The path former LIV golfer Laurie Canter took to unlikely PGA Tour return

PONTE VEDRA, Fla.— It was a deliciously awkward moment.As is a yearly tradition the day before the Players Championship begins at TPC Sawgrass, the PGA Tour assembles the first-time players in the event on a lawn outside of the clubhouse for interviews, and Tour commissioner Jay Monahan visits each player to give him a small blue box from Tiffany’s with cuff links in it.Wednesday morning, one of the 25 first-time players Monahan made that special delivery to was Laurie Canter, a 35-year-old Brit who will be the first player from LIV Golf to tee it up in an event sanctioned solely by the PGA Tour.“I never would have imagined that ever happening,” Canter said with a smile after Monahan presented him with the gift, referring to the well-documented discord between the PGA Tour and LIV.Canter, who no longer plays on LIV, qualified for the Players through his position inside the Top 50 in the Official Golf World Rankings playing on the DP World tour.His journey is a fascinating one, because when he agreed to join LIV Golf in 2022, Keith Pelley, then the chief executive of the DP World Tour, told him he was selling out on his dream to play on the PGA Tour by going to the Saudi-backed rival tour.“He told me in his office at Wentworth that I would never play on the PGA Tour,” Canter recalled.But Canter, who enters this week’s Players ranked 43rd in the world, is not only competing in the Players, he has a strong chance to play in his first Masters next month if he’s able to stay inside the Top 50 by the week before Augusta.

All players in the Top 50 are eligible to participate in the Players Championship and the Masters.Canter, who spent nearly a decade bouncing between the Challenge Tour and the DP World Tour, joined LIV Golf ahead of its inaugural event in his home country of England in 2022.“The first year I played LIV, I’d lost my status in Europe, so I was homeless, really,” Canter said.“So, it was just a case of playing where I had opportunity...