Golf’s New World Order, Part 7: Pro Golf Is Remixed, Louder … and Fighting for Its Life?
Another crazy week in pro golf's battles brought a new Tiger/Rory business venture, Monday night videogames and more truckloads, boatloads and rope-lengths of cash.
This is the seventh (and so far final) part of this 2022 essay series on the fight for the future of professional golf.
In Part 1, I went through the history of the PGA Tour’s business model, the troubled present, and what the new business of the LIV Tour might look like. Part 2 considered the geopolitical moment, in particular the possible decline of the United States as the dominant global superpower and the aspirations of Saudi Arabia to use its oil riches to rise the international political ladder. Part 3 was all about the practice of sportswashing, which is the label often attached to the Saudis’ strategic investments in golf and other sports. Part 4 considered how a century of developments in psychological science might tell us something of the motivations of the players who have left the established Tours to sign with LIV. In Part 5, in trying to understand what the future of pro golf might be, I widened the lens to look at the history of other sports, most notably cricket, boxing and mixed martial arts. Part 6 fleshed out some of the most fundamental things about the game: why we attend golf events, why we watch on our screens, and why we pick up a club to play in the first place.
In Part 7, I explore some of the more recent developments, most notably the joint PGA Tour-Tiger-Rory announcement of the in August of the TMRW Golf League, or TGL.
It’s been some summer for the pro game.
A little over two months after the first balls were struck in anger at the inaugural LIV Invitational Series event outside London—two months in which there has been plenty more anger, as well as accusation, bitterness and, maybe, behind a few closed doors, some regret too, although in the world of high-stakes corporate poker, regret is the one emotion never allowed out in public—we finally have a couple of big swinging counterpunches that the PGA Tour threatened to swing all along.
Whether the PGA Tour’s punches land a knockout blow on the upstart rivals backed by the alliance (unholy or otherwise) of the steadfastly oppositional former world number 1 Greg Norman, the steadfastly oppositional former US president Donald Trump and the Saudi Arabian state, that remains to be seen.
If you’re new to all this golf’s new world order stuff… well let’s face it, you’re not, are you?
Anyone with even a passing interest in the royal and ancient game of kings and queens has been overexposed to all the politicking and all the torrential downpour of dollar-bills that has dominated the agenda for much of the past two years and all of the past two months. As Rory McIlroy described it earlier this summer, boatloads of cash have been thrown at the feet of any of the top 100 players happy to draw up a wheelbarrow, rake in their share and make the move to a less intense schedule with more intense paydays.
If you’re like most people—or certainly most people on Twitter, which, to be eternally grateful, is not the same thing—it’s likely you have a trenchantly held view about the rights and the wrongs of all the seen and unseen things coming out of the corridors of power in the PGA Tour, its sidekicks in Europe and LIV Golf and their Saudi-filled boats.
[We’ve established that you’re not new to all this, but with thousands of analyses and editorials published around the world these past few weeks and, alas, no more hours in the day for any of us than we had before, there’s still a good chance you might have missed or overlooked the earlier pieces published here last month: a 22,000-word six-part essay on the PGA Tour / LIV ruckus, which looked at several strands of golf’s history, its many possible futures and other random-but-perhaps-relevant stuff like geopolitics, macroeconomics and a century of psychological science.
You’ll find all those six pieces available, starting from here, and you can read them for free, although my 13-year-old daughter always seems to enjoy it when I tell her a bedtime story of the latest subscription payment to arrive from someone somewhere in the world who may have entered their credit card details, CVV number and card verification by mistake. Or maybe it’s actually the case that some people believe these essays are worth paying for, which is eternally gratifying, and at least occasionally, hard to believe. So thank you.]
With that preamble out of the way, let’s turn our attention to this week’s new and significant developments; and also to try to sift through the PR and spin and find our way to something close to the unpolished truth about what’s been happening and why.
Let me first set down some details of just what passed in the flurry of announcements ahead of the PGA Tour-climaxing Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, Georgia this weekend.
Six Key Developments in Another Weird Week for Pro Golf
First, the so-called list of Elevated Events—which received brand-name capitalization in all the documentation, but which will surely at some point receive the blessing of a multi-agency and maybe multi-million-dollar proper branding campaign at some point before long—will increase from 8 to 12 in 2023.
(Bear in mind that before the first LIV event in June, the number of events described as “elevated” was three—the Memorial Tournament, the Genesis Invitational and the Arnold Palmer Invitational—and that the first time these events were so described was in the summer of 2020, when the press releases at the time were keen to stress that they came with increased purses of $9.3 million, a figure which looks positively quaint just two years later.)
These 12 new Elevated Events will include the three original elevated tournaments, the three events in the existing FedExCup series, as well as the WGC-Dell Match Play, the Sentry Tournament of Champions and four additional events as yet unannounced.
