Eamon Lynch – Syndication Server

Lynch: The PGA Tour is right to cut players and fields, but the wrong guys are making that call

The Tour’s longstanding raison d’être — creating playing opportunities for members — is dead.

Pity the PGA Tour’s proletariat, who are now fretting about two votes in November that could jeopardize much of what they feel entitled to. Some of them might even be less wary of a former California prosecutor than they are of a prosecutorial Californian. After all, Kamala Harris doesn’t much care about reshaping the PGA Tour, but Patrick Cantlay sure does.

On Nov. 18, Cantlay and his fellow Policy Board members will vote on an extensive slate of proposals that will have an enormous impact on rank and file Tour members. Potential changes include reducing fields in most regular tournaments from 156 competitors to 144, and in many cases 120; cutting the number of fully exempt players from 125 to 100; slashing by one-third the number of cards earned via the Korn Ferry Tour; and reducing or eliminating Monday qualifiers, which award four spots most weeks.

More: PGA Tour shares potential changes to field sizes, eligibility, pace of play detailed in memo to players

Some players will see an unfair narrowing of pathways to make a living; others will welcome a toughening of competitive standards. Either way, it represents revolutionary change for an organization whose members revere Adam Smith but are accustomed to seeing their workplace run as though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were the commish.

Capitalism for thee, socialism for me!

Unlike most recent innovations — signature events, equity ownership grants, huge growth in prize money — these latest proposals aren’t a counter against LIV Golf but rather a reflection of the PGA Tour’s new for-profit status. After all, who prizes streamlined simplicity more than the private equity investors players took on board 10 months ago?

The Tour’s longstanding raison d’être — creating playing opportunities for members, an objective on which its executives were bonused — is dead. Remaking a complacent product for a competitive market means it’s now about earning opportunities. Every proposal is defensible, if debatable. (Except the elimination of Monday qualifiers; that’s the ultimate meritocracy and ought to be expanded and streamed as additive to the Tour’s weekly narrative.) And while it’s easy to characterize these likely changes as another sop to top stars, the truth is that any reform is unlikely to ever discomfit the Tour’s one percent.

These proposals emerged from the Players Advisory Council, a 16-man committee made up of both superstars and journeymen, and they administer an overdue dose of reality. Players are fond of pointing the finger at HQ when it comes to bloat — not unfairly, it must be said — so there’s irony in the first announced layoffs being players themselves. Whether in the glass-walled offices of Ponte Vedra or the wood-paneled locker rooms on Tour, too many people are paid too much money for too little. More than 600 guys have made starts on Tour this year, and the average inside-the-ropes earnings currently stands at $2,030,418. That’s a lot of money for what is, comparatively speaking, a lot of mediocrity.

Finally, the Tour has reached the stage of making incremental changes to better its product rather than to slake the cash thirst of its stars. There’s a long way to go — not least in delivering a product that focuses more on fans than players — but the fact that proper improvements are imminent doesn’t necessarily mean the right folks are making the decisions.

The Tour has always boasted of being a member-led organization, even when it was only nominally so. Since the backlash to the Framework Agreement with the Saudis and the subsequent governance reforms, players are now absolutely calling the shots. In fact, three Policy Board members who will vote on the recommendations — Peter Malnati, Webb Simpson and Jordan Spieth — are perilously close to finding themselves at the mercy of the unforgiving new dispensation they could usher in.

It won’t happen — not imminently, and probably not at all — but Tour players need to step back and defer to executives on fraught decisions around eligibility. And if they don’t trust executives to weigh the greater good of the business, they ought to find replacements. If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the last few years it’s that golfers will make selfish decisions based on where they are in their careers, so empowering them to determine the ability of colleagues to earn a living won’t end well. Just consider the delicate (and legally perilous) decisions that are looming, not least permitting the return of LIV defectors — the same guys they don’t currently have to beat to win tournaments and FedEx Cup bonuses.

Rank-and-file members squeezed out of opportunities, sponsors paying major league prices for minor-league lineups, tournaments diminished in the schedule abyss between premier events, broadcasters paying for a product they aren’t getting, fans woefully underserved with a commodity that is both diluted and repetitive, employees at headquarters facing the prospect of redundancies — the collateral damage of the ‘git me some’ era is widespread. The only constituency that will emerge unscathed is those whose greed set it all in motion: the elite players.

But even those who will be hurt by the proposed changes largely accept that the Nov. 18 vote — unlike that other one, 13 days earlier — is a foregone conclusion. And necessary. As it has been written, so it shall be done.

Lynch: Forget selling pricey Ryder Cup tickets! The PGA of America would be better off selling the entire event

There’s a way for the PGA of America to more comfortably underwrite operations, fund championships.

Numerous constituencies are irked about ticket prices for the 2025 Ryder Cup, a stout $749 per day that’s equivalent to fees for nine weekend rounds at Bethpage Black, or the beer budget for a couple foursomes of its habitués. The most vocal are golf fans who are feeling gouged or simply priced out, and commentators (at least those not proudly in the tank for the PGA of America), who see pricing wholly at odds with both the municipal ethos of the venue and the ‘grow the game’ mandate of the organizers.

One constituency we haven’t heard from is the players who compete for the U.S., but one assumes that smoke has been billowing from Patrick Cantlay’s overheating calculator as he tallies gate receipts, broadcast rights, hospitality sales and merchandising, while wondering why his sort get only a $200,000 charitable donation in their names. He won’t be the only player looking askance at this controversy. That will pain the PGA of America, which prizes nothing more than being positively reviewed in the locker room.

How organizers arrived at $749 is neither clear nor relevant. They obviously believe the market will support it, and they’ll be proved correct. The Ryder Cup will sell out, but then so did last year’s U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club, when too many tickets went to club members who preferred to sit in suites and rattle their jewelry than to cheer on the rope line. The PGA of America runs on a four-year budget cycle funded by proceeds from domestic Ryder Cups, so the revenue generated at Bethpage is crucial to bridge the organization until Hazeltine in ’29.

