How Old Disparities in
the PGA Tour’s Payouts
Created New Uncertainty
During COVID-19
David Skinns was in Mexico when he first noticed the world was grinding to a halt.
At the El Bosque Mexico Championship, the Korn Ferry Tour’s final international event of the season, the former two-time All-American at Tennessee started seeing people in surgical face masks. The flight home was tense. “But you never really think it’s gonna come that close to home,” Skinns said.
Skinns’ T29 finish in Mexico earned him $4,341. It wound up being his last paycheck for more than three months. Two weeks later, under the grip of a national emergency, the PGA Tour put its own schedule — and that of its developmental tours — on ice. With them went Skinns’ livelihood.
Mark Baldwin noticed it too. A month earlier, during the Panama Championship, his mom had started texting him stories about the virus. When the time came to fly to Mexico, he was apprehensive enough to pack face masks — but didn’t wear them on the way down. After the tournament, though, the mood had changed. He wore a mask the entire flight home. “Every outlet was talking about it — the case counts, and where it was,” said Baldwin, a 15-year veteran of tour golf. “It was a topic of conversation, even among all the players on tour.”
Two weeks after Baldwin’s T7 finish — “I believe it was $19,988, but who’s counting,” he said — the Korn Ferry Tour went into lockdown. The next day, Baldwin became a father. He’d been considering taking a couple of weeks off; but the pandemic turned those plans into a virtual paternity leave. Three months in, Baldwin’s last-minute payday has helped soften the blow of three months without a check. But he’s aware that not everyone on tour went into the worst economic calamity of our lifetimes with a T7.
“I’ve been around and played in a lot of different places,” Baldwin said, “so to have to go three months without income is something that, when you’ve played long enough, you really have to try to plan for, if possible. But when you talk about the transition of going from the Latin Tour or Mackenzie Tour to Korn Ferry — if you’re playing those tours, you’re trying to pinch pennies everywhere you can. You can’t turn a profit playing in those places. So you have to find other ways to pay for your life expenses.”
No one questions the wisdom of the PGA Tour’s decision to wipe out three months of golf on its top tour and the Korn Ferry Tour. But suddenly requiring developmental tour players — without warning — to go months on end without pay is highlighting the tenuous financial environment in which most professional golfers live. Like workers in hospitality, manufacturing, and construction, most developmental tour golfers have always lived from paycheck to paycheck. When the paychecks stop coming, the tenuousness of their financial situations becomes brutally clear.
The consequences do not end at the Korn Ferry Tour, of course. On the PGA Tour’s third-level developmental tours and on mini-tours, many players have spent years scrambling for a chance at golf’s highest level — often for little more than a living wage, if that. Now, with the Mackenzie Tour’s 2020 season cancelled, and the PGA Tour Latinoamérica and PGA Tour China’s seasons postponed indefinitely, those players are out in the cold with even less clarity about the future.
“The hardest part is not knowing,” said Mark Baker, who played the PGA Tour Latinoamérica in 2013 and missed out on Korn Ferry Tour Q-School pre-qualifying by two shots in 2019. “When you have a schedule, even if it’s a loose one — ‘I’m gonna go play this qualifier, and then I’m gonna go play this tournament if I don’t get in’ — even with that, at least you’re still preparing to play in a competitive event. And now, you just don’t know.”
Baker had planned to play Mackenzie Tour Q-School in April. But when the pandemic postponed the event at Baker’s qualifying site, he began caddying on the side to pay bills. Now, with the Mackenzie Tour season cancelled, Baker is left to wonder whether pro golf is part of his future anymore. “You’re probably not thinking it all the way through if you haven’t thought that,” Baker said.
. . .
The shutdown necessitated by the pandemic exacerbated professional golf’s inequities, but it didn’t create them — the PGA Tour did that. Even before COVID-19, the payout structure overseen by the PGA Tour kept the overwhelming majority of its prize money walled off from the overwhelming majority of its golfers.
Total Payouts on PGA Tour Affiliates: 2018-19 Wraparound Season
During the 2018-19 wraparound season, PGA Tour events and the Tour’s North American associated tours — the PGA Tour Champions, the Korn Ferry, the Mackenzie, and the PGA Tour Latinoamérica — paid out nearly $460 million in prize money. But more than 95 percent of that money went to PGA Tour and PGA Tour Champions events. Of that roughly $460 million, PGA Tour Latinoamérica purses paid just $2.75 million, and the Mackenzie Tour in Canada awarded less than $1.9 million in U.S. dollars; in contrast, the smallest purse for a full-field PGA Tour event was the $6 million John Deere Classic. The hauls were smaller only by degree on the PGA Tour Champions, where 17 events featured purses of at least $2 million.
