A Superficial Fix to PGA Tour's Bigger Problem

“It’s not about money,” the Joker famously said, as he set a warehouse full of it ablaze. “It’s about sending a message.”

So it goes with placing Gotham City in a stranglehold, but so it also goes with maintaining a stranglehold on professional golf. When news leaked that the PGA Tour’s new Player Impact Program would began distributing $40 million annually to its 10 highest-profile stars, everyone understood that the move was aimed principally at stifling the threat of the Premier Golf League.

Considerably less attention, though, has been spent on whether the move is an effective one.

Ever since the PGL began making overtures in early 2020 toward golf’s biggest names, the notion that those stars are underpaid has driven the PGA Tour’s defense of its station as the world’s most powerful pro golf circuit. Ostensibly, the PIP moots the PGL’s attractiveness by identifying the PGA Tour’s most high-profile stars and rewarding them for their fame — and their loyalty.

It’s not about merit, and it’s not about fairness. It’s about making multimillionaires who feel underpaid feel less so. Fix that problem, and fix the threat posed by the PGL — or so the strategy goes, anyway.

But that strategy says more about the PGA Tour’s vulnerability than its invincibility. And that vulnerability isn’t going away.

First of all, the PGA Tour’s marketing might revolve around its most recognizable faces, but its operations don’t: rank-and-file players are what make the Tour’s model work. The PGA Tour has 50 events on its calendar this year, but its biggest stars probably will play 20 or fewer apiece. But the Tour’s model revolves around volume: more events, which means more tee sheets that need filling out with more players. And as stardom on the PGA Tour has become more lucrative, the need for the game’s biggest stars to jam-pack their schedules has diminished — which has made the Tour even more dependent on faces that casual fans don’t recognize. And the PIP does nothing to address that over-reliance.

Arguably, the PGA Tour already accommodates those players by overpaying them relative to their influence (an argument that loses steam once it crosses into the developmental tours, of course). Players consistently toward the bottom of the FedExCup’s top 125 keep their PGA Tour cards from year to year — and continue enjoying winnings disproportionate to their influence — despite not driving new fans to the game. Or so the argument goes.

But that argument overlooks a second vulnerability that the PIP likewise ignores: that its distinction between “needle-movers” and rank-and-file is oversimplified. Just outside golf’s 10 highest-profile players lies a host of recognizable, mostly young talent that will remain no less underpaid than they were before the PIP. Xander Schauffele, Jon Rahm, and Patrick Reed all finished 2019 ranked 12th in the world or better, but none of them would have factored into a PIP payout that year. The PGL could do much worse than starting with names like those.

And arguing that none of those three is a “big enough star” to necessitate bringing them into the PGA Tour’s garrison reflects a failure of imagination: do Schauffele, Rahm, and Reed fail to move the needle because no one cares, or because the PGA Tour markets other players instead? Consider the professional wrestling wars of the late 1990s (I do, multiple times per day): WCW established itself, for a time, as the industry’s leading company by outspending its rival and using that financial power to take its pick of wrestling’s most established stars; by doing so, though, it inadvertently became reliant on aging talent, while freeing up the WWF to lift up newer talent that never would have broken through otherwise. The rest is history.

The point being that, even if the PIP successfully persuades a handful of PGA Tour stars never to give the PGL another thought, it does nothing to retain talent that the PGL still could build a legitimate threat around. And that’s assuming that the PIP definitively rewards the PGA Tour’s 10 most important assets — an assumption that seems tenuous, at best (Phil Mickelson, for whatever Google search results he generates, is the key to no one’s future).

At the end of the day, then, the PIP underscores at least as many of the PGA Tour’s remaining weaknesses as it addresses. The Tour remains over-reliant on aging players, under-rewarding of top young talent, and apparently unclear on how to identify its most important assets. Those are the same vulnerabilities that the PGL always sought to exploit.

The PIP is no firewall. And as the Joker knew, everything burns.

. . .

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