Pat Perez Takes Aim at Tiger Woods, Defends LIV

Pat Perez is one of the few PGA Tour defectors who admitted his entire reason for joining LIV Golf was for the money. Durant an appearance on the Son of a Butch podcast, Perez ripped Tiger Woods for his criticisms of LIV and defended the new tour.

Perez was responding to Woods’ comments from his press conference at the British Open in July. Woods said:

“But what these players are doing for guaranteed money, what is the incentive to practice? What is the incentive to go out there and earn it in the dirt? You’re just getting paid a lot of money up front and playing a few events and playing 54 holes. They’re playing blaring music and have all these atmospheres that are different.”

Perez responded:

“That’s the stupidest sh*t I have ever heard of in my life. That’s one of the stupidest things I think he has said. The incentive is the fact that last place is $120,000, first place is $4 million. You cannot win $4 million on the PGA Tour. Now, next year you might. They finally got the perks. But last time I checked, he signed a $40 million dollar deal right out of college, was flying on the Nike jet. He found incentive. He could have shut it down right then.”

Perez continued while discussing the incentive to play well:

“The incentive, the incentive, the fact that you can go from like 22nd place or 18th place, have a great Sunday, go from making 220 grand to $4 million, you cannot do that anywhere. That’s the incentive. I mean, you were out there, you’ve seen people, guys are grinding as hard as they ever have in their lifetime. Because not even that—you can go from making 160 grand to like $1 million. It’s very hard to do on the PGA Tour.”

Perez earned $8 million for being part of the 4 Aces team on the LIV tour this year. While he finished 49th out of 68 in individual earnings, he earned $7 million because his team wound up being the best. That was compared to the $28 million he earned during his 22-year career on the PGA Tour.

The PGA and LIV Golf are never going to coexist peacefully. We can expect this kind of sniping to occur over the next few years.