TROUBLE IN PARADISE

 

 

For almost 30 years, through the 1970s, Arnold Palmer was a unique figure on the PGA Tour, winning 62 events including seven “majors” and exciting fan interest as have few other golfers before or since. iHisHis His career prize-money earnings on the Tour came to $1,861,857. A couple of weeks ago K.H. Lee, a native of South Korea and the 41st player on the Tour’s ranking table, won the AT&T Byron Nelson tournament in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, Texas. His first-place check for the four-day event came to $1,638,000. The two players who tied for 15^th place in that tournament each took home $161,705. That was about $33,000 more than the $128,230 Palmer won in all of 1963, his best official-earnings year.

               Those comparisons nicely illustrate how far men’s professional golf has come financially in the last several decades.  The PGA Tour, the main vehicle in the sport, is awash in money, and its competitors have it better than few other athletes. They spend their working days in sunshine on manicured green acres, enjoying country-club amenities.  Corporate CEOs envy their lifestyles as well as their swings.

But while one might think all would be well in Tourland, such is not the case, at least lately. There’s a rival tour aborning, offering more money for less work, and its existence has unearthed some long-standing gripes among the Tourists. The interloper is the LIV Tour, which is scheduled to debut June 9 at a course near London, England. Its supposed to be the first of eight scheduled tournaments—five of them in the U.S.-- with total prize purses of $25 million or more for each.  LIV is Roman numerals for 54, the number of holes to be contested in each event. That’s down from the PGA Tour’s 72-hole standard, and where the “less work” comes in. The PGA has decreed that any player who enters an LIV outing will lose his Tour card, so the war is on.

That would make for an interesting clash straight up, but there’s a wrinkle that has kidnapped news-media attention. The angel for the new tour is the sovereign wealth fund of oil-rich Saudi Arabia, ostensibly a nation but really a business wholly owned by its ruling family.  The current Saudi government, led by Crown Price Mohammad bin Salman, wages bloody war in Yemen and murders its domestic critics, casting a stink over its international reputation. Thus, endorsement of its golf tour has been equated with approval of Saudi policies and practices, and the few who have spoken out for it have suffered obloquy.

 These include Greg Norman, the old Aussie golf great who is the new tour’s chief executive, and Phil Mickelson, a heretofore popular PGA Tour competitor. Mickelson has called the Saudi regime “scary motherfuckers” but said it was worth cozying up to it to gain “leverage” in his financial arguments with the PGA Tour.  The criticism that comment engendered caused him to skip defending his 2021 PGA Championship title last month and go into virtual hiding.

The Tour’s internal disputes are interesting because, unlike team sports, professional golf in the U.S. has no “owners.” Instead, it’s managed by a legally non-profit organization nominally run by the players themselves, who function on the links as independent contractors. The PGA of America was founded in 1916 as an umbrella organization representing all golf pros, but by 1968 its tournament function had become so important that it spun it off as a separate entity. Today the PGA Tour is a golf behemoth that runs the 48-event main circuit that awards more than $500 million in prize and bonus money, the Champions Tour for players 50 years old and older, and several developmental tours, and negotiates multi-billion-dollar TV contracts, just like its team-sport counterparts.

Its governing body is the nine-member Tour Policy Board, four of whose members hold active Tour cards, but like most large organizations it’s really run by its bureaucracy, currently headed by Jay Monahan, a former functionary of the sports-agency octopus IMG. Like other sports-organization leaders, he has the title of “commissioner,” although no commission exists.

Even with its soaring purse structure tournament-golf pros don’t earn much by today’s jock standards; in the 2019-20 season, the last full one pre-covid, only 12 Tour players had more than $5 million in prize-money earnings, about the annual salary of a backup catcher in Major League Baseball. Golf, however, is an expensive sport that affords opportunities for outside income that allows players to multiply by several times their annual tournament income. The 175 men who hold PGA Tour cards, and thus can count on television appearances, can sell their endorsements of just about everything they use or wear, and do so enthusiastically.

Until 2016, top players typically signed agreements wrapping most equipment and apparel into a single package. Then Nike, the sport’s biggest sponsor, pulled out of golf. Now the deals have atomized, with items such as clubs, balls, bags, shoes and cap and shirt logos negotiated separately.  Apparently, Tour players like the new order just fine; things are so good that one, Ryan Palmer (not a relative of Arnold), recently wondered aloud why the “couple hundred thousand dollars” he could get for a clubs’ endorsement was worth it if it kept him from using clubs he was “comfortable with.”

The major rub, according to Mickelson in several interviews, is TV rights for things like highlight films and as they apply to the new and burgeoning “social media.” The Tour currently retains these, but he’d like the players to control theirs individually. Those are a big deal, as witnessed by the seven-figure sums some college athletes suddenly are corralling through their control over their names, images and likenesses. You’ll be hearing more about this issue in the months to come.

The LIV Tour apparently will go off as planned, with a handful of “name” players committed, even though Mickelson seems to have fled the field. Lawsuits against the PGA Tour’s ban edict have been threatened. Be assured, though, that the money being dangled will entice others to appear, whatever its source.

 If you pay them, they will come.