Of course, there’s a way for the PGA of America to more comfortably underwrite operations, fund championships and devote greater resources to the education and employment goals of its members: it could sell the Ryder Cup.

Regardless of the fact that the last five Cups have been decidedly short on drama and close finishes, the event will never be more valuable than it is at this moment, when private equity is circling the sport’s biggest assets. There are compelling reasons why the PGA of America should cash in with a sale, beyond no longer having to indulge gripes about ticket prices.

Keegan Bradley of the United States tees off on the 1st hole during the Morning Fourballs of the 2014 Ryder Cup on the PGA Centenary course at the Gleneagles Hotel on September 26, 2014 in Auchterarder, Scotland. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

Given the division and evident erosion of the audience for men’s professional golf, the media rights landscape could be unfavorable when the Ryder Cup broadcast deal expires in 2031. The day could also be near when players make their move — demanding not just payment for participating, but an ownership stake. Why assume their power grab ends with the PGA Tour when other organizations also profit off their work? The argument about representing one’s country will be no governor since players have air cover on that with the Olympics and Presidents Cup. Which points to the most obvious buyer of a Ryder Cup: the players themselves, through the vehicle of PGA Tour Enterprises, the for-profit entity now flush with private investment cash.

The Ryder Cup would surely fetch several billion dollars at sale, which in the hands of an investment team would lavishly endow the PGA of America’s objectives and championships in perpetuity. For a trade association, that is forever money.

Still, there will be internal resistance to selling. Pride and legacy will factor, a desire to retain ownership of two of the sport’s five biggest assets, even if their original counterparts in Europe (the PGA of Great Britain and Ireland) long ago receded to ‘founding partner’ status while cashing a check. But the most daunting hurdle will be the PGA of America’s governance structure, in which its officers—often with parochial concerns—wield tremendous power over the decision-making of a billion-dollar global enterprise.

The benefits that PGA members enjoy at Ryder Cups (like access and hospitality) could be protected in any transaction, but the perks enjoyed by some serving and former officers (like being traveled hither and yon to the Ryder Cup) are another matter, and that group is a powerful bloc within the association. There are a few snouts that won’t easily be dislodged from the trough.

In defending ticket prices to reporter Sean Zak, the Ryder Cup championship director, Bryan Karns, said that his lens is helping the PGA of America’s 30,000 members grow the game on the front lines. That noble mission would be made easier with a substantial endowment generated by a sale rather than being cobbled together every four years, and it wouldn’t be hostage to a volatile market or a pandemic, as happened with the last Cup held in the U.S.

Given the troubled state of men’s golf, a raft of tough decisions awaits whoever takes over as CEO of the PGA of America (Seth Waugh stepped down in June and a successor has not yet been named). How best to future-proof the association’s ability to serve its members and mission will be a high priority. Perhaps the next leader can persuade colleagues that a clear path to safeguarding the next century is to exploit this moment and sell what was built over the last century.

Lynch: The PGA Tour’s best fix for the Presidents Cup? Sell the International team and get out of the way

It would at least end the charade that the Presidents Cup is a global vehicle by actually making it so.

Some storylines recycle through golf’s ecosystem with the dreary predictability of a Patrick Reed lawsuit filing. The now annual Tiger Woods comeback is one, with attendant speculation about whether a man more compromised than, well, a Patrick Reed lawsuit, can actually win again. Rory McIlroy’s yearly tilt at the Masters is too, invariably followed with commentary about pressure and perspective (neither of which is induced by a Patrick Reed lawsuit). Another tried-and-true narrative has been making the rounds again this week: What can be done to salvage the Presidents Cup?

The biennial contest pitting the United States against an International team (drawn from everywhere bar Europe) is often entertaining but seldom competitive. The Internationals’ only win was in 1998. They have now suffered 10 consecutive defeats — culminating in last weekend’s 18 ½ to 11 ½ loss at Royal Montreal. It was a whupping, no matter how many soft-pedalers say things were closer than the scoreline implies.

Debates over how to address the imbalance can be as animated as the actual matches. Suggestions include reducing the number of points contested to accommodate the lack of depth on the International bench (that has already been tried, going from 34 points to 30 in ’15); shortening the duration (from four days to three); changing the format (by making it a co-ed event with top women golfers); and binning it entirely.

One potential change that hasn’t gotten due consideration is this: ownership.

The Presidents Cup belongs to the PGA Tour. It was created in the waning hours of Deane Beman’s tenure as commissioner and first staged under his successor, Tim Finchem, who was eager to mooch whatever revenue he could from the enthusiasm around team golf generated by the Ryder Cup. The Tour decides who captains both teams, who is eligible to play on both teams, and where the competition will take place. Golfers who defected to LIV — like Cameron Smith, Joaquin Niemann and Abraham Ancer — are ineligible, making what was a tough task nigh on impossible for the International team, though to be fair they were waxed with even more impressive line-ups before LIV.

Last year, the ex-player and now board member of PGA Tour Enterprises, Joe Ogilvie, sent his fellow Tour members a letter outlining the impact of accepting private investment, which happened months later. He listed a number of assets the Tour owned and mused on their worth and growth potential. He included the Presidents Cup and mentioned it again in a subsequent appearance on Golf Today. The event, Ogilvie seemed to be suggesting, had unrealized value. Which raises a delicate question: In whose hands?

If the Tour sold half of the Presidents Cup — and accepted having no influence over the International side — then new owners could establish fresh eligibility criteria, select captains, install dedicated management, assign resources, create a P&L and assume decision-making authority, including for overseas media rights and negotiations with venues outside the U.S. In short, do exactly what Europe does with the Ryder Cup.

