Talor Gooch Won a Third LIV Golf Event. Shouldn't That Be Enough for a Ryder Cup Spot?

In three months the U.S. will try to end a three-decade-long road drought in the matches and Alex Miceli wonders if two LIV players, not just one, should be on the team.

SOTOGRANDE, Spain — Ninety days from today, the Ryder Cup will begin and the makeup of the U.S. team will be more heavily scrutinized than any other time in the event's 96-year history.

On the U.S. side, the top six automatic selections as they stand now are Scottie Scheffler, Wyndham Clark, Brooks Koepka, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay and Max Homa.

The six remaining slots on the U.S. team will go to eligible players who are captain’s selections and will be announced by U.S. captain Zach Johnson following the Tour Championship at the end of August.

Of the six currently on the top of the list, Clark, Homa, Scheffler and Koepka have won two events, with Koepka's being the PGA Championship and LIV Orlando.

Neither Schauffele nor Cantlay have a victory this season.

Sitting at 83rd on the Ryder Cup points list before the conclusion of Sunday’s Rocket Mortgage Classic is LIV Golf's Talor Gooch, below Robby Shelton, Patton Kizzire, Andrew Novak and Zach Johnson.

Talor Gooch has won three of LIV Golf's eight events so far in 2023 / Courtesy LIV Golf

That's an odd place for an American player who has three victories, including a Sunday barnburner in Spain where he birdied the last two holes to hold off Koepka and a resurgent Bryson DeChambeau.

“Last year I didn't get a win, so this year I was just so focused on getting an individual win,” Gooch said Sunday after his 2023 wallet swelled to more than $13.3 million. “You don't think much past the first one until you get the first one. I definitely didn't have three in mind for the season, but it's cool that we're here, and it's especially cool to have the third one here at Valderrama.“

The 1997 Ryder Cup venue proved its toughness and Gooch showed he can win overseas, with all his LIV wins in 2023 on the road in Australia, Singapore and now Spain.

That's exactly what you want if you are a Ryder Cup captain, a player that can play well on the road as this year's matches will be at Marco Simone outside of Rome.

But will Gooch get even a sniff from Johnson?

Gooch sat at 15th on the Ryder Cup points list at the end of 2022, but because he is now on LIV, his three victories may seem like they never happened.

Outside of Jon Rahm, not one player on the PGA Tour has three wins this season.

But with hostilities between the PGA Tour and LIV over, Gooch hopes his performance this year will make a difference.

“A few weeks back when I was in Cabo and woke up one morning and I had 137 texts on my phone and the news had broke of the merger, my immediate thought was, 'I wonder what this means for Ryder Cup,'" Gooch said Saturday. “If apples were to apples, the guy leading the FedExCup and the guy leading the LIV standings, it's like ... I think my play has shown that it's at least worth a discussion.”

Johnson last spoke on the issue on Sunday at the PGA Championship when Koepka was on his way to a win and likely a position among the automatic qualifiers on the Ryder Cup points list.

At that time, Johnson was noncommittal about even if Koepka deserved to be on the team, so Gooch wasn’t even part of the discussion.

Most American players have come out over the last month and said the best 12 Americans should make up a team that is trying to win on foreign soil for the first time since 1993.

Now its on to Rome and a course that none of the 12 are familiar with.

“Hey, at the end of the day, the professional golf world has been in a crazy place over the last 365 days,” Gooch said. “I've always dreamed of being on a Ryder Cup. Before making the decision to come to LIV, Max Homa was one of my good buddies on PGA Tour, and we talked about—my wife and I did our honeymoon in Italy, and we did Rome, and he and his wife couldn't do their honeymoon in Italy, so we had always had the talk the last couple years of, well, we're just going to have to get on the team up there and go do it.”

Gooch is going for his fourth win next week in London and then two weeks later the 151st British Open at Hoylake.

“Obviously it's out of my hands,” Gooch said of being picked by Johnson. “It's out of my control. But the one thing I can control is playing good golf. I'll continue to do that to the best of my abilities, and hopefully things work out.”