USGA Boss Mike Whan Says Talor Gooch Was Not Targeted With U.S. Open Qualification Change

U.S. Open qualifying criteria was adjusted for this year to only allow 2022 Tour Championship qualifiers who were eligible to play, which eliminated one way the LIV golfer could have qualified.

Is there a "Gooch Rule" at the USGA?

In 44 days the 123rd U.S. Open will begin at Los Angeles Country Club.

The list of entries to compete is 10,187, the most for a U.S. Open, surpassing the 10,127 record of 2014 when the Open was at Pinehurst.

Of course, over the next month or so that number will be whittled down to just 156 players, and in that final starting field may or may not be the hottest player in professional golf right now, Talor Gooch.

Gooch has won consecutive events on the LIV Golf tour, including in a playoff over Sergio Garcia in Singapore last week, but neither win provided him with Official World Golf Ranking points and since his last ranking event, the Masters, where he moved from 58th to 56th in the rankings after a T34 finish, Gooch has fallen to 60th. (He is 23rd in the new SI World Golf Rankings.)

Sixty is a magic number for any player who wishes to play in the U.S. Open without going through qualifying and on June 12, if a player is ranked in the top 60 in the world and not otherwise exempt, he will get a spot in Los Angeles.

Gooch's only pathway to the U.S. Open is to rank in the top 60 in the world. He did not submit an application to qualify.

Gooch had another pathway but it was taken away by the USGA, and of all the players who went to LIV, Gooch is the only one to have been affected by a qualification change the USGA implemented this year under its "Exemptions from Local and Final Qualifying" criteria.

Paragraph F-11 of the exemptions states that “Those players who qualified and were eligible for the season-ending 2022 Tour Championship” are exempt from qualifying.

Gooch had qualified for the Tour Championship, but because he had jumped to LIV Golf before the finale in Atlanta, he was not eligible to play. Therein lies the rub.

“We didn't sit down and talk about Talor Gooch,” USGA CEO Mike Whan told Sports Illustrated Monday during a visit to LACC. ”We made subtle changes to a few places on our field criteria and have every year.”

Whan considered the change a clarification and nothing more, so according to him there is no "Gooch Rule" at the USGA.

“There are a lot of reasons a player may not be eligible for a Tour event and most of those would make us stop and at least question,” Whan says. “So going forward let’s make that really clear.”

So now Gooch has one lone pathway to the U.S. Open: earn enough points at the PGA Championship in two weeks at Oak Hill.

The PGA of America gave Gooch a sponsor’s exemption last month into the PGA Championship, which now has additional meaning for the 31-year-old to earn enough ranking points to move high enough in the rankings to stay at 60th or above.

“I'm bummed out that it affects Gooch,” Whan says. “But I also feel pretty comfortable he’s going to play his way into the U.S. Open anyway.”

Would the USGA think about treating Gooch as the PGA of America did?

“No, we're not going to change our special exemption formula, because of a field criteria” Whan says. “That's not how we think of our special exemptions.”

At last year's U.S. Open at the Country Club, the USGA opened its doors to LIV golfers, who the week before played their first event on the fledging tour.

Whan points that out while stating the USGA is not anti-LIV.

“I think we showed pretty clearly that we're the U.S. Open,” Whan says. “We had players that made it through qualification to play, we didn't decide where you played, so I feel pretty good about my record of maintaining the openness of the U.S. Open.”