Matthew Wolff infamously fell out with Brooks Koepka during the 2023 LIV Golf season, and opted to leave Smash GC to join Bubba Watson’s RangeGoats for the 2024 campaign
Matthew Wolff has hailed the impact of his RangeGoats captain Bubba Watson, after opening up on the struggles he has endured on and off the golf course in recent years.
Once one of the PGA Tour’s hottest rising stars, Wolff opted to make the move to LIV Golf in 2022. For the 2023 season, the American star was signed by Brooks Koepka and represented Smash GC alongside Brooks’ brother Chase and fellow former PGA Tour member Jason Kokrak.
Things soon turned sour for Wolff though, after a public fallout with his captain Koepka, which saw the five-time major champion describe the 25-year-old from Chicago as a ‘talent wasted’.
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He told Sports Illustrated last summer: “I mean, when you quit on your round, you give up and stuff like that, that’s not competing I’m not a big fan of that. You don’t work hard. It’s very tough. It’s very tough to have even like a team dynamic when you’ve got one guy that won’t work, one guy is not going to give any effort.
“He’s going to quit on the course, break clubs, gets down, bad body language, it’s very tough. I’ve basically given up on him—a lot of talent, but I mean the talent’s wasted.” Koepka’s comments came midway through the 2023 season, and in the months following Wolff remained playing under the Smash franchise.
He was finally able to part ways during the offseason, and headed to Watson’s RangeGoats for 2024, with the individual champion Talor Gooch heading the other way as part of the trade. A year on from his clash with Koepka, Wolff has opened up on life with the RangeGoats, hailing captain Watson.
more about how you are, like how you act, like how you carry yourself, the man you are. than he does with like your golf score. He knows and he has confidence in all of us… at the end of the day that is the most important thing.
Wolff had previously been open with his mental health struggles, and again discussed his past experiences which he admitted began when he initially broke onto the PGA Tour. “There is a lot of eyeballs, you are always under a camera, people are always watching. With that comes a lot of awesome things.
“Fans and endorsement deals and all that stuff, it is awesome but then it just became a lot. I put a lot of pressure on myself. I had a lot of success when I was young so I think that probably set the expectations really high.” Wolff currently finds himself 16th in the season-long standings, with his best performance coming with a third-place finish in Miami.