Would that make things more competitive? It couldn’t hurt. And it would at least end the charade that the Presidents Cup is a global vehicle by actually making it so. Of the last five international venues, two were 30 miles from the U.S. border in Montreal and two more were in Melbourne, Australia — a marvelous city, but not exactly groundbreaking for those trying to evangelize golf around the world.

Perhaps the Strategic Sports Group chaps have run the numbers to arrive at a valuation of the Presidents Cup’s International component, but it’s surely nine figures and with better potential for long-term returns than any nine-figure LIV contract that expires after a few years. So who could buy it?

The most obvious candidate — and least appealing for those concerned with mundanities like human rights — is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. But there are plenty of alternatives who are invested in golf and who preach a gospel of global growth.

One such man, South African billionaire Johann Rupert, is hosting the Dunhill Links Championship in St. Andrews this week. There’s Pawan Munjal, CEO of Hero MotoCorp and a familiar figure to fans through his relationship with Woods. Or Mexican tycoon Ricardo Salinas, who brought a WGC tournament to his homeland. Perhaps Abdullah Al Naboodah, an Emerati investor deeply involved with the DP World Tour, or Korean industrialist Jin Roy Ryu, who underwrote the ’15 Cup in Seoul. Heck, even Chinese-Thai businessman Chanchai Ruayrungruag, a colorful eccentric who purchased Wentworth Golf Club a decade ago and proceeded to oust many of its members. (I once attended an evening at which he elbowed China’s premier opera soprano aside on a Beijing stage so he could sing himself, the sound of which surely had every cat owner within earshot wondering if their pet was being garroted.)

That’s all to say there’s no shortage of astute businessmen who are confessed fanatics about golf and who might see value in an established platform with 30 years of history and a solvent partner in the PGA Tour. Unshackling the International side may be the best move to positively impact the Presidents Cup both as a competition and a commercial property, while simultaneously paying more than lip service to the goal of globalizing the sport in a meaningful manner.

One of those aforementioned golf-crazed billionaires ought to send Jay Monahan a copy of Richard Bach’s bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull and highlight his oft-quoted line: “If you love something, set it free.”

Lynch: Fans don’t love the Presidents Cup, so will they embrace team golf designed to spare Saudi blushes?

If there is an audience hungry for team golf, then LIV would have drawn greater numbers.

It’s a sobering measure of how uncompetitive the Presidents Cup has been that Mark O’Meara — who retired from the game this weekend at the mummified age of 67 — was the second-ranked golfer in the world when the United States suffered its last (and only) defeat in 1998. The last (and only) time that the Internationals managed a tie was in 2003, when the top 20 in the world rankings featured just two men not now on the senior tour: Tiger Woods and Freddie Jacobson, and Freddie receives his AARP card on Thursday, the day on which the 16th Presidents Cup gets underway in Montreal.

There’s a passionate audience for team golf that thrills fans and stress tests competitors. Just not all team golf delivers that. The Ryder and Solheim Cups do, but for multiple reasons, the Presidents Cup has struggled for traction. It’s not the dearth of history — the Solheim Cup is only four years older — but rather an amorphous team identity and a lack of competitiveness.

It’s tough to rally around the Internationals without suggesting an anti-U.S. vibe, a delicate balance made no easier by this year’s “away” match happening less than 30 miles from the New York border. (As the ProV1 flies, Royal Montreal is closer to U.S. captain Jim Furyk’s birthplace in Pennsylvania than to his Canadian counterpart Mike Weir’s hometown in Ontario). And for compelling competition, there must be the possibility that Goliath could lose, and the last time that happened R. Kelly was No. 1 in the Billboard charts and not inmate No. 09627-035 at a Federal Correctional Institution in North Carolina.

Which isn’t to say there’s no effort and pride around the Presidents Cup. Generations of International skippers have had plenty, and Furyk recently took umbrage when my colleague, Adam Schupak, suggested a U.S. loss would be better for the event’s relevance. “Go f—k yourself,” the American leader said in a delightfully unparliamentary rebuke. But Cap’n Jim might be the only resident of Ponte Vedra Beach so strongly opposed to the benefits of defeat.

Jim Furyk of the U.S. Team at the 2017 Presidents Cup at Liberty National Golf Club. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

Next week will go a long way toward determining the future of the Presidents Cup. It’s profitable — the amount varies widely by location — but with every aspect of the PGA Tour’s business under scrutiny by private equity investors, another easy U.S. victory might force a rethink on how to better maximize product value. There are regular calls for the Presidents Cup to become a co-ed event, but it’s hardly outlandish to wonder if it will be repackaged as a bridge between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, should the Department of Justice insist the Saudi circuit not be binned as part of a deal between the Tour and the Public Investment Fund.

It seems likely that team golf will be a component in any definitive agreement with the PIF, whose governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, is apparently convinced that such franchises will become highly valuable. Even if he’s correct — a generous grant — realizing value is years off. Short term, it remains a tough sell, and not just because LIV’s laughably execrable product has poisoned the well when it comes to fan perceptions of team golf not organized around national loyalty.

Any future team platform operated by PGA Tour Enterprises will probably be seeded from TGL, the simulator-based league backed by Woods and Rory McIlroy, even if it involves LIV teams competing too. But like every concept mooted in golf these days, that raises questions with no readily apparent answers. Will consumers who enjoy a biennial U.S.-Europe feast take to being force-fed team events more frequently? Will they embrace simulator golf as tightly packaged entertainment on Tuesday nights in winter? What about on nights when Woods and McIlroy aren’t playing? Will they care enough to invest themselves in team standings week to week?

And, trickiest of all, what will they sacrifice from their normal diet to accommodate team golf?

