As he Masters team golf, Bubba Watson calls LIV 'the greatest thing I’ve ever done'

Bubba Watson has already been to the pinnacle of golf. In fact, he’s been there twice. And he’s had his forever moment too, when he won the first of his two Masters championships with a dramatic shot on a sudden-death playoff hole.

When he was in that moment, and even when he put on his second green jacket two years later in 2014, the feeling had to be incomparable. For a professional golfer, there couldn’t have been anything better.

But apparently there is.

“This,” Watson said in an interview with FOX Sports, “is the greatest thing I’ve ever done in golf.”

What the 46-year-old Watson is doing now is something he couldn’t have imagined all those years ago. He is playing in the LIV Golf League, serving as the captain of his own golf team, and having the time of his professional life. He might have won a pair of Masters, along with 10 other PGA Tour events, and was even once the second-ranked player in the world, but he swears none of that is the same as the challenge, excitement and energy he feels now in the second stage of his career.

And as he finished up his preparations to lead his fifth-place team — RangeGoats GC — into the third event of the season (beginning Thursday at 11 p.m. ET on FS1) at the Hong Kong Golf Club, he insisted that despite Americans’ understandable love affair with golf’s treasured major tournaments, team golf is the real future of the sport.

“Two of the biggest events I’ve ever played in are the Ryder Cup and the Presidents Cup, and both are team events. So we know it,” said Watson of interest in team golf. “We might not want to embrace it in the United States yet, but the world sees it. The world’s embracing it. It’s like anything, it takes time to make change and make history.

“I said a couple years ago I didn’t want to be left behind,” he added. “And I think golf is going this direction.”

Bubba Watson and RangeGoats GC sit fifth in the LIV Golf standings heading into Hong Kong.

The leap to that for Watson, after a lifetime of playing a mostly individual sport, wasn’t nearly as big as it seems. He was a baseball player in his youth and always loved the team aspect of sports. And he embraced that in the business world too, owning an ice cream store, a car dealership, and a minor league baseball team in his hometown of Pensacola, Florida, and making sure he was very involved.

So when he got the chance to be part of a golf team, he didn’t hesitate, joining LIV in July 2022, shortly after the new league started. He was a non-playing captain for the Niblicks Golf Club at first, as he continued to recover from knee surgery. But it turned out he had plenty to do for the team he was building, especially as he was waiting to be medically cleared to play.

“You’re trying to not only make your team successful, but you’re also trying to make the league successful,” Watson said. “It’s not just golf. (We had) to choose what color schemes we want, what clothes we want. Are we going to have a team dinner and talk about things? How many practice rounds? Interviews like this. That’s what the captains were doing.”

“I didn’t know how involved it would be,” he added. “But it’s not like the league was there. The league is a startup plus each team is a startup. It’s a double-whammy, I guess.”

At the same time, Watson was trying to re-start his own career. He endured a rough ride in 2024 as he struggled to rediscover his old form after missing more than half a year during his recovery from surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his right knee. It didn’t help that he had immersed himself so thoroughly into the growth of LIV and the RangeGoats, that he didn’t leave nearly enough time to work on his game.

“You’re the owner of the team,” Watson said. “You’re trying to figure out the best way to go about helping other players instead of helping yourself.”

His struggles were serious. He never finished above 15th last season, and that was in the second tournament of the year. He finished ranked 53nd overall, which put him in the “drop zone,” facing the possibility that he could be relegated out of the league. And he would have been, too, if he hadn’t appealed to the RangeGoats board and presented a compelling “business reason” to keep him on the team.

Even worse for Watson, as he struggled, so did the team he built. They didn’t win a single event last year and finished ninth in the standings. It made his personal struggles feel even worse.

“Because you’re not only playing for yourself,” he said. “I can three-putt and be mad at myself, but when I three-putt and the other three guys are counting on me, then it becomes more emotional, more challenging and more heart-breaking, I guess.”

But the payoff is better, too. This year, with a full staff on the RangeGoats to take on some of his administrative duties, he’s been able to focus more on golf since his captaincy began. He finished 12th in the opening tournament in Riyadh and then 21st at Adelaide in Australia, which has him currently ranked 21st overall in the LIV field of 54 players.

Even more importantly to him, thanks to a surprise second-place finish in Riyadh, the RangeGoats are currently fifth out of 13 in the team standings heading into Hong Kong. And it’s the team — which he lovingly referred to as “our baby” — that has come to matter most.

“If you love sports, you want to be part of a franchise,” Watson said. “You want to pull for your team. You want to own a piece of that team. You want to be sweating with that team, energetic with that team, sad with that team. So this is an opportunity I’ve never had in my life.”

The team he’s built includes New Zealand’s Ben Campbell and Americans Peter Uihlein and Matthew Wolff, none of whom are currently ranked higher than Campbell’s 26th. Expectations were low for them after last year’s disappointment, when Wolff was the only one to finish in the Top 24 (18th) and be guaranteed a spot in the league for the 2025 season.

Watson, though, is convinced that his team is a lot better than most think.

“There’s a lot of things put out there this winter that we’re close to the bottom,” he said. “But we want to prove people wrong. We want to prove that we can do it. I want to prove that I can still play at the highest level. So there are a lot of things motivating us, I guess. We want to make some waves.”

And he does mean “we,, because Watson knows it’s not just about himself anymore. He is driven to help his team win a LIV event for the first time since early in the 2023 season in Singapore. And as much as it would mean to him personally to some day take a run at the LIV individual full-season championship, it would be just as thrilling to see his team holding the trophy at the end.

Would that compare to winning the Masters? It’s hard for him to say for sure, but he’s open to the possibility that it might mean even more.

“It’s a totally different animal,” Watson said. “I was a vice captain when we won the Ryder Cup (in 2016, after he was controversially left off the team). That’s emotional. That’s exhausting. But it’s totally different when you compare emotions when you’re trying to pull for other guys.”

But that’s also the beauty of golf being played as a team sport. There may be a “learning curve” involved, as Watson said, for players and for fans. It’ll take time for fans to get used to rooting for more than just individual players, just like it’ll take time for those players to get used to relying on others, too.

“There’s definitely more pressure because you want your team to be successful,” Watson said. “I think when we see our name up the leaderboard, it gives us motivation to keep pushing or trying to perform at a high level, so you can not let the team fall off.”

The pressure, though, has all been worth it, Watson insisted, to be part of a league and a franchise that he said is “leaps and bounds further than we thought.”

“I joined LIV because I thought it be fun, energetic, start a business from scratch, to be (part of) some positive change,” the two-time Masters champion said. “So yeah, it’s a dream come true.”

Ralph Vacchiano is an NFL Reporter for FOX Sports. He spent the previous six years covering the Giants and Jets for SNY TV in New York, and before that, 16 years covering the Giants and the NFL for the New York Daily News. Follow him on Twitter at @RalphVacchiano.