Thomas to LIV players: 'It's their own fault' they aren't getting world ranking points
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Thomas to LIV players: ‘It’s their own fault’ they aren’t getting world ranking points

A photo of golfer Justin Thomas
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LIV Golf players want to be awarded Official World Golf Ranking points, which are crucial to gaining entry to three of the four majors championships. They don't currently get them, but they've applied to the board of the OWGR in hopes of doing so moving forward (and retroactively).

However, there are a variety of obstacles in the way of LIV getting world ranking points. For one, the board of the Official World Golf Ranking is stacked with representatives of organizations diametrically opposed to LIV. More importantly, however, LIV Golf and its events fail to meet a variety of published criteria to earn world ranking points.

Rather than actively changing the structure of LIV events to meet the OWGR criteria, 50 LIV players sent a letter to OWGR board chair Peter Dawson on Sept. 16, urging him and the body to grant their events points.

For Justin Thomas, he doesn't understand what the LIV players don't get. They don't meet the criteria, so they shouldn't get the points.

"I mean, I don't understand. It's very obvious and written right there in front of them," Thomas said Tuesday ahead of the Presidents Cup. "They just naturally want what's best for them, just like the decision they made to go there."

Thomas understands the LIV players' desire to earn world-ranking points, but he clearly sides with the OWGR requirements.

"The governing bodies have created a system for a reason, and that's to try to create the best system possible to determine the best players in the world," he said.

There is a small group of critics out there who think the OWGR will be rendered irrelevant if they do not find a way to accommodate LIV Golf and its event structure, which runs counter to their published criteria. Thomas, though, sees the LIV Golf players' decline in the ranking as a consequence of the choice they made to join the Saudi-backed league.

"Now, yeah, is it going to be skewed because some of the top players aren't going to be in there? Yes. But that's their own fault for making the decision they made, and they knew very, very well going into it there's a good chance they won't have World Ranking points, and they took that risk.

"In my opinion, that's their own fault."

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Ryan Ballengee

Ryan Ballengee is founder and editor of Golf News Net. He has been writing and broadcasting about golf for nearly 20 years. Ballengee lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his family. He is a scratch golfer...sometimes.

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