WITH A CHIP ON HIS SHOULDER, GOOCH BECOMES LIV GOLF’S 2023 INDIVIDUAL CHAMPION

It ended with the biggest moment – and certainly the biggest payday – of his golfing career.

In between, all Talor Gooch did during the 2023 LIV Golf League season was raise trophies across the globe. Victory in Adelaide. Victory in Singapore. Victory in Andalucía.

On Sunday, it was Victory in Jeddah. Not the tournament itself, but as season-long Individual Champion, which comes with a $18 million bonus that should prove quite useful for Gooch’s growing charity foundation in his native Oklahoma.

In a league with 13 major champions on the roster, it was the player who can’t seem to get proper recognition from the majors who set the gold standard.

No wonder Gooch plays with an attitude.

“I think I always play with a chip on my shoulder,” Gooch said in the aftermath of his Individual title at Royal Greens Golf and Country Club. “I’ve gone under the radar, if you will, which is fine. For me, it’s a driving factor.

“Then you circle all the way around to the end of last season with what DJ had said and being on the new team, it’s motivating for sure.

“Yeah, I like the chip on the shoulder.”

DJ is, of course, Dustin Johnson, the 4Aces GC captain whose team Gooch played for last season. It was a successful relationship, especially from the team perspective, as the Aces won all five U.S.-based tournaments during the inaugural 2022 LIV Golf Invitational beta-test season. That included the season-ending Team Championship a year ago in Miami.

But when an opportunity on Bubba Watson’s RangeGoats GC opened up, Gooch jumped ship, wanting to play with his good friend Harold Varner III. Johnson said last year’s podium finish in Miami would be the last one Gooch would enjoy.

It took Gooch just four regular-season tournaments to prove DJ wrong. His twin 10-under 62s in the first two rounds in Adelaide led to his first LIV Golf individual title. The next week, Gooch beat Sergio Garcia in a playoff in Singapore, and this time he had company, as the RangeGoats swept both titles.

In the next event, Johnson seemed to take special pleasure in winning LIV Golf Tulsa, considering Gooch was the hometown host. But Gooch proved the two-week heater overseas wasn’t a fluke, as he held off Bryson DeChambeau in Spain for a third individual win, making a clutch birdie on the final hole.

But he delivered his biggest message in Jeddah.

Three players started the week with a chance to win the Individual Champion crown. Ripper GC Captain Cameron Smith was in the driver’s seat, with Gooch in second place and DeChambeau in third. That’s a sandwich between two recent major winners.

With everything on the line Sunday, Gooch shot an 8-under 62, rolling in seemingly every decent birdie look to force a playoff with defending Jeddah champ Brooks Koepka. Meanwhile, Smith and DeChambeau, the two players with more impressive credentials, fell off the pace. Each were frustrated at the end, knowing the opportunity that had slipped away – or rather, that Gooch grabbed.

Even though he lost the Jeddah tournament title to Koepka on the second playoff hole – he took an aggressive line with his approach shot in hopes of forcing the issue, but the ball finished in the water left of the green – Gooch proved his point. He had outplayed Smith and DeChambeau with the season’s biggest stakes on the line while going toe-to-toe with the reigning PGA Champion and five-time major winner.

And in the process, he became the successor to Johnson, last year’s Individual Champion.

How to put it in perspective?

“You’ve got 48 of the best players in the world, with some legends and some current great players, majors champions,” Gooch said. “When you’re playing all kinds of courses across the world in different climates, in different parts of the world and back home in the States and everything over the span of a season – to beat everybody over the course of that, it speaks volumes to the quality of golf that you’ve played.

“For me, it’s a validation to all the hard work, all the patience and the years it took to get my game to this spot to, I think, be considered one of the best players in the world.”

His current captain agrees.

“He’s a young gun,” Watson said while waiting to spray Gooch with some celebratory champagne on the 18th green. “We saw that in his short career on the PGA Tour and when he jumped ship to LIV, you knew he was still going to be one of the best. He’s proven that he is. It’s awesome to watch.

“It’s awesome to learn from, too. The way he goes about his business. Not too many ups and downs. Just straight ahead, no matter what the golf ball does for him.”

His good friend Varner was more succinct.

“I’ve known him a long time,” Varner said. “I knew he was really good. And he just works his ass off.”

Don’t expect that to change just because he’s on top of the LIV Golf world right now. Playing with a chip on his shoulder has worked well thus far. No need to remove it now.

Even so, Gooch will at some point take time to reflect on a 2023 season full of global accomplishments and messages properly delivered.

“I've always felt that I was good enough to be a professional golfer and play against the best in the world,” Gooch said. “Now to be here to, I think, consider myself one of the best in the world, it's what I've been dreaming about since I was nine years old.

“To get to this point in my career and to have this validating of a season, yeah, words can't describe how much it means and just how satisfying it is.”