With 11 green jackets between them, Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus, and Gary Player kicked off the Masters as the honorary starters 

and the former expressed the hope golf’s civil war will finally come to an end.

“We all know golf is fractured with the LIV Tour and the PGA Tour doing the different things they are doing,” Watson said, 

before revealing a passionate, and impromptu, speech he’d given at Tuesday’s Champions Dinner.

“We were sitting down and we were having great stories about Seve Ballesteros and people were laughing and talking. I said to Mr. Ridley (Masters chairman), 

“Do you mind if I say something about being here together with everybody?”

“He said, “Please do.”

“I got up. I’m looking around the room, and I’m seeing just a wonderful experience everybody is having. They are jovial. They are having a great time. They are laughing. I said, “Ain’t it good to be together again?”

“And there was kind of an appall from the joviality, and it quieted down, and then Ray Floyd got up and it was time to leave. And in a sense, I hope that the players themselves took that to say, you know, we have to do something. We have to do something.

“We all know it’s a difficult situation for professional golf right now. The players really kind of have control I think in a sense. What do they want to do? We’ll see where it goes. We don’t have the information or the answers. I don’t think the PGA Tour or the LIV Tour really have an answer right now.

“But I think in this room, I know the three of us want to get together. We want to get together like we were at that Champions Dinner, happy, the best players playing against each other. The bottom line: that’s what we want in professional golf, and right now, we don’t have it.”

What is the best outcome? It’s that the “best players play against each other all the time,” added Nicklaus. That’s what I feel about it.”

“I think we’ll get there. And I certainly hope that happens, the sooner the better.”

How that happens seems to have been the sticking point ever since the framework agreement stunned the golf world last year, and has dragged on long past the original December deadline.

Player said while a solution had to happen, the sticky question of rewarding those who had stayed on the PGA Tour still remained to be answered.

“Anytime in any business whatsoever, not only in the golf business, there’s confrontation, it’s unhealthy,” he said. “You’ve got to get together and come to a solution. If you cannot, it’s not good. The public don’t like it, and we as professionals don’t like it, either.

“But it’s a big problem because they paid all these guys to join the LIV Tour fortunes, I mean, beyond one’s comprehension and the players that were loyal, three of us and others.

“Now these guys come back and play, I really believe the players, if they are loyal, should be compensated in some way or another. Otherwise, there’s going to be dissension.”

Gary Player ‘We’ve got to roll the ball back 50 yards’

Player, meanwhile, also addressed the game’s distance issue, arguing the golf ball needed to be rolled back at least 50 yards and apparently taking a swipe at the current R&A and USGA plans.

Changes to the testing regimen is expected to shave 15 yards off the drives of the professional game’s biggest hitters.

“Where are we going?” he added. “You look at the tour, in 30 years they will all hit the ball 400 yards because there’s such great incentivisation. They are going around the college, gyms now doing weight training. Rory McIlroy showed me yesterday, he does a dead lift – 400 pounds.

“This is where we are going, and this is where we need the R&A and the USGA and the PGA to get together wisely in making a decision about a golf ball. Nothing about the game today, not one single thing, is the same as when we played. Not one single thing.

“We’ve got to cut the ball back 60 yards, 50 yards, otherwise the whole concept of the game, the history of the game, the par 5, par 4, par 3, that’s gone. There are no more par 5s. These young guys are hitting 8-irons to par 5s. We are changing the whole history of the game.

“Now, they are two different games. The R&A never agreed with me that they are two different games, professional and amateur. Go watch Jack Nicklaus in his prime or Tom or Tiger. You’ll see how different it is to the way you guys play.

“They have to cut that ball back. I don’t know what’s going to happen. They talk about making golf courses longer. The world is running out of water, seriously, and the costs of the machine, the mower, fertiliser, labour. Why do that? It’s so simple, cut the ball back. Very, very simple.”

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Source: Tampa Bay Times