GOOCH ON JOINING BROOKS’ SMASH GC: ‘THOUGHT IT WAS A LONG SHOT’

It was Sunday at Valderrama, the final round of LIV Golf Andalucía, and the leaders’ group starting off the first hole consisted of Talor Gooch, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau.

Word was already out that Koepka and his Smash GC teammate Matthew Wolff were having issues, a development that had escalated at the previous LIV tournament a month earlier in DC, which ended with Smash finishing in last place by eight strokes and starting just three players on the final day after Wolff and Jason Kokrak needing to WD.

Gooch was curious. “What are you thinking about doing?” he asked Koepka.

Koepka shot back, no hesitation: “I want to get you.”

Gooch, leading the Individual points standings after back-to-back wins in Adelaide and Singapore, was flattered, of course. But he wasn’t completely sure if Koepka was serious.

“I thought it was a long shot,” he recalled this week. “I thought he was kind of joking.”

It’s doubtful Koepka needed more convincing, but Gooch provided it anyway that day, as he shot a final-round 67 to become LIV Golf’s first three-time individual winner, beating DeChambeau by a stroke and Koepka by three.

Further proof came in the regular-season finale in Jeddah when Gooch and Koepka went toe-to-toe in a playoff. Koepka won the tournament title, but Gooch clinched the season-long Individual Championship crown as LIV Golf’s best player in 2023.

After the season ended with the Team Championship in Miami, Koepka contacted Gooch’s RangeGoats GC Captain Bubba Watson to start trade discussions. Last week, it became official – Gooch to Smash, Wolff to the RangeGoats.

Reaction was swift. Why would the RangeGoats trade away the league’s best player for Wolff, who ranked 27th in points? Gooch was not surprised that outsiders considered it a lopsided deal, but he sees the value in the RangeGoats picking up the long-hitting Wolff, who’s eight years younger and full of promise.

“On paper based off of one season, it’s understandable,” Gooch said of the reaction. “But like I keep telling people, you don’t want to buy a stock when it’s at its highest price. And so maybe Brooks made the bad trade.

“I mean, Wolffie’s one of the best talents in the game, one of the best talents that we have. He bombs it, and he’s stud. It just wasn’t a good fit for him [with Smash] and he didn’t play his best.

“I have no doubt he’s going to play great – especially as we all know in this game, you’ve got to be comfortable to play good golf. And I have no doubt he’s going to have a bounce-back year and play well.

“I’m happy for Wolffie to hopefully get into a better situation. This trade, I think everybody benefited. A year from now, if Wolffie goes and wins the whole league – which he can – all of a sudden people are going to think Bubba was the brilliant one.

“Hopefully he doesn’t. Hopefully, I go win it again.”

For Gooch, there’s potentially a risk involved in leaving the RangeGoats. After all, he played the best golf of his career in 2023, and he enjoyed it alongside good friend and teammate Harold Varner III, one of the primary reasons Gooch left 4Aces GC after 2022 to transfer to the Goats. Varner was also dealt last week, to the 4Aces in exchange for Peter Uihlein.

Gooch and Varner chatted often this offseason as trade discussions heated up, well aware that they could end up on opposite sides in 2024. “It sucks that we’re not on the same team this year,” Gooch said, “but it’s like I keep telling him, it’s not over. This isn’t said and done, and so there’s some potential in the future for us to get together. It’s time apart now but you never know the future has in store.”

The immediate future is set, of course, with Gooch joining the revised Smash GC lineup that also added major winner Graeme McDowell, signed as a free agent to add a veteran, comforting presence to go with holdover Kokrak, a solid top 24 Lock Zone finisher.

The chemistry should be different for Smash. In 2023, they were the second-youngest team in the league with an average age of 30.25. In 2024, with the 32-year-old Gooch and the 44-year-old McDowell joining the team, Smash’s average age will be 36.75 when the first tee balls are struck next February at LIV Golf Mayakoba. That’s more in line with the average ages of the first two LIV Golf team champions, the 4Aces in 2022 and Crushers GC this year.

Before LIV Golf, Gooch and Koepka weren’t particularly tight. But competing against each other across the globe for the last two seasons allowed them to develop a closer relationship.

The appeal for Gooch of joining Smash is not so much that he’s playing with a new friend, but that he’s playing for a five-time major winner who demands a lot from himself (and his teammates) and plays with a chip on his shoulder. From that perspective, the two are very much alike.

The opportunity to learn from one of golf’s biggest superstars should “help make me a better golfer, a better competitor,” Gooch said. “That’s something that I’m really, really looking forward to.”

Smash will be Gooch’s fourth different LIV Golf team. At the inaugural 2022 LIV Golf Invitational London, Gooch was the team captain for Torque GC. By the next event in Portland, he joined Dustin Johnson’s 4Aces and became a key part of a foursome that won four regular-season tournaments and the Team Championship.

In the Aces lineup, Gooch was the clear No. 3 player behind DJ and Patrick Reed. In 2023, he was obviously the RangeGoats’ No. 1 player with Watson shaking off the rust following knee surgery in 2022 and Varner offering a strong No. 2 with a tournament win in DC.

Now he’s with Brooks. Does that make Gooch the No. 2? Or maybe closer to 1B? Or if you go strictly on 2023 results, is Koepka actually the 1B? (Yes, feel free to laugh at that last suggestion.)

“Obviously, it’s Brooks’ team,” said Gooch, who will have a new addition to the family in January when wife Ally delivers their second child. “Brooks is one of the best players of this generation. He’s the face of the team and I’m excited to be there to hopefully make him the second-best scorer on the team a bunch over the next few years.

“I mean, we’re just doing this together and I don’t think either of us really cares who’s one or two or anything like that. We just want to be standing on the podium at the end of the week. That’s all we care about.

“We're together long-term, we're going to build this thing together and hopefully spend a lot of years together and build this thing up. And so, I'm happy with where I'm at.”

He should be. He has a new team, a new captain and a new challenge in 2024. The goals are lofty but if we learned anything in 2023, it’s never good to underestimate him. He’s lifted both the season-long Individual and Team Championship trophies – but not in the same year. It's on the checklist for 2024.