Give Fans What They Want
As negotiations intensify, the PGA Tour should make it more lucrative for Tiger Woods to play
Now that Jon Rahm has gone LIV and Rory McIlroy is already making a case for him to be his teammate on the 2025 European Ryder Cup team despite his change of allegiance, what does that mean for everybody else? For starters, for Europe, what does it mean for Sergio Garcia and Henrik Stenson and Graeme McDowell and the other blokes who signed with LIV and were essentially put on a banned list, as players or management, for the 2023 team?
And what about on the American side? Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau were all similarly shunned from any role in the 2023 Ryder Cup because of their LIV deals. They all lost sponsorship deals after going LIV. It wasn’t long ago that the choice was binary: You were either an Establishment golfer—a Tiger Woods, a Rory McIlroy, a Scottie Scheffler—or you had gone to the dark side.
But if the PGA Tour, per its own statements, is negotiating some kind of merger with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, is anything binary?
At first, in the aftermath of the hasty June 6 PIF-Tour truce announcement, there was a no-poaching policy: LIV agreed not to recruit any more Tour players while the negotiations continued. Later, a federal court said such a clause was not legal. But if you were a member of Team PIF, and negotiating in good faith, wouldn’t you just abide by that clause no matter what the court said?
We got our answer. They bought Rahm.
If the Saudi bankers had a goal of disrupting golf’s established world order, they were effective. Disruption is a good starting point if you want to take over anything. Professional golf has never been this messy.
Part of golf’s greatness is that the numbers in the boxes on a scorecard are tidy, but the path the golfer takes to those boxes can be utterly chaotic. This global chaos in the pro game is only good for the new kids. The new kids with all the money and all the latest toys.
So now the PGA Tour is looking for investors for its new for-profit business. In addition to the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund, an American supergroup, the Strategic Sports Group, is in the mix. (Same people own the Boston Red Sox.) What the Tour players evidently want is the very thing Dire Straits captured for eternity in one lyric: Money for nothing. It really comes down to just give me money. Padraig Harrington said in June that the players really should be worried about not making less money, not making more. But that is a minority view. Nobody has made a case that this for-profit entity is going to make golf better for the people who ultimately fund it all, ordinary fans. Not Tiger Woods, not Rory McIlroy, not Peter Malnati.
In August 2022, Greg Norman, the LIV Golf CEO, told Tucker Carlson, the Fox news personality, in an interview at Trump Bedminster, that Woods was offered something like $700 million to go LIV. You could understand if Woods is thinking, in the wake of Jon Rahm, that he is missing out on something. I mean, it would just be human nature. Where’s my piece?
Woods, since August a PGA Tour board member, has three key interests he wants and needs to protect. One, his standing as the best player in the history of the PGA Tour. Two, his role as the host of the Genesis Invitational. (That’s huge. As Arnold Palmer had Bay Hill and as Jack Nicklaus has the Memorial, Woods has the old L.A. Open at Riviera.) Three, his own path to professional golf’s new funny money.
Woods will turn 48 on Dec. 30. When Palmer was that age, he and his advisers, including Alastair Johnston and Mark McCormack of IMG, had already made one major strategic move: sell Arnold on the basis of his personality, his standing in the culture at large, and not on his past, or his future, as a golfer. For Woods, that path will be more difficult. For one thing, Palmer loved attention and being out and about. Woods does not. His public life is scripted. Palmer’s was anything but.
I’m just reading tea leaves here, but I don’t see Woods, and the other five player directors on the PGA Tour board, wanting the PIF money if they can find money closer to home. They all have a core belief that the PGA Tour is, at its heart, an American enterprise. Also, for Tiger, there’s the Phil factor: LIV Golf got its start because Mickelson got on board with it. That alone could be a deal-killer for Woods.
What, exactly, any investor is actually investing in is hard to see, although I can see one glaring undervalued asset: senior golf. If there was a short global senior schedule (nine months, nine tournaments), with Woods playing in all the events, against all the various players who tried to beat Woods for years, I think there could be something real there. That might be something you could make significant money from. I say that in part because people tuned in to watch Woods finish 18th in the 20-man Hero field earlier this month.
You’d have to have close-to-full fields (at least 100 players) with a cut in these events. Four-round events. You’d have to have courses on the order of Royal Melbourne, courses they want to play and we want to see. You’d probably want a team component. You’d have to have a real broadcasting partner. You’d have to have big pay days, to draw Tiger in the first place. But the starting point would be actual competition, featuring players ordinary golf fans are already invested in.
Lee Westwood is 50. Ian Poulter is 47. Mickelson, should he decide to accept this mission, would be a spectacular addition. The names are for real: Darren Clarke and Vijay Singh and ageless wonder Bernhard Langer; Ernie Els and Colin Montgomerie and Padraig Harrington. Even Fred. Get them all in, playing courses we’d love to see, and there could be a real thing here. But you would need Tiger. He could jump-start the whole thing, just as Arnold got the senior tour started in the early 1980s.
In all of this discussion over the past two or three years, this has been the most neglected part: What do fans actually care about, and what will they care about? This could be something people would care about. But you have to rethink it. It can’t look like what has already been done.
The thing we know is if Tiger cares, we care. If Tiger plays, we watch. Tiger played golf for money. Of course he did. They all do. But he never talked about it, and we never thought about it. And that made all the difference.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Bamberger@firepitcollective.com