If team franchises are to gain value, they need a season that extends beyond a few winter weeks indoors in Florida. There has to be a green grass element too. And that’s where team golf collides with the brick wall impacting every aspect of the PGA Tour-PIF negotiations: the schedule.

2024 BMW PGA Championship — Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland interacts with Matteo Manassero of Italy after they both scored an eagle on the fourth hole during day three of the BMW PGA Championship 2024 at Wentworth Club on September 21, 2024, in Virginia Water, England. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

Top golfers won’t work more than 24-26 weeks a year. Earlier this month, McIlroy said he wants to play just 18-20 weeks. For non-LIV guys, that doesn’t leave much time after accounting for majors, the Players Championship, a Ryder Cup, the FedEx Cup playoffs, the signature Tour events and whatever sundry stops guys feel obliged to make on home circuits. The only way team golf doesn’t come at the expense of something else on the calendar is if it’s bolted on to existing tournaments — for example, Tuesday afternoon matches at the Memorial or the Travelers Championship. Even that solution demands those sponsors be willing to share their week and leaves open the question of scheduling playoffs or a team grand finale.

All of these unknowns exist against a backdrop of fan apathy. If there is an audience hungry for team golf, then LIV would have drawn greater numbers, even allowing for the garish theatrics and players who’d struggle to win a popularity contest if it was staged at Smith College and the only other candidate was J.D. Vance.

The best scenario we can hope for is a team product emerging that engages fans and taps into the passion we see around Ryder and Solheim Cups. The second best scenario is that if team golf fails, it should fail quickly. Because at this juncture, it seems more like an off-ramp being built to save Al-Rumayyan’s blushes and less like the gleaming new highway he imagines it to be.

Lynch: A PGA Tour-Saudi deal is closer, but opportunists will have time to take advantage while real fans wait

Even if deal terms emerge in the coming weeks, a long and bumpy road lies ahead.

“There are four types of men in the world: lovers, opportunists, lookers-on and imbeciles,” wrote the 19th-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine. “The happiest are the imbeciles.” All are well represented in the chaos prevailing in men’s professional golf.

The imbeciles — usually more irate than happy — can be found in the drool-speckled ranks of LIV Golf’s social media trolls, but not exclusively. How else to explain a decision to hold the most recent meeting between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund in New York City on September 11? PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan wasn’t present, and so didn’t face the fraught question of whether to attend the 9/11 memorial ceremony that his government contributed so much to bringing about.

What of the lovers, opportunists and lookers-on?

The latter is the largest group, the PGA Tour’s journeymen, veterans and staff who aren’t deemed important enough to be updated on matters that will greatly impact their working lives. (There’s arguably a subcategory of lookers-away, former fans who are disengaging from golf, due at least in part to the division and diluted product.) Opportunists, meanwhile, are laboring to exhaustion.

Strategic Sports Group has been opportunistic — not in the pejorative sense — by investing $1.5 billion in a sport that is under-leveraged. The Saudis too, by identifying what makes golf penetrable for sportswashing: players who don’t have contracts but do have a delusional notion of their market worth. The DP World Tour can also be included. It benefitted from a lucrative alliance when the PGA Tour needed to scope the rising Saudi tide, and now does little to quash speculation that it might be an alternative for the PIF if a deal isn’t reached with the Americans. And of course, Greg Norman, who finally roped a dope willing to finance his grievances, and whose insistence that LIV is thriving has as much credibility as tales of canine suppers in Springfield, Ohio.

But none have been more opportunistic than PGA Tour golfers. They’ve secured previously unimaginable pay for working in an underperforming product, grabbed control in a governance shakeup amid the aftershocks of the Framework Agreement, and are playing power games by creating their own marketing events, safe in the knowledge that the Tour lacks the leverage over members that it enjoyed during the imperial commissariat of Tim Finchem.

The game is ripe with the stench of every man for himself.

So what of the lovers? That’s you, golf fans. And right now, the thing you love is making it awfully tough to maintain your affection, even for those who aren’t overly troubled by the prospect of Saudi investment being mainstreamed. How long before a new normal is established and the political and economic narratives diminish in this sport?

Talk to enough people familiar with the state of negotiations between the PGA Tour and the PIF and it’s clear progress is happening, but uncertainty remains. Not least the timeframe governing a Department of Justice review of any agreement. Assuming that the presidential election doesn’t lead to a stubby Cheeto thumb being placed on the scale, that process could take more than a year. In hopes of hastening it, the Tour has constantly updated Justice officials on what they’re considering and addressed any concerns raised. But it’s unclear if the parties could seek some manner of preliminary green light from the DOJ in advance of an announcement, nor even how detailed deal terms must be to pass muster. Two things can be assured: players will not go backward on what they’re earning and LIV will be repackaged rather than retired, since regulators would likely see the alternatives as anticompetitive.

Despite Rory McIlroy’s public suggestion that the onus is on PGA Tour officials to get moving, it’s the PIF that will most impact whether a deal is realized. A Justice Department review will almost certainly involve requests for discovery materials similar to those the Saudis refused to submit during antitrust litigation, and which they’ve declined to hand over to a U.S. Senate committee for a year. Sources close to the negotiations say there’s clear intent by the PIF to avoid establishing a transparency precedent that might shine a light on its other investments in the U.S., known and stealth. So what level of compliance will prove sufficient for the U.S. government? It won’t get 100 percent, but how far shy of that will it settle for?

Which is to say that even if deal terms emerge in the coming weeks — not implausible, based on people I’ve talked to — a long and bumpy road lies ahead. Which promises to leave lovers waiting, imbeciles slabbering and lookers-on idling, all while giving opportunists more time to better angle themselves to the trough.

Lynch: Jay Monahan won’t talk about a Saudi deal, but one comment showed how things have shifted in his favor

Jay Monahan’s groundhog days lack lobster, piña coladas and escapades worthy of frisky marine mammals.

