Cameron Smith’s jump to LIV Golf leaves a void at Players Championship

• The Players Championship is March 9-12 at the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course
• Cameron Smith won last year’s Players with a final-round 66
• Smith is the fourth defending champion to miss the following year’s tournament

Contrary to chatter in 19th holes and bars along A1A, all vestiges of Cameron Smith’s victory in the 2022 Players Championship have not been washed clean at the TPC Sawgrass or the Players Stadium Course. 

It’s true that the Ponte Vedra Beach resident and Australian native lost his playing and practicing privileges at the home of The Players when he defected to the LIV Golf League last year after becoming the first man since Jack Nicklaus in 1978 to win The Players and the British Open in the same year.  

But the Tour has acknowledged, with traditional gestures, Smith’s one-shot victory over Anirban Lahiri in the first Monday finish since 2005. 

The flag of the previous champion’s home country flies between The Perch and the clubhouse, and Australia’s has been fluttering in the breeze every day since Smith’s 66 in the final round. 

Unless another Aussie such as 2004 Players champion Adam Scott or 2016 winner Jason Day come up big again this week at the Stadium Course, the flag will change to the new champion’s country sometime during the evening of March 12, the day of the final round. 

There are also two ways past Players champions are honored within the clubhouse: a recap of their victory, with a caricature of the player, is made into a framed poster and hung in one hallway; and a display of clubs that each winner used during their triumphal week in another hallway. 

Smith’s smiling visage, his long hair spilling from under his flat-brimmed hat, is in one hallway, and a pitching wedge he used last year is in the other. 

He will always be a Players champion. No one can take that away, and the Tour is not. 

But he’s still an absentee champion, only the fourth time in the 49-year history of The Players that a winner has not defended his title and the first since Tiger Woods missed the 2014 tournament with a back injury. 

The other champions who didn’t defend were Jerry Pate in 1983 (shoulder injury) and Steve Elkington in 1998 (sinus infection), which means Smith is the first Players champion to miss the tournament the following year for non-injury reasons.

“He’s one of our champions and history speaks for itself,” said Players executive director Jared Rice. “The play of all of our past champions speaks for itself. But 2023 is about the players who will be here. We have our eyes forward on the product, which is the best field in golf again.”

Final round highs and lows

Smith’s victory in 2002 was remarkable for its highs and lows. He birdied his first four holes and five of his first six, weathered three bogeys in a row in the middle of his round, birdied another four in a row and five of eight, and escaped with a bogey at the last when he hit his second shot from the right trees into the water on the left of…