Over a fifth of the field at next week’s Masters Tournament will comprise players currently competing on the LIV Golf Tour.
Eighteen LIV golfers have qualified for the season’s first major championship, which currently has a field of 89 players. Among them are six past Masters’ champions who hold lifetime exemptions: Sergio García, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Charl Schwartzel and Bubba Watson.
Also scheduled to tee it up at Augusta are LIV’s Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka courtesy of US Open victories in the past five years; Cameron Smith gets a spot because of his 2022 Open Championship title; Mito Pereira earns his place for his top-four finish at the 2022 PGA Championship; Talor Gooch made it as one of the 30 qualifiers for the 2022 Tour Championship; while Abraham Ancer, Jason Kokrak, Kevin Na, Joaquín Niemann, Louis Oosthuizen, Thomas Pieters and Harold Varner III earned invitations after being in the top 50 of the world ranking at the end of 2022.
The field picked up a few extra PGA TOUR players over the weekend when Jason Day, Harris English, Keith Mitchell and Min Woo Lee all received invitations after breaking into the world’s top 50 in recent weeks. A further invitation is given to to the winner of this week’s Valero Texas Open, if he is not already qualified.
Day has four top-10s in 11 Masters appearances, including a runner-up in his 2011 debut, but he missed the cut in 2020 and 2021 at Augusta and failed to qualify last year. English will be making his fourth start at the Masters, while Mitchell and Lee have played just once before.
The action gets under way on April 6.
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