ATLANTA — ”I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters,” Bill Murray rants about the repetitiveness of his existence in the movie “Groundhog Day.” “That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?”

Jay Monahan’s groundhog days also lack lobster, piña coladas and escapades worthy of frisky marine mammals. Instead, his involve press conferences in which he repeatedly declines to answer questions about the one subject folks wish to hear from him on: the state of negotiations with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. Wednesday brought another of those at East Lake Golf Club during the commissioner’s press briefing at the Tour Championship, the transcript of which will show considerable overlap with his last one, at the Players Championship in March, and with his appearance here last year. That Monahan has actually offered more detail on the talks than his PIF counterpart, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, counts for naught since MBS’s bag man doesn’t make himself available for questions and is held to different standards in many matters, not least transparency and accountability.

There were several topics Monahan was eager to discuss — his themes were “engagement, momentum and innovation” — but the focus was, predictably, on what he didn’t say. Or more accurately, what he wouldn’t say.

“As it relates to any details of the conversations that we’re having with the Public Investment Fund, I’m not going to disclose details. I’m not going to get into specifics.”

“I’m not going to negotiate details in public or disclose details or specifics. All I can say is that conversations continue, and they’re productive.”

“When you get into productive conversations, that enhances the likelihood of positive outcomes, and that enhances the spirit of those very conversations. I think that’s where things stand.”

The fact that Monahan won’t talk doesn’t mean there isn’t something to talk about. There’s a difference between being evasive and simply not being expansive. Sources familiar with the current state of the PIF discussions suggest there’s occasional activity but that any particulars are being laboriously lawyered. It’s also apparent that Monahan concerns himself with just one constituency: the Tour’s Policy Board, or more specifically, the player-directors on that body. He knows that unilateral decisions are beyond his remit as commissioner thanks to the trilateral commission that created the controversial Framework Agreement. He’s clearly uninterested in the two precincts most vocal about wanting to see action on a deal: golf media (thirsty for new material), and LIV players (desperate to be insulated from the consequences of their decisions).

That Monahan isn’t hearing a clamor for progress from his own members indicates how the balance of power has subtly shifted in the Tour’s favor.

Conventional wisdom has long held that a delay in reaching a deal is disadvantageous to the Tour, that time allows LIV more opportunity to poach players, that time bleeds out the Tour’s product, that time amplifies discontent among fans, sponsors and partners.

But one comment that passed largely unnoticed in Monahan’s prepared remarks hinted at a shifting reality. “We now have the structure and the resources we need to define the future of professional golf on our terms and the significant support of a world-class group of investors,” he said, referring to Strategic Sports Group, which injected $1.5 billion into the Tour in January.

Humorist Will Rogers once described diplomacy as the art of saying “nice doggie” until you find a rock. In SSG, Monahan found his rock. It provided him something the Tour didn’t have a year ago: $1.5 billion worth of options.

To be sure, there are weeks when the PGA Tour’s product struggles to breathe, but by comparison, LIV’s is in hospice care. It has an audience that could be comfortably accommodated in one of East Lake’s hospitality suites (as long as there’s wifi for online trolling), zero market traction, expensive contract renewals looming, all while being hostage to capricious internal politics in Riyadh. Monahan can be forgiven for thinking his hand is strengthened as time passes.

Only when a PIF deal is announced does the clock start ticking on the inevitable and time-consuming Department of Justice review as to whether it’s anti-competitive. Monahan must know that the DOJ will almost certainly demand PIF turn over the same discovery materials it refused to submit during the original antitrust litigation against the PGA Tour, and which it won’t give to a U.S. Senate subcommittee. Why would the Tour break into a sprint when running a marathon in which its only competitor has more hurdles and potholes to navigate?

For all the times he chose to remain circumspect today on the prospects of a deal, Monahan gamely tried to lay out a vision for the Tour’s future. There’s a plan to address fan frustrations (though it’s not readily apparent how he can or will ameliorate broadcaster angst over ratings slumps). It remains to be seen what improvements or innovations his “Fan Forward” strategy will actually deliver, but its existence at least signals awareness that the Tour’s most pissed-off constituency is being heard, something Monahan promised to address back in March.

“We’re moving forward at speed and focused on what we can control, because that’s what we owe to our fans,” the commish said.

He didn’t announce $1.5 billion worth of innovation though, which raises intriguing questions about the Tour’s future ambitions or acquisitions with its nest egg. That too would be a sensitive subject, and questions he probably plans to leave unanswered at his next “State of the Tour” press conference, seven months from now.

Lynch: The FedEx Cup playoffs aren’t really playoffs — but one last tweak could turn things into must-see TV

The PGA Tour wants win-or-die suspense without actually subjecting players to a win-or-die system.

When an underwhelming product is extensively modified (say, for example, Greg Norman’s Irish golf course, Doonbeg) or even entirely discarded (like, say, Greg Norman’s Stonehaven design in Scottsdale or Greg Norman’s Great White course in Florida or Greg Norman’s Experience at Koele in Hawaii), the ultimate goal is something better.

But can that be said of the FedEx Cup playoffs system, which has been tweaked so frequently since its 2007 inception? It depends on what you believe the intent of the FedEx Cup is, and what you believe may not be aligned with what the mandarins at PGA Tour headquarters think.

Every change to the playoffs formula — how many guys can qualify, the number of events, how points are accumulated and weighted, the staggered scoring — all share one objective: to tether the postseason more snugly to the results of the regular season. In effect, to serve a function antithetical to that of playoffs in other major sports. The result of such manipulation is that golf’s playoffs are not actually playoffs. Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter said that good teams make the playoffs but hot teams win them. Regular season heroics guarantee zilch in the postseason, beyond perhaps a home-field advantage, but nothing material to a contest. The PGA Tour, however, wants the marketing punch of promoting playoffs — which conjure a win-or-die suspense — without actually subjecting its players to a win-or-die system.

