Pat Perez is at the Senior PGA Championship, but he shouldn’t be playing at all. He is still serving a suspension for moving to LIV Golf that keeps him out of all PGA Tour events until January 1, 2027. The contrast became clear almost immediately on the practice range when Stewart Cink spotted Perez.

“I thought you were suspended!” Cink yelled at the Concession Golf Club, but Perez did not flinch. “Yeah, I am suspended for a year. There was no surprise in that. I knew that that was going to happen. I’m just grateful and fortunate to be here. The Tour gave me a lifeline to come back and play. Couldn’t be more appreciative of it. It’s going to be next year, which is not the end of the world.”

Although lighthearted, the exchange highlighted why Perez is here and why his case has become one of the most complex in the LIV return conversation. Perez can play this week because the Senior PGA Championship is run by the PGA of America, not the PGA Tour, and operates under its eligibility rules. He is also eligible for the U.S. Senior Open at Scioto in July and the Senior British Open at Gleneagles. Those three senior majors are the only competitive golf he will see in all of 2026.

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What separates his case from other LIV returnees is that Perez never resigned his PGA Tour membership when he left in mid-2022 to join Dustin Johnson‘s 4Aces team. He assumed that would work in his favor. It did not.

“I thought because I didn’t resign, that would have been better, but it was actually worse,” he said as this decision added an extra layer to his disciplinary process and pushed his return to Tour-sanctioned events back to January 2027.

In 2025, Perez joined the LIV broadcast team after losing his circuit spot, and then spent the season as a broadcaster, and the Tour treated that as promoting an unauthorized event, extending his suspension through August 2026. He was reinstated in January 2026 but cannot compete in PGA Tour-sanctioned events until January 1, 2027.

Notably, the timeline looks very different from that of his peers. Koepka won a major during his LIV years, qualified for the one-time Returning Member Program, and walked straight back in. Reed is targeting a return later in 2026. Perez sits out the entire year across all three Tour circuits, and that gap between outcomes is exactly what keeps the questions coming.

The Tour’s own statement clearly states: “Players who do not qualify for the Returning Member Program can only be reinstated in accordance with the nonmember policy and any applicable disciplinary process.”

Pat Perez did not pick up a club from January through late September 2025, spending the year entirely in the broadcast booth, and only began serious preparation in the fall. He noted that his first Tour event back in 2002 was the Sony Open alongside Ken Tanigawa and Tanigawa is his playing partner again this week in his first senior major.

“I mean, you couldn’t make that up if you had to,” he said.

Nevertheless, Perez isn’t the only former LIV player plotting a senior comeback.

Henrik Stenson eyes similar path back after LIV Golf relegation

Henrik Stenson, who won the Open in 2016 and turned 50 last month, will play in his first Senior PGA Championship this week. Like Pat Perez, he hasn’t played in a competitive game since being demoted from LIV last August. This ended his four-year run with the Majesticks GC team.

Stenson’s route back has fewer disciplinary issues than Perez’s. In November 2025, he paid off his outstanding fines to the DP World Tour, got his card back, and is now able to play in both the Legends Tour and DP World Tour events. This gives him a lot more options for playing in 2026 than Perez has right now.

Stenson is using this year as a test. The Senior PGA, the Barbados Legends event, a US Open qualifier at Walton Heath in May, the Senior US Open, The Open at Royal Birkdale, and the Senior Open are all on his calendar.

“It’s going to be a bit of a hybrid this year for sure,” he said.

The competitive drive remains intact. At last year’s Open at Portrush, Stenson was in contention for a top-10 finish before unforced errors dropped him to T45.

“If you feel like you can get into those positions, you still have belief,” he said. “That doesn’t go away.”