PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — There are losses in golf, a lot of them. Many more defeats than victories. But some losses are worse than others. Way worse. And Tommy Fleetwood lived it.
His runner-up finish at the Travelers Championship last month was excruciating for the way it went down. The 54-hole leader, he had a two-shot advantage with three holes to play at TPC River Highlands and was unable to close it out.
A couple of late bogeys, including one on the 18th hole, saw him succumb to Keegan Bradley, who never led until he rolled in a clinching birdie putt on the final green. It was a shocking end for both players.
“I’m gutted right now,” said Fleetwood afterward, his attempt at a first PGA Tour win denied by the U.S. Ryder Cup captain. Fleetwood, from England, has seven victories on the DP World Tour and figures to be a key contributor for the European Ryder Cup team later this year at Bethpage Black.
The ending stung, and despite his frustration, Fleetwood handled the near-miss with class, doing TV and print interviews and undoubtedly picking up some fans along the way, the reaction touching.
“I saw some of it,” Fleetwood said in an interview. “My wife told me about it and she said it was really nice. It was really cool. I always say, whether it’s in person or playing in front of a lot of fans or whatever form that it comes in, I think I’m very lucky with the support that I get. I’ve always had a very good connection with people, I guess. And I feel very grateful.
“It’s funny, like, I’m going back to that, you move on. And I will say a million times I would rather be there and it not go my way then not be there at all. It looked like it was going to be my time. And so many people feel like they’re on the journey with me. Which is cool. It’s nice.”
Fleetwood has been frustrated with his game a good bit this year and feels as if he has not been in contention often. He has six top-10 finishes worldwide this year, but the Travelers was his first true opportunity to win.
And after now 160 starts on the PGA Tour (including last week's Genesis Scottish Open, where he tied for 34th), Fleetwood seemed poised to finally break through.
“I played so well and it was my best finish of the year,” he said. “That’s just how the game goes. In that three-hole period, I didn’t really execute the shots badly, just one of those things. But I looked at how well I played, spoke to the people I work with and who are close to me, and we all think at that time it’s easy to be hard on yourself. And I don’t want to be a person who does that.
“You beat yourself up for a couple of days. But also the people around me were so positive about it, so then that rubs off on you. So I’m very lucky to have that.”
Fleetwood said the performance was especially good coming off a tough U.S. Open, where he missed the cut at Oakmont.
“I played so poor, I couldn’t hit the golf shots, and I was gutted at the U.S. Open because I felt like I looked at that golf course and the way that you had to play it and in my mind ... and that didn’t happen,” he said. “I played really poor, and that was a big disappointment. So I was happy with our bounce back.
“The things that I worked on, showed a lot of good spirit and experience to work on the right things and get myself back. It shows you’re never that far away.”
Fleetwood said he needed a few days to gather himself and then he began looking forward to the British Open this week at Royal Portrush, where in 2019 he finished second to Shane Lowry.
He was six shots back of the eventual champion, but Fleetwood took plenty of positives from that performance, although during a practice visit to Northern Ireland last week prior to the Scottish Open he found himself wondering how he did some of the things he did.
“It was playing really tough, really windy and you don’t necessarily remember the nuances of the course, but you remember the holes,” Fleetwood said. “Good memories, like the way I played on Saturday.
“There’s actually a golf swing. I always talk about it. There’s a swing that I put on it on 11 on Saturday, and I remember it distinctly and I’ve searched for that feeling every day since. But it was so clear and it was so good. I just remember how good it felt.”
Fleetwood is hoping for more of that this week.
LIV and the OWGR
After three years of acrimony over the Official World Golf Ranking and how it is not accrediting LIV Golf League events, the OWGR announced last week that LIV Golf has reapplied. LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil said in a statement that he welcomed the opportunity to show OWGR how it can fit in and be granted points.
It remains fair to wonder how different things might be now had LIV in the fall of 2023 gone back to the drawing board and figured out a way forward after the OWGR announced publicly that it was rejecting its bid for several reasons, the biggest being a lack of player pathways and weekly field variation.
Other aspects that are often cited—54 holes and no cuts—are actually not deal-breakers. OWGR accredits several lower tours that play 54 holes. And it now does not award points to the bottom 15 percent of any no-cut field.
When OWGR rejected the bid in 2023, LIV Golf leadership decided to move on from OWGR. It believed that the process was too far gone, that it wasn’t worth the hassle. That the quest would be fruitless anyway because many of its players had fallen so far down the rankings list.
But that is not necessarily the case. LIV Golf clearly has the resources and nimbleness—with just 14 events—to do things more on the fly. Had it gone back and started thinking about ways to accommodate OWGR late in 2023, it perhaps could have been approved in time for this season with the ability to make those changes.
Think about what that might have meant to someone like Joaquin Niemann. He’s won four times on LIV in 2025. While a victory there would get a fraction of the points given to a PGA Tour winner, it’s hardly nothing.
He's now ranked 88th in OWGR without getting a single LIV point. But had this season counted, those four victories plus the multiple-winner bonus that OWGR applies would have easily pushed him into the top 20. With a straight projection, he’d be around the top 10 and if there is an adjustment still around the top 20.
That is a huge carrot for any player on LIV. Perform well and add a few outside events and you can move up. Isn’t that what they are after? For Niemann, it goes a long way to getting into major championships for which he’s had to fight extremely hard these last two years.