Playoffs are about volatility and shock upsets. Ask the ’08 Patriots or the ’23 Bruins. By comparison, the paternalistic PGA Tour has spent almost two decades trying to offset those essential elements and attempting to engineer outcomes that mirror the results of the regular season. Points accumulated through the Wyndham Championship, the last stop before the playoffs, are carried all the way through to the grand finale at the Tour Championship and used to determine how many strokes under par a player will begin (Scottie Scheffler, No. 1 in points, will begin next week’s tournament 10-under-par). The Tour wants its FedEx Cup champion to be someone who performed consistently well all year, not someone who got hot for a couple weeks in August, so rolling regular season points into the playoffs helps stack the deck toward that outcome.

2024 FedEx St. Jude Championship — Hideki Matsuyama raises the FedEx Cup TPC Championship trophy to the crowd during the final round of the FedEx St. Jude Championship golf tournament at TPC Southwind. Mandatory Credit: Steve Roberts-USA TODAY Sports

Quibbles about the FedEx Cup are a matter of nomenclature. If it’s a season-long race (as the Tour admits), then stop promoting it as playoffs. If the aspiration is actual playoffs, then whatever happened before the first shot of the post-season shouldn’t matter. But there is a way to bridge this divide and produce genuinely exciting playoffs in golf. I offer it here to Commissioner Monahan at no cost beyond the usual retainer he sends, according to LIV’s conspiratorial gobshites.

The FedEx St. Jude Championship should remain as it is and where it is. Sure, Memphis in August makes Tour pros sweat more than seeing their wives scrolling through their text messages, but it’s where FedEx is headquartered and a little swamp ass is a small price to pay when the company is delivering such a huge sponsorship. Keep it as 70 players starting and only 50 moving on to the BMW Championship. Heck, as a sop to the importance of the regular season, let points continue to determine who those 50 guys are.

But end the utility of points there and truly shake things up.

Instead of 30 guys continuing on to the Tour Championship at East Lake in Atlanta, just 16 make it, and a head-to-head match-play bracket determines the $25 million first prize. The top four in points after the FedEx St. Jude Championship are exempt directly into the seeded bracket at East Lake, though still required to play all three postseason events. That’s their entire earned advantage for an outstanding regular season. To grant anything more amounts to placing thumbs on the scale. In any event, pre-playoffs results are already generously rewarded. Scheffler just took home $8 million from the Comcast Business Tour Top 10 for that very thing.

The 12 men needed to fill out the bracket for the match-play showdown would be determined not by a weighted and dated points formula but by the BMW Championship leaderboard, and if multi-man sudden death is needed to settle the last place, all the better. And since the BMW is the most mobile of the playoff events — it hasn’t been held at the same venue in consecutive years since 2011 — it ought to be moved out west, forcing broadcasters to air it in prime time in the east. Build audience interest in what’s at stake, and in what comes the following week.

Trauma from the WGC-Match Play era lingers at Tour HQ for good reason, having seen more than a handful of finals featuring worthy but thoroughly unengaging competitors. The prospects of that happening are reduced in a 16-man field versus 64, but if they’re playing for $25 million then the FedEx Cup itself takes center stage, regardless of star power. And most of us would watch a chop from the local muni play if 25 large is on the line. Match play would also eliminate the online mockery about gross and net divisions in the Tour Championship, which has plagued the event since the staggered starting scores were introduced in 2019.

There’s a way to value season-long accomplishments while guaranteeing the capriciousness and surprises that sports fans expect from their playoffs. It just requires the stomach for one more round of changes to the system.

There you go, Commish. You’re welcome. Just send the check to the usual offshore account.

Lynch: The Tour can honor Chi Chi and show star players that making golf richer doesn’t just mean their bank accounts

The attitude embodied by Chi Chi has fallen by the wayside

Quibbling about awards invariably centers on who receives them and who deserves them, since they are often not the same people. (See: Kissinger, Henry and the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Golf loves nothing more than touting its values, real and imagined, so every organization in the sport contributes to a healthy disbursement of baubles. Most are bestowed on great players for their accomplishments, and in many cases are named for those folks.

Ben Hogan, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Bob Jones, Harry Vardon, Glenna Collett-Vare, and Louise Suggs all have awards named after them, some more than one. The slew of annual prizes handed out by the PGA Tour mostly acknowledge achievements inside the ropes that are readily supportable by metrics, like scoring averages and cash pocketed. Only one of the Tour’s accolades, the Payne Stewart Award, speaks to what the recipient does after scorecards are signed and the cameras are turned off. Elsewhere in the golf industry, two awards — those named for Bob Jones and Old Tom Morris — also nod to the manner in which honorees have conducted themselves and the imprint they’ve made.

The name of Juan “Chi Chi” Rodriguez is on the latter two trophies as a legatee, but no prize is presented in his honor. That’s because his career record doesn’t belong on the plane of Palmer and Nicklaus. Eight PGA Tour wins and 22 on the senior circuit made him an occasional scene-stealing cameo actor among superstars. Yet he’s in the World Golf Hall of Fame, which hints at a deeper impact not easily summarized via a list of tournament successes. His passing on August 8 at the age of 88 is an opportunity not only to reconsider how to best honor the life of Rodriguez, but to reassess what traits the game ought to highlight and encourage among current and future generations of players.

When sports legends die, it often serves to illustrate how much has changed since their prime. Usually for the better, but sometimes not. So it is with Chi Chi. We see anew how the senior tour became corporatized beyond recognition, even in its rebranding as the PGA Tour Champions. Rodriguez was unceremoniously shown the door a couple decades ago when his scores were thought too undignified. That was the moment when the Tour ceased to view itself as an entertainment product built on exhibiting aged stars and more like an annuity opportunity for journeymen who didn’t play for as much cash in their earning years. The identity of the circuit left about the same time as Chi Chi.

