Masters win could launch a badly needed new PGA TOUR star

The PGA TOUR has a star problem.

It's not that it doesn't have big names. There are plenty of those. But as the field assembles to begin the major championship season at the Masters this week, it's another reminder of how many of the sport's top players toil in near obscurity with LIV Golf.

Over the past five seasons, 19 majors have been played. (The Open Championship was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic.) Eleven of those majors were won by players currently on the PGA TOUR. Eight of them are in the LIV column.

Considering that the majors are golf's primary measuring stick, it's not an ideal look for a TOUR that has so far managed to ward off the menace of the Saudi breakaway league.

And while we're past the point where any major should feel like a LIV versus PGA showdown, given that both parties are involved in comically slow peace negotiations, it would be very much to the TOUR's benefit if one of its would-be stars would go ahead and win the green jacket at Augusta.

The TOUR's roster, after the LIV defections of recent seasons, is in an odd place. There are superstars like Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, who have multiple major wins but none for a long time. (McIlroy's major drought is longer, but Spieth's last win of any kind was three years ago.) Three players have won two majors in the past seven years - Collin Morikawa, Scottie Scheffler, and Xander Schauffele - but none are natural charmers. (Morikawa did gain publicity recently for saying he didn't think players had a responsibility to do publicity.) And then there are a bunch of one-off major winners, players like Shane Lowry, Matt Fitzpatrick, and Wyndham Clark, who are obviously quite good but haven't strung together a dominant streak.

There is also, of course, Tiger Woods, who probably saved the PGA TOUR just by not defecting to LIV, but whose body is so beaten up that he seems to have blown his Achilles just by trying to get ready to compete again.

Everyone else falls into the non-major-winner category, which includes most of a typical tournament field but also a host of guys who have become semi-famous after being featured on the Netflix documentary "Full Swing" or in the TGL golf-simulator league. That's a long list, including players like Patrick Cantlay, Tony Finau, Tommy Fleetwood, Sahith Theegala, Viktor Hovland, and Min Woo Lee.

How much would it help the PGA TOUR if one of that group, players who already have a decent profile but have yet to have that major breakthrough, were to win at Augusta? It would give them a new star, someone else for casual fans to take note of on a Sunday leaderboard. And it's no small thing if the John Deere Classic or RBC Canadian Open can claim a reigning Masters champion among the field. That guy would go straight on to the posters.

It would also have to help, at least a little, in whatever discussions are going on between the TOUR and LIV's Saudi owners. The existential threat posed by LIV appears to have passed: This golf season is the first since LIV began in late 2021 that the Saudi league didn't poach any of the TOUR's stars. That's partly a result of the multibillion-dollar investment from a group of American sports owners that has increased PGA TOUR prize money and will bring equity bonuses to players. But it's probably also because LIV has failed to make itself a true rival league.

Last weekend's LIV event in Miami was the first in the United States under its new broadcast partnership with FOX, and while television ratings were higher than usual, it still drew barely a quarter of the audience for the PGA TOUR's Texas Open, which had a relatively weak field and pedestrian leaderboard.

But that Texas tournament was also indicative of the challenges the TOUR still faces. Absent familiar LIV names like Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau, all of whom have won multiple majors, a typical PGA TOUR field that isn't a so-called Signature Event has dozens of players who would be unfamiliar to all but the most avid golf fans. Some of those guys will usually find their way onto Sunday leaderboards. It's just math.

What TOUR events are missing becomes that much more obvious in a week like this one, when Rahm, Scheffler, DeChambeau, and McIlroy are all chasing the same trophy.

The stars that the PGA TOUR lost to LIV might never come back. The best way to replace them would be with new ones.

But it'll be up to the TOUR's players to become stars. And there's no better place to do it than Augusta National.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.