Bryson DeChambeau at the Center of PGA-LIV Divide Ahead of Ryder Cup

The Procore Championship in Napa, Calif., is normally a sleepy early fall PGA Tour event star golfers have every reason to skip.

Except this year. This is a Ryder Cup year.

This year, there’s team chemistry to build and practice reps to chase after most American players took too much time off ahead of their 2023 beatdown in Rome. Only two team members aren’t in the field: Xander Schauffele, who just became a first-time father, and Bryson DeChambeau.

We know why DeChambeau isn’t playing: As a member of LIV Golf, he remains suspended by the PGA Tour, that two-year-old “framework agreement” for a merger becoming more laughable by the day. We know DeChambeau himself wanted to play, and we know his captain wanted him there too.

“Well, he’s suspended, and that’s out of my control,” Keegan Bradley told Sports Illustrated. “I thought the Ryder Cup sort of transcends all of this.”

It’s a bit rich of Bradley to assume the stodgy tour would bend this rule for DeChambeau in the name of Ryder Cup bonding. Remember, it’s the PGA of America that administers the Cup. The PGA Tour doesn’t get much out of the Americans beating the Europeans; it’s already beating Europe when it comes to who has the better pro tour.

What fascinates me about this standoff is that it’s the first time in a while there’s been chatter about the PGA-LIV Golf divide and its consequences. And there’s no surprise this particular player is in the center of it all.

Because for my money, no sports figure this decade has had a career arc more fascinating than Bryson DeChambeau’s.

Deep-in-the-weeds golf fans first heard of the guy when he won both the NCAA championship and the U.S. Amateur in 2015, while majoring in physics and cutting his irons and wedges to the exact same length. That was about four Brysons ago, or, if I throw up my hands and follow the latest linguistic trend, his “Scientist Era.”

DeChambeau became a major winner in 2020, got into a weird feud with Brooks Koepka and started bulking up like crazy — his Beefy Bryson Era. Of course, he left the PGA Tour when LIV came around, and many felt it was a heel turn for him to join the Saudi-backed league.

But he found a way to display his likeable side, and believe me, there’s far more personality there than in your average golfer. Through his YouTube channel (which averages tons more viewers than LIV Golf’s Sunday rounds), he’s built a massive following. When he beat Rory McIlroy at the 2024 U.S. Open, the crowds there adored him, and you could see his reinvention was complete.

DeChambeau is going to rock Bethpage Black this month. He played in just eight events that doled out Ryder Cup qualifying points, and his performance was enough for an automatic spot. Bradley has been effervescent in his praise of DeChambeau, whose booming drives and heart-on-his-sleeve character will suit Bethpage and the New York crowd nicely.

So, should DeChambeau be banned from the Procore this week? No, but DeChambeau shouldn’t have left the PGA Tour in the first place.

From one angle, it’s the sort of nothing controversy that fills time between now and the Ryder Cup. But from another, it shows just how far DeChambeau has come in his brief professional career, and how the PGA Tour is hurting itself by not figuring out how to get him back on its courses.