More: Social media responds to the death of Chi Chi Rodriguez with love, affection and great tales

We’re also reminded of what a character Rodriguez was — engaging, funny, outspoken, performative, exasperating, preachy, and undeniably swaggy. Sixty-plus years ago he stood out among the army of vanilla clones that have always overpopulated professional golf. He would do so even more today.

More than anything, Chi Chi’s passing evokes an era when salesmanship was a required skill set on the PGA Tour, at least for those who wanted to make some coin. Players had to market themselves and their collective product, to give something in return to sponsors, spectators and fans at home. Their job wasn’t just to show up and cash a check, with little more than a cursory nod to the constituents who make that possible. Sure, toreador dancing while brandishing his putter as a sword and placing his fedora hat over the hole were affectations, but still evidence of an effort made.

Almost 20 years ago, I went to meet Rodriguez at his home in Puerto Rico. He was wounded still about being shoved to the sidelines in the Tim Finchem era, but was also warm and gregarious, reflective about past misjudgments. Most of all, he was appreciative of what golf had given him, and even moreso about what he’d been able to give back. The game could use a lot more of that sentiment these days.

Which is why the PGA Tour should add another award to its annual prize-giving: The Chi Chi Rodriguez Medal. Every player would be eligible because every player can meet the requirements — of giving something back to fans, of going the extra mile to engage and entertain those who pay for the product, of offering more than thin smiles and banalities about taking one shot at a time. As we move toward an era when the Tour’s business will require more of its members, it’s a way to drive home that signing a few hats and posing for selfies is the bare minimum they can give of themselves.

Even the most devoted Tour propagandists might struggle to think of more than a couple of viable candidates for such an award, which only highlights the need for it. The attitude embodied by Chi Chi — that players’ obligations extend beyond their bank accounts — has fallen by the wayside in this era of irrational market values. Making the game richer isn’t solely about cash, nor is it a responsibility just for sponsors or the Saudis. It’s on players too. It’s not an easy metric to measure, but we knew it when we saw it with Chi Chi. And we know that we’re not seeing it much now.

Lynch: Only in golf is the Olympics a welcome respite from greedy business as usual

In Paris, there will be no talk of prize money or FedEx Cup points or any other commoditized metric.

To whatever extent the Olympics ever truly embodied noble values like sporting excellence and international unity, it has long since been overtaken by more obvious priorities among its constituent parties — commercialism, geopolitics and cheating, to single out just a few. Thus, for cynical sports fans, targets don’t come any softer than IOC luminaries in Lausanne.

Golf fans too have reason for ambivalence. In most sports, an Olympic gold medal is the pinnacle of achievement. In golf — being included for a third consecutive Olympiad — gold represents the sport’s fifth biggest prize, at best, and perhaps only the seventh. Most male competitors place greater value on major championships, and even the Players. Plenty would prefer a FedEx Cup, the game’s most lucrative title. That prioritization won’t change while fields are comprised of professionals rather than amateurs.

Eight years on from Rio, Olympic medals remain an ill-defined currency for golfers. Xander Schauffele is justifiably proud of his Tokyo gold, but it was cited as his peak accomplishment only because he didn’t own the pair of majors he collected this summer. Yet much has changed since the XXXII Games in Japan, and perhaps fans will now better appreciate the rarest thing in our sport: a title that isn’t defined by its monetary value.

Some of the most enthralling action in Paris has featured athletes well-compensated in their sports but for whom a podium finish has genuine meaning. Witness the last stand of Andy Murray and the potential farewell of Rafael Nadal. Presumably, a few golfers are competing grudgingly, not particularly animated by an unpaid week of work during an already long season, but wary of being perceived as disloyal to their flags. Most are embracing the moment though.

More: USA Today’s 2024 Olympics hub | How to watch | Full men’s field | Full women’s field

“It makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger than just golf,” said Ludvig Aberg. Nicolai Højgaard confessed to goosebumps from wearing national colors and imagining a medal. Even Rory McIlroy, once a doubter, has become a believer. In 2021, he lost a seven-man playoff for the bronze medal and remarked afterward that he’d never tried so hard to finish third. One man even tried to litigate his place at Le Golf National. Joost Luiten qualified but the Dutch Olympic committee decided not to send him (the same body didn’t prevent a convicted child rapist from competing under its flag). Luiten won his case but his spot had already been given away so he was placed on the alternate list. He didn’t start the men’s event on Thursday.

Anyone who watched Shane Lowry’s glee as Ireland’s flag-bearer understood what the Olympics means to him. After the opening ceremony, he flew to Dublin to attend the All-Ireland Gaelic football final. Lowry is a devoted fan of the sport, and his father was part of the national title-winning team in 1982. This year’s final pitted counties Galway and Armagh, the latter from whence I sprang. Friends and family crossed oceans to attend. I didn’t watch, but driving around the county in recent days one can’t avoid the undiluted passion. Bunting was draped on most buildings. Flags fluttered from most moving cars. Sheep were dyed. As feverish fandom goes, it rivals South American soccer.

Gaelic footballers have one thing in common with Olympians: neither are paid. Many athletes in Paris earn the other 40-odd weeks of the year, but not Irish footballers. Guys become national heroes on the weekend and return to work Monday as teachers and electricians. Their rewards — pride in community, love for the sport, being stood a drink in every pub in the county for eternity — must seem awfully quaint to anyone familiar with the prevailing sentiments in men’s professional golf, where so many conversations are focused on compensation and entitlement.

In one respect — the 72-hole stroke play format — Olympic golf is too similar to the norm. In another, it’s a welcome respite. In Paris, there will be no talk of prize money or FedEx Cup points or any other commoditized metric that can make golf feel less like a passion and more like a product. So many of the things that turn off fans are missing, though Greg Norman is wandering the boulevards taking selfies and blathering about LIV because … well, Greg Norman. (If only the IOC had the humor to award him an honorary silver medal).

