LIV Golf vs. PGA TOUR: Live coverage of court hearing for Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford, Matt Jones to play FedEx Cup Playoffs

Three members of the LIV Tour will be in Federal Circuit Court this morning in San Jose, California in an effort to participate in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, as they request a temporary restraining order that would require the PGA TOUR to allow them to compete in the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis beginning on Thursday.

We'll have live coverage of the hearing once it begins in this space, with video, quotes, and a direct link to the Zoom if possible.

The hearing on the motion from Talor Gooch, Matt Jones, and Hudson Swafford will be at 4 p.m. PT on Tuesday, with Judge Beth Labson Freeman presiding in the Northern District of California. The hearing will be on Zoom, and we will add that link when it becomes live to this article.

The trio earned enough points during the 2021-22 PGA TOUR season to be in the Top 125, which would have qualified them for the Playoffs, except they have been banished for signing on with LIV during the season. PGA TOUR Commissioner Jay Monahan and the rest of the Tour have taken a strong stance against LIV participation, suspending those involved for at least two seasons.

A total of nine golfers that joined the LIV Tour during the 2021-22 season and have not resigned their TOUR membership would have made it to TPC Southwind for the first round of the Playoffs, but only these three are asking to play.

Gooch would be a strong candidate to make it to the TOUR Championship at East Lake Golf Club after the St. Jude and the BMW Championship in Wilmington, Delaware on August 18-21. He currently sits in 20th place in the points race, with Jones in 65th and Swafford in 67th. The top 70 players will survive to the BMW, then the top 30 to East Lake, where the prize for finishing last is $250,000. The winner will take home $18 million.

The restraining order is one part of an antitrust suit that has been filed by LIV against the PGA TOUR. “The punishment that would accrue to these players from not being able to play in the FedEx Cup Playoffs is substantial and irreparable,” said the LIV golfers in their TRO request, which you can read in full here.

“The Tour has unlawfully suspended the TRO plaintiffs from the Tour for almost two years and, as of yesterday, refused to stay these suspensions, as the Tour's own rules require,” the plaintiffs continue. “Unless restrained, the Tour's impermissible suspensions will prevent the TRO Plaintiffs from playing in the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which will deny them a crucial opportunity to qualify for next year's premier professional golf events.”

The PGA Tour filed a blistering response, accusing the players of waiting as long as possible to file to assist in receiving relief, and restating the case for their exclusion.

“Despite knowing full well that they would breach TOUR Regulations and be suspended for doing so, Plaintiffs have joined competing golf league LIV Golf, which has paid them tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed money supplied by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund to procure their breaches.”

TRO Plaintiffs now run into Court seeking a mandatory injunction to force their way into the TOUR's season-ending FedExCup Playoffs, an action that would harm all TOUR members that follow the rules. The antitrust laws do not allow Plaintiffs to have their cake and eat it too.”

They don't hold back on the LIV Tour as a business either, saying “LIV is the most recent example of 'sportswashing,' a strategy by the Saudi government to use sports in an effort to improve its reputation for human rights abuses and other atrocities.”

  
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