Two close friends on the professional golf circuit found themselves on opposite sides this week, as one re-signed with LIV Golf and the other slammed the tour, saying it “has the body of a Ferrari but the engine of a Ford”.

In Disney’s The Fox and the Hound, Tod the fox and Copper the hound grow up as inseparable friends, only to reach a point where the world around them decides they’re meant to be enemies. Neither really wants it. Neither is angry. They’re just painfully aware that circumstance has pushed them onto opposite sides.

That same sense of reluctant separation ran through The Chipping Forecast podcast this week, as Eddie Pepperell and Laurie Canter – close friends and DP World Tour contemporaries – found themselves on opposite sides of golf’s civil war.

Canter, who recently re-signed with LIV Golf, joined the podcast to talk openly about his decision and the state of professional golf. But it put him in direct opposition with podcast co-host and DP World Tour stalwart Pepperell – a man who recently said LIV golfers shouldn’t be welcome on the DP World Tour.

Explaining his decision to ignore the PGA Tour card he earned via his performances this year in favor of rejoining LIV, Canter said money and flexibility were key factors:

“Ultimately, without being crude about it, I got a really great offer – great opportunity to go. So when you look at that, and as I see it, hopefully the ability to keep playing the tournaments in Europe that I kind of resonate with, that was the big part of the decision-making process.”

But that didn’t sit well with Pepperell:

“It’s a door that goes only one way,” he argued. “If you go to LIV and take the money, you can still, somehow, at the moment, have access to play in the DP World Tour, but it doesn’t seem to work the other way. So there’s a bit of an imbalance about things at the moment.”

Canter stressed that welcoming LIV players is in the DP World Tour’s best interests:

“I think it would be in the DP World Tour’s interest to get the best fields they could possibly get. Whether I was a member or not, Rory McIlroy, Tommy Fleetwood, Jon Rahm, Tyrrell Hatton – those are the guys that put bums on seats. Bryson DeChambeau… Dustin Johnson playing the Dubai Desert Classic… I’m in that camp. To have the best people playing, that benefits everyone.

“I think a great result for the DP World Tour, if we’re talking about LIV, would be to potentially not just have Jon Rahm come and play a couple of events where he can play, it would be to have Jon Rahm fight Rory McIlroy for the Race to Dubai”

But Pepperell refuses to budge on what he calls the “injustice” of that:

“I just want to pick you up on that, because I do disagree,” he said. “Until there is access that is even remotely equivalent between tours, the DP World Tour cannot afford to just open their doors up to LIV players. Fundamentally, it can’t, because there’s an injustice inherent within that. And I’m not talking about the Jon Rahms and the Bryson DeChambeaus – I’m talking about the Brendan Steeles, the Cameron Tringales, the Kevin Nas. The people who offer little to no value to any field in which they play, with all due respect. You cannot have a situation where the DP World Tour is just opening their doors up to LIV golfers while the same isn’t happening in the other direction.”

Pepperell even suggested a solution that would see DP World Tour players able to play in LIV tournaments:

“A way around this would be for LIV to open up, I think, a minimum of eight spots into each LIV event, and you could build in some mini order of merits throughout the DP World Tour season to give them access.”

Pepperell believes that LIV needs the DP World Tour as much as the DP World Tour needs LIV:

“If we’re seriously going to consider what a DP World Tour-LIV merger would look like, I actually think there isn’t a better time than now for the DP World Tour to explore this. But it doesn’t matter who LIV fills its fields with, it’s not going to succeed as a product. It might have the bodywork of a Ferrari, but it’s got the engine of a Ford, and that isn’t going to change, no matter how many stars you sign, whereas the DP World Tour does have something a bit different.”

Canter seems less optimistic about a merger:

“Regarding the LIV x DP World Tour merger, that’s quite a big word,” he said. “And I think in the context of the relationship and agreement the DP World Tour has with the PGA Tour, I don’t know how that would work in reality. You know, if it’s possible to be giving 10 graduates to the PGA Tour, and then for LIV to have options, or DP World players having options into LIV.

“I don’t disagree fundamentally with a lot of your point around how it might make sense, but the DP World Tour has quite strict criteria about how to get into their tournaments, so the idea that LIV guys could, at will, cruise in and cruise out isn’t right. The guys who’ve got exemption criteria and have standing on the tour to play, I think it’s just maybe protecting their right to play, which, to me, benefits the DP World Tour. Guys like Dustin [Johnson] or Brooks [Koepka], who’ve played a few at the end of the year. Obviously Joh [Rahm], Tyrrell [Hatton], the guys who have exemptions, who are, I would say, commercially relevant and important to to the world of golf. And I think the DP World Tour has those players because they have those exemption criteria, or they were or are still members of the Tour.

“You don’t need to carve out additional spots for players who play on LIV, it’s just, if the opportunity presents itself and they’re exempt to do it, then let them do it.”

Tod and Copper eventually find a fragile balance: they remain friends, even as the world drives them apart. Pepperell and Canter’s friendship isn’t under threat, but the broader conflict in golf is far from resolved. Will the tours find a way to coexist and collaborate, or will they remain locked in a structural divide, with players like Canter caught in the middle? Unlike the film, there’s likely to be no Disney-style happy ending – only the slow, uncertain unfolding of the sport itself.

Watch this space.