And the total prize money on offer for those 12 events in 2023 will be at least $290 million (approximately $20 million for 11 events, and an additional $75 million bonus at the 2023 Tour Championship).
Second, the PIP, or Player Impact Program, has doubled from $50 million to $100 million.
And not only that, but that the change comes in not for 2023 (as the common advance trailer of announcements like this usually goes), but for the 2022 list, which will effectively be complete this weekend, given that the FedExCup will be over and done with and the year’s four Majors are receding rapidly into the rearview mirror.
Not to come over all curmudgeonly, as Peter Alliss might have put it, but it warrants pointing out here that the original PIP, back in the dim and distant past of 2021, was seen by almost everyone who paid it any attention as a simple cash distribution mechanism to the PGA Tour’s star players, serving as an incentive (or as one Sports Illustrated writer called it, a bribe) to keep them loyal to the Tour for the foreseeable future, and that the incentive/bribe was approximately 50 per cent successful: five of PIP’s first top 10 were gone to LIV within six months of receiving the cheques.
Maybe the new cash injection (is it unfair to call it a boatload?) from a $40 million to a $100 million fund will prove enough to keep any wavering but as yet undeparted stars around, or maybe it will be the case that all the players who treat an instant path to intergenerational wealth as the core principle of their career have already left. Either way, time, as it tends to do, will tell.
Third (and staying true to form with the creatively handicapped naming conventions at play), there are now official “Top Players” on the PGA Tour.
Everyone knew there were top players before, but now there are Top Players, defined as anyone who finishes in the top 20 of the Player Impact Program rankings. The trade-off, if that’s not too weird a word to use, for these top players is that they will be committing to playing 15 PGA Tour events: the 12 Elevated Events and three more normie tournaments. Which, in addition to the Players Championship and the four Majors, means all Top Players will, if fit, be playing in 20 tournaments each year.
In effect, what the combination of “Elevated Events” and “Top Players” means is that more than half a century into the life of the PGA Tour, we’ve arrived finally at a point where there is a clearly boundaried top-level pro golf season quite separate from the rest of the “PGA Tour”.
That season becomes 20 tournaments, meaning the rest of the calendar year takes on the role of a sort of second division, full of the grinders and journeymen whose ambitions will range from becoming a Top Player themselves to making sure they stay on Tour and can continue to play in that second division year after year.
And so the hierarchy of the Approved Professional Golf Calendar steadily takes shape.
At the top, the PGA Tour’s Top Players and their 20 tournaments all expected to be worth at least $15 million each in prize money.
Below them are the ~105 others who make up the rest of the PGA Tour.
And maybe in joint third—but crucially, with available pathways up the levels if they, as McIlroy baldly stated, “Play better! You work your ass off, you play better, and if you do that, you will get into these events. And that’s as simple as it is”—come the PGA Tour’s feeder Korn Ferry equivalent and the European/DP World Tour.
That isn’t a complete picture, though.
Outside of this Approved Professional Golf Calendar lies what we might call the global east, currently dominated by Saudi money and LIV series (which officially becomes the LIV Golf League in 2023), but which also firmly includes the Asian Tour, and with Australia and the South Africa-based Sunshine Tour apparently leaning in that direction too.
In this new map of the pro golf world, the Europe-aligned United Arab Emirates becomes a little pocket in the midst of enemy territory—a modern day executive sports West Berlin—while South America could yet emerge as a battleground to be fought over.
Given the depth of its connections to that part of the world, including the PGA TOUR Latinoamerica (an early triumph for the PGA Tour’s Naming Committee for New Initiatives), which quietly celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2022, the PGA Tour is well-positioned to triumph there, but it has been caught cold by its rivals before and it will be interesting to see if something similar happens there. With Carlos Ortiz and Abraham Ancer already gone to LIV, Mexico would appear to have toppled, and it would be surprising if the agents of Joaquin Niemann, Mito Pereira (both Chilean) and Sebastian Munoz (Colombian) are not being steadily courted by LIV negotiators at this moment.
Fourth, greenbacks, dinari, lucre, spondulicks and cold hard cash.
The dollar amounts that accompanied the LIV Golf announcements earlier this year were eye-watering ($25 million on offer for the first seven tournaments, and $50 million for the series-ending finale at Trump National Doral in Miami) and if we’re not yet too cynical, our eyes should be watering again with the dollar amounts accompanying the latest PGA Tour announcements too.
Between the Elevated Events, the confirmation of existing PGA Tour event pures for 2023 and the PIP program, the press release tallied a cool $415 million in US-approved earnings that will be winging its way into the accounts of the world’s top players (not including Dustin Johnson) over the next 12 months or so.
