Resisting change is akin to breathing while never truly consciously breathing. Whether subtle, profound, sneaky, overt, stealth, or significant, you and everything and everyone around you is in that constant state. In the last three years the NBA has added “play in” games to their playoff format. Major league baseball has added a pitch clock, substitution guidelines, a scheduling overhaul, starting extra innings with men on base, and outlawing of the shift. The National Football League is going to play the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this season after treating Vegas like it was a wagering infested cesspool and den of inequity from the mind of Lucifer for decades. And that Super Bowl will not be a one off, the Shield will race back to Vegas as often as they can. While men’s professional golf has seen seismic change over the past year, the year ahead should be even more disruptive if the members of the PGA Tour truly want to exercise what they have before them.
Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus steered the players into the players division and the birth of the PGA Tour away from the PGA of America more than 50 years ago. Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and the now empowered policy board made up of a majority of players who now have the tee and it’s their time to determine if they have the vision to put in place what the strongest and best tour in the world is going to look like for the next decade and beyond. Getting more money was the easy part, and when you get the money it’s also easy to think that the bulk of the work is done, when it’s just beginning. Getting Tiger, or having Tiger be willing to be activated as a board member, is the most significant development in the history of an otherwise overlooked and toothless position. The players, while possibly shedding a reputation for abject aloofness as it pertains to governance, truly wanted to shift the power of decision-making and policy-building in their favor. Now is when they display what a member run tour truly looks like.
It’s not the tiny fiefdom that was lofted in the air as a trial balloon at the infamous Delaware meeting. That was merely a lazy and selfish attempt to reduce signature events, or for practical matters, the best events into a 40 man speak easy where you play with a gluttonous amount of chips that aren’t even yours. The duplicity of boasting ‘biggest and deepest tour in the world” while trying to shrink the most elite events into a Grove XXIII dogfight with courtesy cars was appalling. Stars drive all sports and should be positioned to control the lion’s share of the revenue as they do in the major sports where fiscal guardrails exist with salary caps and luxury taxes. However, every sport must and does leave the door ajar for the underdog because that dynamic is a crucial thread in the fabric of elite competition. I know Lee Hodges didn’t sell a ticket for the 3M Open but him waxing a field by a touchdown and the extra point is not shocking. It’s the amplification of what we should all know about guys who make a living staking it, they are witches. The tour shouldn’t be stamping that out, they should be proceeding with pragmatism.
100 should be the number for all signature events and cuts should be common and not uncommon. Elite professional golf is for men and women who find comfort with the discomfort of living in the margins. The margins of error with the integrity of each strike on the clubhouse and the margins of what microscopic data separates airborne hours with NetJets from ironing your own joggers in your King room at the SpringHill Suites. Elevation and relegation in sports is compelling especially when it’s up to you alone to determine your destination. It’s also incumbent upon those who climb to the rarest of air in the game that poor play should have consequences. Jason Day and Rickie Fowler should be battling for the comeback player of the year award, if it still existed, because they looked into the abyss and missed cuts and beat it away to rise again. Small aside, bring the award back, the members know plenty of guys are coming back from something.
Next, as Rory McIlroy said in response to my question last October about what the fall should look like, he responded, “Football”. Not the most expansive answer from Rory but the most succinct and on point. With the reduction of field sizes and the necessity for tons of players to get starts in autumn as opposed to the tour going away and letting us pine for it for a couple months, it’s time for the tour to concede to football. Why in the world are the fall events Thursday to Sunday affairs? Maximize America’s obsession with football by getting the hell out of the way of it while also playing off it. Players love the schools they played for and the NFL franchises they root for so play between football weekends instead of existing as ambient noise in the middle of them. Own the weekdays with Tuesday to Friday dates. You fill the days between Monday Night Football and college Gameday and you lead into countless playoff baseball games played at night in the fall. The TV audience is certainly modest but at least it’s yours as opposed to battling every single power 5, soon to be power 2, college game on Saturdays and the monolith that is the NFL on Sundays.
Co-op more events on the DP World Tour while presenting more playing opportunities for DP members like was achieved during the fortnight of the Barbasol and Barricuda. The leaderboards looked like a breakout session of the UN general assembly. The talent is coming from everywhere so the Scottish Open should not be the only event co-sanctioned overseas with the expectation of top 20 players being in the fields. The Dunhill Links and Irish Opens are majestic stages to prop up the Tour silhouette not to mention the inevitable cultivating of a Middle East footprint.
Which leads to the LIV cleansing and players returning to PGA Tour fields.
Whatever happens with the framework of the framework agreement the players who left don’t need some prolonged and punitive process of re-entry. Fans want to see the best players in the most fields together. The Tour spent real money, the members money, with an agency to soil the reputation of the LIV defectors only to normalize and cleanse the whole thing with a hasty agreement to try to agree to partner. For those players who are angry they didn’t get a bag because they stayed loyal, be angry with yourselves, or the commissioner, or your agents but building in firewalls to prevent top players from immediately returning is just hurting the product you now have the most ownership of in the tour’s history. If you want to be pissed at guys who carped on the way out, I get it, but it’s about the product, not your feelings.
As for the vacated board seat this is a very important decision that now rests in the hands of the players and that individual must understand 
the global sports landscape. This is not about someone who may have invested his company’s money in the PGA Tour, this individual should be in the sports industry. Colin Neville, from Rhein Capital, is now a very key figure for the PGA Tour and its membership. He has been in the middle of countless mergers, acquisitions and significant capital investments in sports franchises and sports enterprises around the world. The new board member, chosen by the player board MUST know the global sports chessboard and in particular the Middle East’s place in it now and going forward. Neville and a true sports industry leader can build the revenue driving tenacles of the tour while also being the active participants working with the PIF to maximize investment. I don’t know how profitable owning and operating golf facilities under the TPC brand may be, certainly better than pre-covid, but is that the best place for the tour to be investing. The Tour’s board as they continue to infuse countless communities with charitable dollars is also now in the “for profit” wilderness and Neville and the future board member selected by Tiger and company should be weaponized to make the players more money in sponsorship but making the tour’s brand more powerful through partnership. If they are going to hand pick someone, hand pick someone who knows how to grow a global sports brand because they’ve already built a global sports brand.
The Tour and Tiger and Rory’s new endeavor TMRW Sports have a partnership agreement as TMRW gets ready to launch in 2024. It’s not unreasonable to consider that the most golf shots Tiger hits in 2024 will be in primetime on a simulator streaming globally and carried on network television from the TMRW sports campus in south Florida. Mike McCarly, the former president of Golf Channel, knows how to build primetime sports properties and Jeff Neubarth who is the head of production, who oversaw the growth of Morning Drive at Golf Channel, and then helped construct the widely creative and innovative digital presence of Callaway golf are a dynamic duo and the tour needs to lean on them to maximize the value of the tour’s biggest and most valuable commodity, their players.
Scary times are when you don’t have a plan, exciting times are when you have a vision and the right people in place to execute a plan. However the tour looks in five years will rise or fall on Tiger and Company’s shoulders because they have what they wanted, it’s their time to use it.