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Good Wednesday morning, golf fans, as the PNC Championship takes center stage over the coming days

1. Jason Day to LIV? Definitely no.

Tom D’Angelo, Palm Beach Post…“Jason Day doesn’t mind golfers leaving the PGA Tour to join LIV Golf. And he remains close with fellow Aussie Cameron Smith, the highest-ranked golfer to make the jump.”

• “But would Day join Smith on the tour financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund?  “I definitely would say no,” Day told the Palm Beach Post during the QBE Shootout. “I wouldn’t go as of now.”

• “But does that close the door forever?”

• “Who knows in a year’s time, you might think differently,” he said.

2. Inspired by Morocco’s World Cup run

BBC report…“Morocco’s Ines Laklalech has become the first golfer from North Africa to qualify for the LPGA tour, having been inspired by the coach behind her country’s World Cup run in Qatar.”

• “Laklalech, 25, earned a spot on the premier tour in women’s golf despite shooting her worst round on the final day of the qualifying event in the United States.”

• “The Casablanca resident fired a one-over par 73 in the final round at Highland Oaks in Dothan, Alabama on Sunday.”

• “Yet she finished on 19 under par at the end of the eight-round tournament and shared 12th place – good enough to claim a much sought-after spot on next season’s tour.”

• “I’m a big fan of the Moroccan national team so I’m super, super happy,” Laklalech said. “It definitely gave me an extra boost on the course.”

3. A look back at one of the big golf stories of 2022…

Golf Digest’s Dave Shedloski remembers the Du Pont delegation…”It isn’t known how far along the PGA Tour had progressed towards its initiative to counter the LIV Golf Series with an expanded program of “elevated” high-dollar tournaments prior to the Aug. 16 players-only meeting in Wilmington, Del. But with four months’ worth of hindsight, it appears the gathering of nearly two dozen high-profile tour pros at the Hotel Du Pont can be viewed as a turning point for the tour in its ongoing fight with the Saudi-backed upstart. Just eight days later at the Tour Championship in Atlanta, Commissioner Jay Monahan laid out the tour’s plans to which top players had given their blessing—if not insisted be put in place—thus shoring up its base of big names and assuaging fears that more LIV defections were coming.”

• “That Tiger Woods flew in from his home in Florida to lead the meeting, along with Rory McIlroy, underscores the gravity and importance of that moment. And whatever was said that day—players in attendance have been tight-lipped about specifics—was embraced by those in attendance, which then apparently gave Monahan the green light to proceed with the plan to designate 13 tournaments for increased purses ranging from $15 million for the Sentry Tournament of Champions to $25 million for its flagship event, the Players Championship. Additional moves to retain talent, including up-front stipends for true tour rookies and fast-track access for top college golfers, also might have come out of the Delaware gathering.”

4. Newsmakers: OWGR

Shedloski again…”Since its inception in 1986, the Official World Golf Ranking has had its share of critics provide a healthy dose of skepticism, even as it came to be an accepted measure of talent in men’s professional golf—tracking the long reigns at the top of Tiger Woods (683 weeks) and Greg Norman (331 weeks)—and embraced by the major championships as a useful qualifying determinant. But the legitimacy of the OWGR has never been more scrutinized and attacked than it was in 2022 with the emergence of the LIV Golf Series. Because LIV has failed to meet at least a half-dozen metrics for OWGR inclusion, its golfers can’t collect OWGR points. Subsequently, their rankings have plummeted; just to cite the fall of two prominent players, Sergio Garcia is outside the top 100 for the first time in more than two decades and Brooks Koepka will end the year out of the top 50 for the first time since 2014. Norman, who is CEO of LIV Golf, and his players have sought fast-track acceptance to no avail.

• “The OWGR, overseen by the majors and established tours like the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, has a schedule for validating each new tour, generally two to three years, and it isn’t budging. That’s logical when you consider as it represents a competitive firewall of sorts for the legacy tours against the deep-pocketed Saudi-backed newcomer. Naturally, the LIV faction increasingly questions the validity of the OWGR without LIV players in the equation. What OWGR leaders probably didn’t anticipate was catching flak from their right flank. In recent weeks, Woods, World No. 2 Scottie Scheffler and No. 5 Jon Rahm all have referred to the OWGR as “flawed,” this after its points distribution structure was tweaked yet again in August. The OWGR is a fundamental tenet to professional golf. Now it’s at the center of the upheaval occurring in the game. Can it survive? Should it survive? What form might it take next year and beyond? Will the majors, which make primary use of the rankings to help determine its fields, abandon it in favor of their own respective qualifying formulas? No “small” issue seems bigger in golf’s ongoing squabble.”

