Lynch: The PGA Tour’s board meeting will bring changes, but not yet to player entitlement or fans being shortchanged
Just days after the birth of his first child and on the brink of losing his status, career journeyman Rafael Campos came up with a ‘Hail Mary’ moment on Sunday, winning the Butterfield Bermuda Championship to safeguard his job and punch his ticket to the Masters. Meanwhile, a yacht spin away at a boardroom in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, decisions were made Monday that ensure people like him will have fewer pathways to the Tour, less opportunity to use any card they earn, and dim prospects of keeping it.
The past 24 hours could hardly have produced a more jarring juxtaposition between the marketing romanticism of the PGA Tour and its modern, miserly reality.
Changes in the administration of the Tour — the addition of private investors and the rise of players who fancy themselves such — mean the boardroom is now more likely to revere Warren Buffett than, say, Arnie or Jack. Buffett has often said that price is what you pay and value is what you get, and much of what was being deliberated today focused on whether there’s sufficient value in what they’re paying for. Even if not every constituency is being subjected to the same metrics.
Rank-and-file members didn’t emerge well from this meeting. Beginning in 2026, field sizes will be reduced, the ranks of exempt players will be cut, and the number of Korn Ferry Tour grads and Monday qualifiers will be slashed. The dominant (and wholly defensible) sentiment is that too many guys are paid too much for too scant a contribution to the business, so the herd must be culled. And to be fair, some of the player-directors who made these calls are almost certainly going to find themselves on the wrong side of the cull soon enough.
Rafael Campos of Puerto Rico reacts after putting in to win on the 18th green during the final round of the Butterfield Bermuda Championship 2024 at Port Royal Golf Course on November 17, 2024, in Southampton, Bermuda. (Photo by Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)
Also on the agenda was tens of millions of dollars of budget cuts, what private equity likes to call “efficiencies.” Addressing bloat and waste is a long overdue exercise in this organization, but many of those who work at the GloHo deserve more defenders than they’ll see when the axe starts swinging. The operations and culture of the Tour — a mix of competence, complacency and conceit, depending on who you’re dealing with — is overdue a shake-up, but people who’ve done a good job will still be hurt. Cuts ought to be with a scalpel to safeguard talent, growth and revenue, but those decisions are now heavily influenced by folks accustomed to using chainsaws, and who have a great deal of experience in sports but none in golf.
Another cost-versus-value analysis will focus on the Tour’s potential deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Are player-directors willing to accept things like team golf and no reparations from LIV defectors in return for a smoother pathway to reunifying the game? They must surely grasp that an opportunity now presents itself in the form of a stubby Cheeto thumb eager to tilt the scales of the Department of Justice in favor of whoever is most flattering, though it’s a pity the Tour lacked PIF’s foresight to lob a couple billion bucks into Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners hedge fund.
Other reckonings will come in due course. For tournaments, which exist now in a caste system that elevates some and diminishes others, and with a risk to the entire Fall series if new global priorities emerge as part of a deal. Sponsors, too, will make their own value calculations. How many will pay in excess of $20 million to players who won’t actually guarantee their appearances? And for sluggish ratings within a niche audience? The Tour’s board will be dealing with troublesome fallout long after Greg Norman and his LIV folly have been dislodged from the Saudi teat.
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As of today, the Tour’s investment partners at Strategic Sports Group are a loud, powerful and impatient presence in the boardroom. That’s a positive. Outsiders with an eye on returns are incentivized to dispense with outdated practices and attitudes and push a more forward-thinking, less protectionist vision. But SSG’s can’t be the only voice that matters. Who will advocate for what can’t be represented on a balance sheet? Like the charitable impact tournaments have at a community level, the legacy and tradition around particular cities and sponsors, or the essential meritocracy of having pathways for less privileged players. That should not be lost in the accounting.
For all the changes approved today, this final Tour board meeting of 2024 won’t address two painful necessities. At some point, the board needs to face down the entitlement of top players, whose compensation seems only to rise even while the stock of their enterprise craters. And they’ll have to get real about serving the constituency that actually gives (fans) rather than just the one that takes.
If they’re confident that their decisions will produce an enhanced product for long-suffering fans, then it’s about time one of them peeked around the boardroom door and began explaining how.