Perhaps an Olympic gold won’t ever be the equal of a major championship for most competitors, but the presence of golf in the Games is only a positive. In many nations, a sport having Olympic status impacts government development funding. So if folks want to talk about growing the game — and mean it as more than a convenient platitude — this is a decent place to try, even if the significance won’t be measurable for years. That’s a reality elite female golfers grasped long before their male counterparts. These two weeks in Paris are about what the world’s best golfers can contribute, not about what they will receive.

Lynch: The Open exposes the risk in building golf around superstars who don’t show up

Depth equals strength, not dilution.

TROON, Scotland — It’s been almost 40 years since the debut of the musical “Chess,” and while it was ostensibly about, well, chess, and set mostly in Thailand, one lyric has currency at the 152nd Open on the dilapidated west coast of Scotland.

One night in Bangkok makes the hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble

This might be the only time you’ll ever see Troon cross-referenced with Bangkok, but this week has been a pointed reminder of how capricious and cruel elite-level professional golf can be. Many players who arrived at Royal Troon in form have already departed, while some long thought washed up are still working. The young and studly are licking their wounds, the old and infirm are applying heating pads to loosen up for their weekend tee times.

Because links golf is seldom played, and the weather is more impactful than at any other major, it’s easy to write off results in golf’s oldest championship as anomalies, blips not reflective of the norm, a self-contained sideshow that lacks real meaning for the broader game. Players can have that luxury of compartmentalizing — and probably need it — but the decision-makers currently shaping the future of the game don’t, and they ought to be paying attention to what’s happening 4,000 miles east of Ponte Vedra Beach (and 3,000 east of Fenway).

British Open: Leaderboard | Photos | How to watch

Because this Open is testament to the danger of constructing a product that’s rigged in favor of a small cohort of star players who then don’t actually deliver on the promise that’s been sold.

That’s the essence of sport, of course. Buying a ticket to a Lakers game doesn’t guarantee a fan will see LeBron James in full flight, nor even at all. But the odds are good that when the result is final, the star will be center stage. By comparison, golf is predictable only in its unpredictability.

A few things can be wagered on with certainty. Like Scottie Scheffler being in the mix, or Shane Lowry’s performance improving as the weather deteriorates, or John Daly missing the weekend (or going AWOL earlier in many cases). But the Open has showcased ample stories that seemed so improbable as the week began.

Take Daniel Brown, a little-known English professional whose 61st place finish at last week’s Genesis Scottish Open was his only made cut in more than four months. On Saturday, he played in the final group of a major — his first-ever major. Yet he showed up on Sky Sports’ set five hours before his tee time — evidence of a willingness to contribute, a lack of entitlement or a need to market himself, depending on your disposition. His countryman, Matt Wallace, missed the cut last week and during an emotional interview seemed about as low as a golfer can get. But he’s still here, and still working.

Matteo Manassero, the former child prodigy of European golf, who fell into an abyss that included stops on the Alps mini-tour, only to earn his way back to his first Open in a decade, is still just 31 years old. “Things also can turn around quickly,” the Italian said after making his first major cut since the 2016 U.S. Open.

2024 British Open — Ludvig Aberg reacts on the 18th green during day two of The 152nd Open Championship at Royal Troon. The World No. 4 missed the cut. (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

Darren Clarke also hasn’t made a major cut since ’16, the last time the Open was at Royal Troon. But as Northern Ireland’s most celebrated golfer flew to Portugal for a vacation after missing the cut, Rory McIlroy’s former mentor is chugging along in his 32nd appearance. Clarke loves this event, but the 2011 champion confessed on Friday evening that 2025 might be his last, tempted to sign off at Royal Portrush, close to where he grew up.

“I know I’ve earned my spot in the field until I’m 60,” he said, “but I’d hate to think that I was stopping some 19 or 20-year-old lad from living his dream.”

Nor is Clarke the only regular from the geriatric circuit who survived the carnage of Troon. When Alex Cejka last appeared on the first page of a major leaderboard, George W. Bush still had two years left in the White House, while Padraig Harrington’s irrepressible love of the game keeps him working when most of his contemporaries left for the broadcast booth or the bar.

The walk-on actors are delivering their lines in this production. What of the leading men?

Ten of the top 20 players in the Official World Golf Ranking are gone, blown off course and out of town by the challenging conditions. Major winners, runners-up and contenders dispatched without ceremony, including DeChambeau. McIlroy. Aberg, Hovland and Woods. The PGA Tour could have filled a charter jet Friday night from the ranks of winners this season who are surplus to requirements in Scotland.

That potential passenger manifest ought to be read carefully by Jay Monahan and SSG group’s John Henry, who are ultimately responsible for shaping and financing the Tour’s future. Depth equals strength, not dilution. The capriciousness of golf needs to be embraced because it can’t be litigated away in a misguided attempt to engineer a sport around a handful of superstars — a questionable strategy anyway when fans suspect that many of them aren’t quite the charitable, puppy-loving good guys they were promised. The few guys who sell tickets — really a precious few — can’t be guaranteed a spot at the trophy ceremony unless you’re willing to thoroughly bastardize the concept of meritocracy. Some weeks (even some of the biggest weeks) just turn out to be more about the Davids than the Goliaths, and the best weeks are about both. This is one of the best.

If they want predictability in the product, only one man in the field at Royal Troon delivered it. John Daly was a WD, as he was at the PGA Championship, and numerous times previously. It’s been a dozen years since he last played the weekend in a major, 14 years since he finished inside the top 50, 19 since he broke the top 20, and 29 since he had a top 10. But even that show has only two years left to run.