this week.
Couples has taken several swipes at LIV players, most recently at a breakfast last month before the Hoag Classic in Southern California, a 54-hole event on the Champions Tour. Couples said, “If you’re giving Phil Mickelson $200 million [signing bonus] at age 52 to shoot 74 and 75, God bless you.”
He also mocked one of Smith’s reasons for joining LIV which, apart from a lucrative signing bonus, was the ability to spend up to three months a year in his native Australia. Smith told this publication when he joined LIV that it had been tough to miss weddings of family and friends Down Under while spending so much time playing in the US. To which Couples said in Southern California last month: “I find that comical, because my favourite to ever play has five kids, 40 grandkids, and he has never missed anything — and that was Jack Nicklaus.”
In September last year, when Smith had joined LIV, Couples posted on social media, “To all my friends who I missed birthdays & weddings … so sorry, I was busy earning a living on the @pgatour and in my line of work the goal is to EARN your way to work weekends … and by weekends I mean 72 holes.” It was a dig at both Smith’s reason for leaving the PGA Tour and to LIV’s 54-hole events.
Now, Smith and his fellow LIV Golf players are entering a four-month window in which they can prove, outside of their new tour, that they are still great players. We are, of course, talking about the men’s majors season, which begins next week at Augusta National. At the Masters, 18 LIV players will tee up in what will be the there first time many of those LIV recruits compete in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event on U.S. soil.
And showing they are still elite is exactly what they want to do.
Just ask Smith, whose whirlwind 2022 included winning the Sentry Tournament of Champions, Players Championship and Open Championship at St. Andrews, before joining LIV and in his second start and claiming a DP World Tour title later in the year.
He and other major winners who left the PGA Tour for LIV, including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, have faced criticism that the format of LIV events —54 hole, not cut tournaments with just 48 in the field—the LIV’s spread out schedule has caused them to form competitive rust.
It’s one of several reasons Smith wants to play well at the Masters, where his stellar record includes a tie for third last year playing in the final group with eventual winner Scottie Scheffler and a tie for second to Johnson in 2020.
“First and foremost for me, I’m trying to go there and play the best golf I can,” Smith said Thursday following his pro-am at LIV Golf’s Orlando tournament, which starts Friday. “Is it important for LIV [golfers to play well at the majors]? … I think it is important for us to go there and really show a high standard of golf, which we know we’re all capable of.”
Smith has had a relatively slow start to 2023, admitting he gave himself perhaps too much rest in his LIV offseason. The 29-year-old missed the cut at the Asian Tour’s Saudi International in January, before a sixth place and a 26th place at LIV’s first two events. But there’s no doubting his major credentials, having shot 30 on the back nine to win the 150th Open last year by one shot. He also owns four top-10s at Augusta and a tie for fifth at U.S. Open.
“Most of us [LIV golfers] will get four cracks at it this year [in majors], and hopefully we can get a win out of it,” Smith said. “Maybe we just show a really hearty effort. I think for us, internally, it’s the right thing. There’s a lot of chatter going around about ‘these guys don’t play real golf anymore’ and I think it’s BS to be honest and we just want show people that.”
Of the 18 golfers who are playing the 2023 Masters, six are past Masters champions—Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Sergio Garcia, Johnson, Patrick Reed and Charl Schwartzel. The others include Smith, Abraham Ancer, DeChambeau, Talor Gooch, Jason Kokrak, Kevin Na, Joaquin Niemann, Louis Oosthuizen, Mito Pereira, Thomas Pieters and Harold Varner III.
