After LIV cut him, he quit golf. Now he's back - and contending

Pat Perez at the Senior PGA Championship this week.getty images

Pat Perez had a stellar PGA Tour career. In 515 career starts, he had three wins and 64 top-10s, and banked nearly $30 million in earnings. But when LIV Golf came knocking in 2022, Perez, who was then 46, couldn’t resist the siren song of a mega-payday. “It’s like winning the lottery for me,” he said.

As a member of Dustin Johnson’s 4Aces, Perez lasted three years on the tour, never finishing better than 28th in the individual standings. After the 2024 season, when Perez finished a lowly 48th, the 4Aces cut him. But he wasn’t out of work for long. LIV leaned into Perez’s outsize personality and offered him a job as a commentator on its broadcast team.

When we say Perez dropped his clubs for a mic, we mean he quite literally didn’t touch them — for nearly a year. From January 2025 to the end of September of that year, Perez said he didn’t hit a single fade, draw, punch or stinger. Not one golf shot.

”Didn’t even think about it,” he said earlier this week. “I never thought I’d be able to play on the tour again, so I just thought, you know what, I’m just going to kind of hang out and do TV and then we’ll see where it’s at.”

“The tour” in question was the PGA Tour and its sister properties, namely the PGA Tour Champions, which Perez, before he signed with LIV, would have been eligible to play when he turned 50 in March 2026. But when he joined LIV, the PGA Tour suspended him. In late 2025, Perez applied for PGA Tour reinstatement. The Tour granted his request but with a caveat: He’d have to sit out the entire 2026 season, meaning Perez would forfeit his first 10 months of Champions tour eligibility.

“I said, Okay, ‘I appreciate the opportunity,’” Perez said. “Then I kind of got back into it a little. Then I realized I could play at three majors.” Those would the three of the five senior majors not run by the PGA Tour: the Senior PGA Championship (which is conducted by the PGA of America), the U.S. Senior Open (USGA) and the Senior Open Championship (R&A).

Perez was speaking this week from the first of that trio of events, the Senior PGA at the Concession Golf Club in Bradenton, Fla. “Really my focus changed in August [2025] to get ready for this week,” Perez said Wednesday. “I started counting the days. I got 144 days, and then I got to start working out. I got to start practicing harder and figuring out balls and clubs and all this other stuff and kind of get ready for this week.”