AUGUSTA, Ga. — Sergio Garcia believes the conflict between the PGA Tour and the LIV Tour is a media creation.

“The professional game, maybe it’s a little more separated, mostly because of the media, not so much because of the players,” Garcia said Tuesday at the Masters.

This, of course, is absurd.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has poured billions of dollars into LIV Golf, poaching huge PGA Tour stars such as Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, and Jon Rahm. Before he joined LIV in 2022, Mickelson called the Saudis “scary [expletive].” LIV hired former PGA Tour star Greg Norman, an outcast for years, to be its CEO, and Norman consistently has fanned the flames of division. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy publicly rebuffed offers to join LIV that would have made them hundreds of millions of dollars. The PGA Tour banned LIV golfers, who sued for reinstatement (and lost), one of several lawsuits and countersuits between the entities. The European tour fined and suspended LIV defectors, also was challenged in court, and also won. All suits were dismissed in June, when the two sides decided to work on a partnership.

As these events unfolded, high-profile players like Rahm and McIlroy consistently criticized LIV’s format and their peers’ decisions to abandon the tours that made them rich.

These all are facts. The following Garcia statement is not:

“You guys love to kind of dig and just kind of try to make it sound like we get in the locker room and we’re fighting each other and stuff like that.”

Garcia probably isn’t the best arbiter of bad intentions. Despite his lengthy and successful career, which includes 11 PGA Tour wins and capturing the 2017 Masters, Garcia:

— Was disqualified from the 2019 Saudi International for intentionally damaging five greens.

— Spat in the 13th hole before replacing the flag at the 2007 WGC-CA Championship.

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