Fifth, we had the “Earnings Assurance Program” and the “Travel Stipend Program”.
Hats off to the Naming Committee, who really have been working overtime this summer. These two initiatives will undoubtedly be most immediately welcome for the journeymen and grinders who make up the bulk of the PGA Tour membership, and certainly more significant than the prospect of the obscenely rich getting obscenely richer.
You might recall, if you delved into those 22,000 words earlier this summer, that Pat Perez, of boozy LIV private jet fame and erstwhile 4Aces team mascot, took in less than $50,000 in tournament earnings as recently as 2016, and you might reasonably assume that the spectre of another year like might have played a big part in his decision to take a reputed eight-figure signing-on fee to join LIV.
If that is the case, then the $500,000 “Earnings Assurance Program”, combined with the “Travel Stipend Program”, might play a significant role in making marginal or endangered Tour pros happier than they’ve been in quite a while.
It’s probably true that few people reading this have ever stood over a 15-foot putt knowing that their job for the next 12 months rested on making it, but those anxieties are never far from the minds of the pros who battle it out to keep or win their Tour card.
With a minimum of $500,000 in earnings assured (basically, the Tour will backfill any shortfall in earnings below that amount, which would have meant Perez receiving a no-strings-attached cheque for more than $450,000 from the Tour six years ago) and $5,000 handed out to everyone who misses a cut as a “travel stipend”, the pain is greatly eased for the Tour’s up-and-comers and been-and-done-its.
Still with me? Good. Because the best weirdest is yet to come.
Sixth, bookending all the official and official-sounding PGA Tour stuff, came arguably the most significant news of all.
First, the announcement at the start of the week that Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods were going into business as the TMRW Group (alongside former Golf Channel President and all-round sports media mover-shaker-kingmaker Mike McCarley), and then on Wednesday, the glam-and-glitzy media event which teased the arrival of a brand new showbiz way to watch golf: the TGL, or TMRW Golf League.
Surely I’m not the only one who felt that the video which accompanied the TGL announcement echoed more than a few of the notes that LIV struck earlier in the summer. Both LIV and TGL promised enhanced fan experiences, tech-enabled innovations and team play. LIV set out “Golf, But Louder”, while TGL put forward “Golf Remixed”.
The one big difference is the way it will be played.
Slated to begin in January 2024, TGL will take place not on the arduous and unsuitably real-world terrain of actual golf courses, but in TV studios filled with lights, technology and (presumably mandated) roaring fans, with each Monday night event bringing six players together, in two teams of three, to play a sort-of video game round of 18 holes in just two hours of primetime television.
If LIV’s 54-hole, no-cut and wackily-named teams was an unforgivable break from the past for golf’s purists, those same purists will find little succour in the latest development, which takes golf another step further away from its origins.
How the PGA Tour Talks About Things
I joke about the lack of imagination in what the PGA Tour and its communications teams get round to calling new initiatives, but this joke masks what might be a real and serious issue.
For all that the cash windfall is sure to send hundreds of millions of additional money into the pockets of top players (and Top Players), as well as benefiting a long list of local charities that routinely partner with each tournament, there is something dry and deadening about the way the PGA Tour talks about things.
“Elevated Events” and “Top Players”, “Earnings Assurance” and “Travel Stipend” programs, all of it is about as exciting as a weekend in Prestatyn.
The cold light of history might in time show us that this week was a key moment in finally and assuredly keeping the LIV threat at bay, once and for all, and there’s little doubt that the volume of behind-the-scenes wheeling, dealing and favour-calling between the Tour and its corporate backers might have impressed even Buffett and Munger.
Maybe, if a promised Netflix series comes to pass, we might yet get to peak behind that curtain and get a sense of how this summer has actually gone down in the corridors of power.
But leave all that, all the money, all the long list of deep-pocketed and loyal—for now—corporate sponsors, all the local charities that partner with PGA Tour events, leave all of it aside, and the thing that really makes pro golf thrive starts and stops with the world’s most appealing golfers playing the world’s most appealing courses.
One of the things most noteworthy in Jay Monahan’s prepared remarks which prefaced his announcement of all those developments listed above was the position of the players in all this.
His carefully prepared and choreographed statement led strongly with community focus, charitable impact and positive change—pointing out five supported charitable initiatives around the Atlanta area (East Lake Foundation, Focused Community Strategies, Grovepark Foundation, Purpose Built Schools Atlanta and First Tee of Metro Atlanta) and noting the $40 million contributed to support racial equity and inclusion efforts by providing new backing to 127 organisations.
Central to that positive change, the thing that makes it happen, is the money that courses through the PGA Tour’s coffers, and Monahan took great care to pay tribute to its sources.
