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With just a week out before the 2025 PGA Championship at Quail Hollow in North Carolina, the LIV Golf Tour will be well represented with 16 tour members in the field. Former PGA Tour winner Lucas Herbert, who currently ranks 5th in the LIV points standings, will not be among them.
LIV Golf just wrapped up the tour’s event in South Korea at the Jack Nicklaus Golf Club where Lucas Herbert finished tied for 13th. He has three top-5 finishes this season with a t2nd in Mexico City and two 4th place finishes in Hong Kong and Riyadh. That was not enough for the PGA of America to send him an invitation to the 2025 PGA Championship, an invitation he had hoped to receive.
Speaking exclusively with the popular X account Flushing It Golf, Herbert discussed the difficulty of missing out on Augusta and watching golf’s major championships from home. But he does seem to have remained upbeat and hasn’t lost hope in qualifying for majors in the future if he doesn’t qualify through the LIV Golf points standings.
Speaking ahead of the Asian Tour’s International Series Japan, where Lucas Herbert will seek to gain OWGR points (he currently ranks 324th in OWGR points), he told Flushing It “When we came to LIV we knew that the majors were going to be the sticking point and it was going to be the hard thing to deal with. But it has been difficult to watch Augusta the last 2 years and know that I was never going to get there with the way everything is set up at the moment, there’s no clear pathway to get to Augusta. So it was tough to watch them knowing I was never going to get there.”
Herbert went on to say “I’ve had chances to qualify for the other majors though, so I can’t get too upset at that. And that was the thing that we knew when we signed up with LIV, that majors would be the issue. They have the right to invite, or not invite, whoever they want. Obviously I’ve been playing great this year and I would have loved to have played. But a big part of why I’ve played so well this year has been being in a team environment with Ripper. I’ve learnt so much from the other 3 guys that I don’t think I would have been able to learn playing on my own on the PGA Tour.”
Lucas Herbert On The Upsides Of LIV Golf
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Despite being disappointed to miss out on the PGA Championship, Herbert highlighted some ways he believes his life has improved since leaving the PGA Tour. He says having an offseason is huge for him.
Herbert says “having an off season to be able to do a lot of work in the gym and also a lot of equipment testing has helped too. We were never really afforded that luxury playing on the PGA Tour. You just couldn’t have gotten away with playing that little golf, unless you’re Adam Scott, or these guys like Rory, who is able to guarantee he’s able to go and win an event every year.”
He continued, saying “It’s very hard to turn down events (on the PGA Tour). So an off season and the freedom with the club contracts, being able to go and test equipment, that massively helped too. So it’s a double edge sword.”
Herbert believes he wouldn’t have performed as well on the PGA Tour this season had he stayed there. Telling Flushing It that he doesn’t “think I would have played as well as I have this year had it not have been for LIV, so maybe I wouldn’t have been good enough to qualify for the PGA Championship without LIV anyway. I’m seeing it both ways. It is what it is and there’s some guys on LIV that did get invited and that’s great because there’s some really high quality golf being played on LIV at the top end of leaderboards.”
He also spoke at length about the ability to grow the game of golf internationally while playing on the LIV Golf Tour. You can find his full quotes in the tweet below:
Lucas Herbert has been playing some of the best golf of his career this season, sitting 5th on the LIV Standings, but he didn’t earn an invite to the PGA Championship. He addressed the issue ahead of the International Series Japan:
“When we came to LIV we knew that the majors… pic.twitter.com/vIYYBHA6Y6
— Flushing It (@flushingitgolf) May 7, 2025
DataGolf has emerged as a unified ranking for PGA Tour and LIV Golf. According to DataGolf, Herbert is currently ranked 44th in the world (324 OWGR) while he ranks 5th in LIV Golf individual points standings at the moment.
There’s a good argument to make that he merited an invitation to the 2025 PGA Championship over some others that received them. Conversely, he could have qualified through the same paths others attempted to qualify.