Even on the Korn Ferry Tour, just one step away from golf’s richest league, the disparities are glaring. The Korn Ferry Tour’s 27 events paid out less than $17 million in 2019, and most of its purses were $600,000 or less (in contrast, the PGA Tour’s season-ending Tour Championship doled out $47 million among 30 player). And now that the PGA Tour’s Q-School feeds into the Korn Ferry Tour, nearly every college player in the country is obligated to at least one season of indentured servitude on the Korn Ferry — and the financial consequences that come with it.
For example, in 14 events in 2018, former Georgia Tech All-American Roberto Castro earned just over $172,000; during the same span, Florida State product Hank Lebioda — the 2016 ACC Player of the Year — earned just under $170,000. Both efforts were good enough for promotions to the PGA Tour. In Castro’s second start back on the PGA Tour in October 2018, a T5 finish at the Sanderson Farms Championship earned him more than $167,000 — nearly as much as he’d earned in an entire season on the Korn Ferry Tour. A few months later, Lebioda made out even better at the Zurich Classic, where his T5 was good for just over $190,000.
Smaller though winnings are on the Korn Ferry Tour, they at least provide a living wage; the same is frequently not true of the PGA Tour’s other developmental ranks. On Canada’s Mackenzie Tour, whose 12-event schedule in 2019 lasted four months, only 23 players earned the U.S. equivalent of $20,000. A living wage, by definition, changes depending on where the earner lives; but to live on typical expenses, a single person in suburban Atlanta must earn $28,412 per year — or $9,470 every four months. Only 54 players on the Mackenzie Tour met that threshold in 2019.
In contrast, 52 players entered at least 10 Mackenzie Tour events and still earned less than $12,000 in Canadian dollars (roughly $9,000 in U.S. dollars).
The scene is only slightly more ample on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica, where every player outside the top 50 in 2019 earned less than $18,000. In December 2019, Augusto Nuñez won the tour’s season-ending Shell Championship at Trump National Doral in Florida, for which Nuñez pocketed $31,500 — about $5,000 less than Cameron Champ’s haul the month prior for a T33 finish at the Mayakoba Golf Classic.
The finances of smaller winnings is even more complicated by the cost of players’ expenses. As the size of pro golf’s “pie” shrinks at each level, so too does each player’s slice of that pie — and the amount of that slice that he gets to keep.
“Even for a mini-tour event, five thousand is not a lot of money, when you think about traveling to the event,” Baker explained. “Did I pay airfare? Did I rent a car? Did I stay in a hotel for the week? Maybe I Airbnb’d it, maybe I had host housing. But to simplify it, I would say you could pretty much cut that paycheck in half, or maybe even a little under.”
. . .
There is a common retort to all this: play better. Golf is a meritocracy — so the argument goes — and better play means better pay.
This oversimplified argument overlooks two flaws.
First, golf might be a meritocracy, but the PGA Tour isn’t. By design, the PGA Tour protects its top stars with exclusive paydays and points opportunities that are unavailable even to its own rank and file, artificially inflating stars’ positions in both the Official World Golf Rankings and the FedExCup Standings (which, in turn, determines which players keep their PGA Tour card the following season). And even when PGA Tour players fall outside the ranks of the 125 players guaranteed a Tour card the following season, they are parachuted into the Korn Ferry Tour Finals — where they need only finish in the top 25 of a three-tournaments-long sprint against players who haven’t taken a week off in months; it is pro golf’s equivalent of beginning a marathon at the 25-mile mark. In a pure meritocracy, there are no gilded second chances. But there are on the PGA Tour.
That’s not to say that the PGA Tour’s rank and file receive all its preferences. Of the roughly $324 million in winnings that wound up on the Tour’s 2019 official money list, more than half (just over $181 million) went to the top 50 players; the remaining 45 percent was split among more than 200 other players. The top 20 players alone earned just over $100 million total (about 31 percent of the season’s official money). And that doesn’t count the Tour Championship’s $47 million cash bath for its top 30 points-earners.