Inside the first 45 seconds, he thanked key partners Coca-Cola, Southern Company and Accenture, and over the next three minutes he would mention Southern Company again (as backers of the Payne Stewart Award recently given to Billy Andrade), take the opportunity to double-underline the contributions of Sentry Insurance (who recently announced the continuation of their backing of the Tournament of Champions to 2035) and pay careful praise to FedEx, the biggest backer of them all going into the weekend of the year where their name is on the lips of golf fans everywhere.
About four minutes into his speech, Jay finally turned the way of the players, the “incredible field of stars on hand this week”, paying tribute individually to Patrick Cantlay (reigning FedExCup champion), Hideki Matsuyama (competing in his 9th consecutive Tour Championship), Rory McIlroy (aiming at becoming the first three-time FedExCup winner), and 2022 three-time PGA Tour winners Sam Burns, Xander Schauffele, Cam Smith and Scottie Scheffler.
Perhaps the grand truth that’s hiding in plain sight is that the players are the red and the yellow, but the corporations are the Lamborghini, the alloy wheels and the engine that purrs behind everything.
Nobody ever wants a slate-grey Lambo, and so it’s the primary job of Jay Monahan and his team to keep the reds and yellows in focus so that the wheels can keep turning underneath.
Even in a week where cameras and pressers were the bulk of the action, the colour, as it always does, came from the players, and the players at the centre of providing it were, as it often is, Tiger and Rory.
The Sad Reality At the Heart of the TGL Initiative
For all the machine gun fire rat-a-tatting from the PGA Tour, news of Rory and Tiger’s TMRW Group, and the announcement of the TGL League as their first project 48 hours later, was without doubt the biggest cannonball fired in the direction of LIV since it became an existential threat to the status quo of professional golf at the beginning of the summer.
If there’s an irony in all this, it’s that Rory and Tiger are no strangers at all to boatloads of cash, and their newest venture will undoubtedly be sending more of that lucre their way—McCarley, answering a question about the prize money on offer in TGL, joked that it might fall “somewhere between a boatload and a truckload”.
Whenever TGL does come around, there might well be something profoundly sad about the sense that this is likely to be the only way we’ll get to witness Tiger swing a club.
In the great man’s performances this year—three tournaments played, including, remarkably, making the cut at both the Masters and the PGA Championship—the hardest thing to watch was not the standard of his play, which is obviously several leagues short of what he could manage in his pomp, but just how hard it was for him to put one foot in front of the other out on the course.
Lesser men would have called it a day at this point, and maybe that is something that Woods’s logical brain might be telling him to do, but within this most complex of superstars there are two factors which will likely keep him trudging on:
on the one hand, the unbreakable spirit which has been the hallmark of both his initial ascent and several subsequent recoveries, and which will not be giving him a pass now,
on the other, the sense that his presence right now, at this most challenging moment in the arc of golf’s 500-year history and 500-year future, is needed so much that he must be a part of it, he must be visible, in whatever shape or form is required.
The shape and form that is emerging—a shape and a form that might well have been constructed precisely to help him remain part of the pro golf scene for the next number of years as the battle for the future of the game plays out—is a Monday night, tech-made and TV-manufactured exhibition game where he no longer has to walk on legs whose walking is done.
It’s not a million miles away from a reality TV show featuring Tom Brady playing catch, or Michael Jordan throwing Arcade Hoops with cameras rolling.
In Billy Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, the character Norma Desmond, a former star of silent movies, says nine immortal words that say more about mortality than anything else:
“I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
One of the most notable things about TGL, when it comes round, might be the sense that we’re witnessing in real time the pictures getting small for the most talented man ever to pick up a club.
In all the developments of this summer—the blank-cheque LIV developments that set the wheel in motion; the PGA Tour turning out their pockets to compete in response; the European/DP World Tour manoeuvring for the best way to lose the least ground; and the need of media moguls everywhere, brought to the brink of extinction by the quicksand of a rapidly changing industry, to create more and more of the “Entertainment Content” they need to mine the attention of ordinary working men and women everywhere (and further squeeze all the quiet moments of deeper meaning from their lives)—in all of this there is a recurring sense that all of us are fighting a battle that none of us are going to win.
Let’s give Norma Desmond, who knew a thing or two about life’s battles, the last word.
Later in that famous “It’s the pictures that got small” scene, she hears that the man who’s ended up in her home after a flat tyre works as a screenwriter.
You are?
Writing words, words, MORE WORDS!
Well, you’ve made a rope of words and strangled this business! There’s a microphone there to catch the last gurgles, and technicolor to photograph the red swollen tongue.
For golf, the rope is made not of words but of what some Brits might call wonga.
Out of those truckloads and boatloads of cash, we might get all the rope-lengths we need to strangle the pro game and leave it gasping for breath, red swollen tongue out for all the world to see.