The Tour Responds
It's gotten a lot of flak, but I hesitantly have to say ... they did good here.
As detailed here, LIV Golf has put the screws to the PGA Tour, putting the entire tour (and, in some ways, the professional sport) in jeopardy. This week, professional Michelob Ultra drinker Brooks Koepka - who made fun of guys who went to LIV and said he was all about competition - got an offer he couldn’t refuse and signed with LIV. Abraham Ancer, currently ranked 20th in the world, did the same.
It’s gotten harder to laugh at the ‘talent’ on tour when it has Brooks, Abraham, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Louis Oosthuizen, Talor Gooch, Phil Mickelson, and reportedly guys like Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler and others, in addition to the older European and South African golfers. These are real golfers even if they’ve signed up to get paid a lot for what amount to exhibitions.
This week, the PGA Tour announced some massive changes that will unfold in the next year or so. The one that got the most “juice” were a few new international competitions for the top-50 golfers, no-cut events with a $20,000,000 prize bank. (This sounds fairly similar to LIV structure!) In addition, some existing events will have their prize pool inflated to the same amount, which adds a LOT more cash to the Tour.
Some of the most high-profile events on the PGA Tour will have significantly more prize money available to players starting next season, including the Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational, WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and the Memorial Tournament. Those events will go from a total purse of $12 million to $20 million. The Sentry Tournament of Champions will go from $8.2 million to $15 million, the Players Championship will have a purse of $25 million, and the FedEx St. Jude Invitational and BMW Championship will jump to $20 million.
As Commissioner Jay Monahan noted, this isn’t a true disruption to golf.
“I am not naive,” Monahan said. "If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete. The PGA Tour, an American institution, can’t compete with a foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in attempt to buy the game of golf.
“We welcome good, healthy competition. The LIV Saudi golf league is not that,” he said. “It's an irrational threat, one not concerned with the return on investment or true growth of the game.”
Hey, that’s … remarkably well stated!
But the best changes are the ones that folks aren’t talking about so much - instead of giving 125 players a card for the next year (and then adding a ton of exemptions on top of that) the tour will go back to a smaller field - just 75 will retain their card. This means true competition for those additional spots every week, giving players from the Korn Ferry Tour a better chance to get on instead of washouts holding onto exemptions for the most random of reasons.
The schedule for the season will also be much more reasonable - after the Fed Ex Playoffs (which are also more restrictive) there will be those three new events for the top-50, but there won’t be these unnecessary tour events in the fall. The season will have a legitimate off-season. This is good for players AND fans. No Laying Up’s DJ Piehowski has a good Twitter thread about this. A few samples:
In short (ha!) the very best golfers will be rewarded more, and there will still be plenty of opportunities for the other professional golfers to make plenty of starts and earn money.
Guys like Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Xander Schauffele and Max Homa have stated that they are sticking around the PGA Tour, even before this was announced.
The tour IS fractured now - with guys like Brooks who might not really love golf but do love money heading to LIV, and other guys cashing checks for their own reasons. It seems like the PGA Tour is sticking to their guns that these players will NOT be allowed to play in any PGA Tour events, and that’s fine - that’s double dipping, in essence. Majors will still be competitive with the best golfers in the field. These changes seem like they’ll keep some of the very best golfers on the PGA Tour, and let the others reap what they sow.
There is no silver bullet here - and the Euro Tour is still a very big open question (will they merge with the PGA Tour or LIV? Probably has to be one or the other). But for now, it DOES seem - finally - like the Tour has both recognized the threat and done what it can, mostly, to improve its product AND satisfy its best players.
Can they start playing more interesting courses? Eliminate the silly exemptions completely?
Watch this space.