Just two days after winning the $50 million LIV Golf Team Championship with his 4Aces, Dustin Johnson is already making changes to his squad for 2023.
According to an ESPN report, Johnson is dropping Talor Gooch and adding Peter Uihlein to the team that won five of the eight events over the upstart circuit’s first year.
Uihlein finished runner-up in two of LIV’s last three regular-season events, as well as fourth at the opener in London, to come in third on the season-long points list. Over the course of the regular season, the 33-year-old made $7,314,786 in on-course earnings, but picked up an addition $5.5 million – $4 million for his third-place season finish and $1.5 million for Smash GC’s third-place showing at the team championship – to bring his first-year total to $12,814,786. The former top-ranked amateur in the world and 2010 U.S. Amateur champion made just more than $4 million on the PGA Tour after turning pro in 2011 over 126 tournaments.
Gooch is reportedly bound for Bubba Watson’s Niblicks GC, where he’ll most likely slot in alongside Harold Varner III and Hudson Swafford.
Ahead of last Saturday’s semifinal matches at the team championship at Trump National Doral, LIV Golf officials met with select members of the media to lay out its plans for the future, which included a transfer window similar to professional soccer where players will move between teams in a period of time directly after the team championship and before the start of the following season.
LIV’s goal is for teams to be locked by the end of this year, and this appears to be the first of a few inter-team moves, with upwards of six new names potentially joining in 2023 when the series transitions to the 14-event LIV Golf League.