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The PGA Tour began its annual FedEx Cup Championship series this weekend in Memphis. In another two weeks, the golf tour’s season will end in Atlanta with this year’s winner taking home an incredible $18 million.
The money being offered by the PGA Tour has never been better.
Heading into this weekend’s golf tournament, the top money winner (Scottie Scheffler) has pocketed $13 million in earnings this season. In fact, the golfer in the #125 spot on the PGA Tour’s money list (Nick Watney) had won over $1 million with zero wins and just one top ten finish in 2022.
The PGA Tour and its players are quick to remind us that they are not guaranteed a penny every week as only the top half of the field advances to play on Saturday and Sunday to split the prize money. The other 50% of the 144 golfers who begin play on Thursday go home with nothing. The players must pay for their own travel, room, board, caddies, trainers/instructors, and others out of their own pockets. Professional golfers are not employees of the PGA Tour.
Don’t feel too sorry for them, though.
Almost every PGA golfer receives extra money for wearing advertising on their shirts, hats, golf bag or anywhere else they can place a sponsor’s name.
Just 60 years ago, the great Arnold Palmer’s magnetic personality helped to give golfers their first significant boost in tournament prize money.
As televised golf became more popular, professional golfers finally believed they had a chance to earn a decent living playing on the PGA Tour every week rather than remaining as the head golf pro at their local country club.
Golfers like Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Phil Mickelson, and, of course, Tiger Woods have carried the leadership baton to help increase golf’s popularity and television viewership. During the 25-year Tiger Woods era, most PGA Tour golfers are now routinely making more than $1 million per year in earnings.
All was going well for the PGA Tour until Greg Norman’s LIV Golf Tour set sail this spring.
When the upstart LIV Golf Tour started to assemble 48 golfers this spring for their inaugural season, the league offered most new players a guaranteed signing bonus along with dramatically higher purses for fewer golf events per season. Without a “cut” every week, the minimum pay for a last place finish in a LIV Golf event has been $120,000. That’s incredible pay for finishing 48th out of 48 pro golfers.
The PGA Tour’s policy of only paying professional golfers for making the 36-hole cut in its events has been in place for decades. The audacity of having a competing professional golf league offering guaranteed signing bonuses, a 54-hole event, and a $120,000 minimum pay at each event has rankled many within the professional golf world.
Current PGA stars such as Justin Thomas want the exiting LIV golfers to stay away and never return.
He recently said, “I just, to be perfectly honest, I just wish one of them would have the b*lls to say I’m doing this for the money. Like, I personally would gain a lot more respect for that. But it’s just the more the players keep talking and saying that this is for the betterment of the game, the more agitated and irritated I get about it.”
Last week, three golfers who recently signed with LIV Golf petitioned the US Court system to allow them the right to compete in the PGA’s season-ending FedEx Cup. Talor Gooch, Matt Jones, and Hudson Swafford (sounds like a law firm, doesn’t it?) finished the PGA Tour season among the top 125 golfers eligible for the FedEx Cup. They asked a judge to provide a temporary restraining order which would allow them to compete.
They lost.
The judge ruled that the three professional golfers knew exactly what they were doing when they exited the PGA Tour to join the LIV Golf group. The trio could not prove that they were being financially harmed by the PGA Tour’s decision to keep them out of the FedEx Cup field.
Rory McIlroy was pleased with the outcome. He said, “From my vantage point, common sense prevailed, and I thought it was the right decision. Now that that has happened, I think it just lets us focus on the important stuff, which is golf. We can all move forward and not have that sideshow going on for the next few weeks, which is nice.”
On Friday, the PGA Tour threw another log onto the fire. They are effectively taking an eraser out and wiping the LIV refugees’ names out of the PGA record books.
PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan advised his players last week that the tour will remove the suspended/resigned LIV players – a list that includes Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka – from the career money list. He indicated the adjustment was needed to ensure players seeking exemptions for next season, based on their position on the career money list (either through the top 25 or top 50), would not be impacted by the suspended/resigned players.
Riiiight!
It doesn’t take a math major to simply put an asterisk next to any former PGA members who have opted to play on the LIV Golf Tour and exclude them from your count, Mr. Commissioner! That’s pretty weak stuff.
Compounding this week’s drama was the persistent rumor that British Open winner Cameron Smith had or will soon sign a contract with LIV Golf with a signing bonus of around $100 million. For his part, Smith refused to address the matter with the nosey media prior to teeing off in the first FedEx Cup tournament in Memphis this past weekend.
However, Cameron Smith became embroiled in a rules controversy on Sunday morning after finishing the third round just two strokes behind the leaders. After sending his golf ball into a lake on Saturday, Smith took a penalty drop and the ball came to rest along a painted red line signaling the boundary of the water hazard. With a PGA Tour official on the scene, Cam Smith played his next shot and finished his round.
On Sunday morning, the PGA Tour advised Smith that he was being assessed a 2-shot penalty after the round as he was not allowed to play his shot from the red line near the water hazard. The Golf Channel television crew said that the golfer basically shrugged it off and acted as if it the penalty wasn’t a big deal. Cam Smith would finish at -9 and in a tie for 13th place.
On Monday morning, though, Cameron Smith announced that he has withdrawn from the second of the three FedEx Cup events this coming week as a result of a lingering hip injury. After having to deal with a non-stop hounding from the golf media and then enduring the surprise of learning that he had received a retroactive 2-shot penalty, Smith’s decision to get out of the limelight for a week seems both timely and more than a little curious.
The anger is now reaching a boiling point. The battle lines have been drawn for months.
I think the LIV Tour should offer a challenge match to the PGA Tour.
Using the same format as the popular Ryder Cup, the two tours would select 12 golfers and then compete on the golf course for prize money donated by the LIV Tour (as they apparently have no shortage of it).
Half of the prize money would be donated to the favorite charity of each of the 24 golfers in the field. The 50% of the prize money would be split by the winning team. The losers would receive nothing other than reimbursement for the cost of travel, room, and board.
Golf fans would much rather see the players duke it out on the golf course instead of in the media and at the courthouse. Television and golf advertisers should be drooling for such a match-up, too.
Once a winner is crowned, I would hope that the friction between these two rivals might finally start to diminish. Though these two golf tours are definitely competitors, golf fans are quickly tiring of the pettiness on both sides.