5. Golf tips from The Match

A few items from Golf Digest’s Luke Kerr Dineen…

• ”Tiger’s draw bunker tip…On the second-to-last hole of The Match, JT found himself in the opposite situation of Spieth: His ball was in a bunker, but was on an upslope. So JT said he enlisted a shot that Tiger taught him: the “draw” bunker shot. It’s a great shot when the ball is on the upslope, he explained, because it prevents the club from digging (which it can do easily from this lie).”

• “I stand a little wider, a little further from the ball, and choke down a bit,” JT explains.

• “Lift your heel for more power…On the 10th and final hole, JT said he was going to get after one. He targeted 180 mph ball speed (he touched 179 mph in the end). How did he squeeze that extra power out of his swing? By lifting his lead heel off the ground, a move he said he’s been practicing for these occasions.”

6. Stats of the year

Justin Ray for PGATour.com…

• “For 40 years, nobody had opened a tournament with triple bogey or worse and won on the PGA TOUR. Then it happened twice in the same month…The PGA TOUR has been keeping hole-by-hole data for the last 40 seasons. From 1983 through July 2022, in more than 1,700 official stroke-play events contested, there was not a single instance of a player starting a tournament with triple bogey or worse and going on to win. Then, in August, it happened twice!”

• “At the Wyndham Championship, Tom Kim began his week with quadruple bogey. Incredibly, he went on to win by five shots after a leaderboard climb that featured a front-nine 27 on Sunday. Three weeks later at the TOUR Championship, Rory McIlroy, who was already ceding six “Starting Strokes” to Scottie Scheffler, opened his tournament with triple bogey and still won.”

• “For the first time since the inception of the Masters in 1934, all four majors were won by players younger than 30….The value in the No. 1 statistic of the year is just how unthinkable it is that we have never seen it before. For the first time in the four-major era of men’s golf, all four winners in a calendar year were 29 or younger. Fifteen times in the modern era, three majors had been won by players in their 20s – but never all four.

• It also makes it six different major winners in a row – all under the age of 30 – the first time the men’s game has experienced that since the inaugural Masters Tournament.”

7. Shocking retirement!

8. Inbee to have first child

Brentley Romine for Golf Channel…“Inbee Park is already a seven-time major champion, Olympic gold medalist and LPGA Hall of Famer.

• She’ll soon be able to add mom to that list.”

• Park, 34, took to Instagram on Tuesday morning to announce that she and husband, Gi Hyeob Nam, are expecting their first child.

• “We are thrilled to announce that we will be welcoming new member of our family,” Park wrote. “Thank you all for so much support and love.”

9. Improving The Match?

• More unique formats…”The one-club challenge on Saturday only worked because all four of the competitors are professional (I don’t need Josh Allen and Aaron Rodgers playing a 450-yard hole exclusively with a 4-iron), but it was so incredibly compelling that you could make the entire event a one-club challenge; I would absolutely be more interested than if guys were playing with all 14 sticks.”

• “There are myriad variations of this you could run — make the losing team of each hole take a club out, three-club challenge, driver only on one hole and so on — but the crux is the same regardless: Make pros show us how talented they are by playing holes with one club better than the rest of us could with all of them.”

• Title belt…”This is not an original idea to me, and in fact it’s not even original to Shane Bacon (who tweeted about it on Monday). Rick Gehman brought this up on the First Cut Podcast last week, and I think it’s brilliant. Make The Match a title belt. The options this gives you are as limitless as they are obvious. If J.T. and Spieth are the current belt holders, a different twosome can be pitted against them to try and win the belt away from them.”

• “Eschew those The Match bracelets the duo won on Saturday and go full 1860s Open Championship by handing out belts. You wouldn’t even need to pit two golfers against them as long as you implemented handicaps. This would provide a bit of an edge to something that, at times, perhaps lacks it.”