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If we expect players like Lee Westwood and Rory McIlory to attend events such as The Players Championship, it’s about time that the river starts running in both directions.

“I feel like since I've been out on TOUR that this is one of the tournaments that I would like to win the most right along with the majors,” Phil Mickelson said at last week’s TPC Sawgrass when asked whether or not the event had lost any prestige with the absence of Westwood and McIlory.

"Everybody has got their own personal deal, but I just—I disagree with their thought process," he said," Mickelson went on to say.

While most would agree with Mickelson’s stance on the matter, we also have to understand that the world of golf is a much different place today than it was even five years ago.

The top players in the world (six of the top 10 players in the WGRs) are competing against each other at this week’s Volvo World Match Play Championship in Spain.

It’s a very strong event played on a fantastic golf course in a beautiful part of the world.

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So where is Mickelson?

Where is Matt Kuchar?

Where is Dustin Johnson?

Where is Bubba Watson?

Ryan Moore, Jhonattan Vegas, Aaron Baddeley and Y.E. Yang were the only regular PGA Tour members that made the trip over to Spain, with Moore being the only American born player in the field.

The BMW PGA Championship will be held next week at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England. Westwood will be there, McIlroy will be there, Martin Kaymer will be there, Graeme McDowell will be there, Luke Donald will be there, Paul Casey will be there, Ernie Els will be there, etc.

In fact, seven of the top 12 players in the world will be at Wentworth next week.

Yet is anyone expecting the likes of Mickelson, Johnson, Kuchar, Steve Stricker, Nick Watney, etc. to show up?

Although the overall talent pool still runs deeper on the PGA Tour, these big-time European Tour events contain more of the world’s elite players than just about any tournament on the PGA Tour other than the majors and the WGCs. Next week’s BMW PGA Championship will be one of the strongest events played anywhere in the world this year.

Yet, we simply expect these elite European players to travel to America to compete on the PGA Tour while our top American players are unwilling to travel across the pond to take part in events like the Volvo World Match Play Championship or the BMW PGA Championship.

When Tiger Woods was healthy, he would typically attend the Dubai Desert Classic and the Australian Masters. However, this was more of a result of the $3 million appearance fees Woods was given than an underlying desire to travel long distances to compete against the game’s best.

Mickelson has attended the Barclays Singapore Open and the Barclays Scottish Open in the past as well as the 2011 Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship, but Mickelson’s travels were almost solely a result of his association with Barclays and the large appearance fee he was given for attending the Abu Dhabi event.

Most of the top players in the world, PGA Tour and European Tour alike, do attend the WGC-HSBC Champions in Shanghai, but that’s a World Golf Championship event.

At the moment, five of the top six and six of the top 10 players in the world are either European or spend most of their time on the European Tour. This number is likely to rise even further as Woods drops out of the top 10 and aging players such as Stricker continue to fall in the world golf rankings.

So the old adage that talented foreign golfers should want to travel to America to compete against the best no longer holds as much weight as it once did. In fact, if America’s top-tier golfers truly wanted to compete against the best, they’d be in Spain right now for the Volvo World Match Play Championship and they’d be in England next week for the BMW PGA Championship.

So, yes, McIlroy and Westwood should have attended The Players Championship. One would certainly expect two of the top players in the world to want to compete in one of the strongest events of the year.

But, on the other side of the coin, one would also expect players such as Mickelson, Johnson, Kuchar, Stricker, etc. to travel to Europe to attend events that are just as strong as many of the PGA Tour’s top-tier events.

Here in America, we say that we are all for the globalization of golf…just as long as that solely entails international players coming to our shores to compete on the PGA Tour.

Call it patriotism, national pride or even protectionism, but we seem to want the river to continue flowing in one direction and one direction only.

The only problem is that the river has already started flowing in a different direction.

Michael Fitzpatrick is a Senior Writer for Bleacher Report. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes were obtained first-hand or from official interview materials.

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