What to Watch For at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship

Six LIV Golf players—Louis Oosthuizen, Talor Gooch, Peter Uihlein, Hudson Swafford, Dean Burmester, and Laurie Canter—are on the tee sheet at the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship this weekend. And no, they didn’t win the spots via the Old Course lottery.

Ever since a UK arbitration panel ruled that the DP World Tour could suspend or ban LIV players at its pleasure, these guys have been almost exclusively seen on Greg Norman’s tour. So how exactly are all of them teeing it up in Scotland this week?

Well, because South African business magnate Johann Rupert wants them there. Chairman of Dunhill’s parent company and one of the European circuit’s most important financial backers, Rupert has publicly lamented the current rift in professional golf. Last year, he urged the PGA and DP World tours to work with LIV. So Rupert has evidently leveraged his position to get the LIV guys back in the mix. He’s partnering with Louis Oostuizen in the pro-am portion of the event, as he has in previous years.

What does the DP World Tour have to say about all of this? Not much. Some of the players involved may have already served undisclosed suspensions or paid undisclosed fines, but it appears that all have been cleared to play.

So this week, several of LIV’s lesser lights will square off against Big Two Tour members, something that hasn’t happened in non-majors since March. We saw such mixed fields regularly on the DP World Tour in 2022, while the LIV players’ appeal was pending, but the sight of, say, Talor Gooch matching skills with Billy Horschel has become rarer in 2023.

For that reason, the Dunhill Links—always one of our favorite coffee-golf events—has an extra layer of intrigue this week. It will be the first thorough assessment of how LIV’s less intense schedule is affecting its middle-tier players. Are the Swaffords and Burmesters as sharp as ever? Or has LIV’s shorts-allowed, shoot-80-without-consequences atmosphere caused them to take the game less seriously?

We’ve seen the breakaway tour’s studs answer these questions for themselves major championships this year. Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, and especially Brooks Koepka have shown that they can still hang. But we haven’t seen much of these other guys.

One week at St. Andrews, Carnoustie, and Kingsbarns isn’t going to prove anything definitively about the state of the average LIV player’s game, but it will be the best test we’ve seen in a while.