There is some undeniable fairness in this, of course: players who play better should get paid better (higher pay for higher finishers is, of course, the whole point of professional golf). But portraying the PGA Tour as a pure meritocracy overlooks a second flaw: that the PGA Tour needs its rank and file at least as much as it needs its top players. The Tour’s top 50 earners accounted for only about a fifth of the Tour’s total starts during the 2018-19 season, and on a tour whose annual schedule has ballooned to nearly 50 events, starts are irreplaceable. They are the fuel on which the entire operation runs. The PGA Tour needs bodies: bodies to pay airfare to Hawaii to sit and wait as alternates for a one-off event, and to round out an opposite-field event in Puerto Rico so that Golf Channel can sell commercials during a World Golf Championships weekend. Without those rank-and-file PGA Tour players filling out its fields, the Tour’s bloated schedule would be impossible to maintain (11 of the 2018-19 money list’s top 50 finishers played fewer than 20 events). The Tour needs stars, of course — but under its current model, it arguably needs its rank and file even more. But it doesn’t compensate them as though it does.
To be sure, there is far less inequity between the PGA Tour’s stars and its rank and file than, say, between the PGA Tour and the Mackenzie Tour; after all, no PGA Tour member has trouble paying his hotel bill. But the Tour’s devaluation of its rank and file is the stepping-off point for its treatment of its developmental tours: if it can do it to card-carrying PGA Tour members, then it can do it to anyone.
. . .
Skinns was in Ocala, Fla., for a mini-tour event when the shutdown came. He didn’t know how long it would last, but he knew his family’s bills wouldn’t wait: two of his young children were in daycare. So he started driving for DoorDash — suddenly a vital service, in a country sheltering in place. But someone had to process the meat for the meals that Skinns delivered, and someone had to cook those meals, and someone had to deliver them. For the employees of slaughterhouses, the cooks working in crowded kitchens, and the drivers picking up food and bringing it into populated areas, exposure risks are significantly higher. And Skinns saw little proof that the restaurants he picked up from were taking safety precautions.
“I didn’t do it for long before I was of the opinion that it wasn’t particularly safe,” Skinns said. So he quit. He and his wife pulled the children out of daycare.
By the time the Korn Ferry Tour resumes play at TPC Sawgrass on June 11, its players will have spent more than three months stretching to make ends meet. Players at the first event back were always going to feel pressure to earn a meaningful check after going so long without a payday. But the moment is even more tense than it seems. Before the shutdown, the Korn Ferry Tour played six events; so for players whose 2020 status expires after eight events, the first two tournaments back from the shutdown represent a fleeting, last chance to improve their standing before the reshuffle. With demand so high for playing opportunities, though, the volume of players stuck on alternate lists will be unusually high. Players who ordinarily would be in will be left out.
The timing couldn’t be worse for anyone who needs a solid performance in the next two events to lock down their position for the reshuffle. Skinns began the season on past champions’ status; now, he’s not sure what will happen.
“Before the shutdown, I knew that would shuffle me into the next few. I don’t know if it’s even going to shuffle me in anymore,” Skinns said.
The events are no less critical for players who make their way into the fields. The Korn Ferry Tour’s revamped schedule is planning for 17 events between June and mid-October, but even that is no certainty: experts predict that COVID-19 infections will continue to spike periodically through the rest of 2020, and large spikes could require tours to shut down again.
“I think that’s part of the calculus here: we have somewhat of an idea of what we’re dealing with, and we’re going to come back, but it’s very likely that the season could be disrupted again,” Baldwin said. “So they’re gonna try to give us playing opportunities in, hopefully, the safest way possible.”
For now, no one is giving up on anything — even Baker, with nowhere certain to play this summer. He knows the odds are against him — even if he plays tour golf in 2020, time is against him in the long run. But that was true before the pandemic, too. If anything, COVID-19 has clarified his choice: for players in their early 20s, they can afford to wait it out — but for older players like Baker, who turns 37 in June, the pandemic might shut down careers, too.
Either way, all Baker can do is wait. The possibility of a paycheck is better than the possibility of none. But Baker is the first to acknowledge that the new reality of pro golf might push him out of the game. He doesn’t rule out laying out for a few years and making another run at tour golf when the virus passes and his financial footing is more stable.
It would be the height of irony if Baker’s best chance of playing his way onto a tour was to stop trying for a year or two. But players like Baker have never been unwilling to pay the price.
“I never think that something’s impossible,” Baker said. “And I think that’s what keeps everybody going — having a big dream. I just love my dream.”
. . .
Addendum: This story excludes a comparison of payouts on the LPGA Tour and its developmental tour, the Symetra Tour, because those tours are overseen by the LPGA — not the PGA Tour. Therefore, a comparison between LPGA tours and the PGA Tour’s arms is not as straightforward as, for example, compensation to the United States men’s and women’s national soccer teams (both of which are governed by the United States Soccer Federation). However, for the sake of completeness, purse payouts in 2019 on the LPGA Tour totaled roughly $68.5 million and just over $4 million on the Symetra Tour.
. . .
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