So what does LIV need to do? Well, if you simply base it on what the OWGR announced in 2023, LIV needs to address its promotion and relegation issues and probably has to do something about a lack of field variance from one tournament to the next.
One aspect is fairly simple. It probably needs to demote roughly 15% of its players each season. If it expands to 60 players, one idea floated, you’re basically talking about anyone outside of the top 50 being in trouble.
LIV Golf has pumped a lot of money into the Asian Tour via its International Series and its baffling why it doesn’t lean into that relationship as an easy way to replenish its roster. Think Korn Ferry Tour and its relationship with the PGA Tour and how players graduate from the lower tour.
Perhaps the more difficult obstacle is weekly turnover. LIV Golf’s business model is the team concept. It wants to sell teams as franchises and has gone to great lengths to make that important. Each team is expected to operate financially on its own. So how do you change up players? Do you have more than four per team and rotate or substitute?
Or do you add two weekly random teams via qualifying and perhaps other tours? The latter would certainly be far easier if there was a deal between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund. Without that, a “PGA Tour team” seems highly unlikely. And it might not even be feasible.
But the idea of weekly qualifiers could be really popular. A couple of outlier teams might not be able to compete against the teams of Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, but it potentially gives LIV the field variance that it seems to need.
And LIV Golf needs OWGR accreditation. Say what you want about OWGR—it has numerous detractors—but calling it irrelevant is erroneous. It is used to fill the fields of all four major championships. Players get bonuses based on it. And there has been grumbling among some at LIV that there are pathways beyond the league that are hurt due to this issue.
The OWGR board is scheduled to meet this week at Royal Portrush. It is unlikely that anything will come of that meeting immediately. But it’s an important step, albeit it late, for LIV. And it will be interesting to see what changes were presented that would help the league achieve this goal.
Prepping for links golf
Adjusting to links golf is one of the challenges presented to players at the Open. Tommy Fleetwood talked about how it’s become harder for him to adjust—even though he grew up in an area near Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, that is filled with links courses.
The modern professional game rarely sees this type of golf. But to ignore its nuances can make for a long week.
That’s why so many players go on golf holidays that include links courses in the run-up to the Open. Or they play the Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club, a modern links that offers many of the same characteristics players will face this week.
“I personally couldn’t but play links golf the week before [the Open],” Padraig Harrington said at the Scottish Open, where he made the cut and tied for 71st. “At the moment on the Champions Tour, Dick's Sporting Goods, I’ve won it the last three years, I’m not defending. Because I know if I want to play in an Open championship, I’ve got to play links golf, competitive links golf.
“It’s about getting better the next three or four days going into next week, so next week we are not at step one. We are further down the road.
“The course is tough and the rough is up, and we kind of want that for the challenge for next week. But the fact that we keep coming back here and we’re familiar with the golf course, that means it’s a lot easier for the players. There really is—there’s nothing left to chance this week. There’s no stress and it’s perfect preparation going into the Open.”
Harrington won the 2007 Open at Carnoustie in a playoff over Sergio Garcia and followed the next year with a win at Royal Birkdale, where conditions were so difficult the first day that several players walked off the course.
Although he shot 74, he endured the worst of it and felt it was a key in his victory, which saw him come from behind the last day to beat then-53-year-old Greg Norman and Ian Poulter.
“I’d love to see 63 holes with sunny weather like this, and wind and nine holes of brutality,” he said. “That’s a perfect Open Championship. If you put 72 holes of really extreme weather it wears everybody down.
“But 18 holes to nine holes where everybody has to play that ferocious wind and rain and get on with it, that would be perfect. But 72 holes would beat everybody up.
“Obviously when I look back at 2008 when I won at Birkdale, players walked in off the golf course; it was that bad the first day. I think a certain amount of that is always good in an Open Championship and it’s certainly very entertaining for the fans. But as players, it’s hard to do 72 holes of that. Let’s hope for nine or 18 of this next week and for the other guys, not for me, and then sunny, blustery weather like this would be perfect.”
LIV and HSBC
The LIV Golf League announced last week what it is calling its most significant partnership to date, a deal with global banking firm HSBC that is for multiple years and will include sponsorship of two of LIV’s teams.
Financial details were not disclosed and it’s difficult to decipher just how much these partnerships help LIV Golf’s bottom line. The league has announced several such arrangements, but so far has never had a title sponsor—or a presenting sponsor—that doesn’t have some affiliation with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which backs LIV Golf.
But HSBC is a big name in golf and a significant get for LIV, which has had difficulty establishing relationships outside of golf companies and attracting other traditional advertisers. HSBC is the title sponsor of the DP World Tour’s event in Abu Dhabi later this year, a playoff-type tournament that leads into its season-ending event in Dubai.
It was also HSBC that helped facilitate a meeting at the Open two years ago at Royal Liverpool between then-R&A CEO Martin Slumbers and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF.
The partnership began last week at LIV Golf’s event in Spain—where Talor Gooch was the winner—and spans the entire schedule. It makes HSBC LIV’s “official international banking partner.”
As part of the deal, HSBC will also provide “team-specific support” for Bryson DeChambeau’s Crushers team as well as the tri-captain Majesticks team of Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter and Henrik Stenson.
LIV’s business model requires the teams to operate on their own by securing their own sponsorships and using team prize money to help facilitate their objectives. HSBC is also becoming the presenting sponsor of a nine-hole broadcast segment.
More Open Coverage on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Search for a Breakthrough Is Real and Sometimes Painful.
