LIV Golf had a blank canvas, the PGA Tour could use one as it tries to solve a packed schedule
LIV Golf had a seemingly endless supply of Saudi money that suddenly is coming to an end. Overlooked is another of its assets — this one with no price tag — the PGA Tour would love to have.
A blank canvas. Even as LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil was trying to present hope for a future without the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PGA Tour was moving from one signature event to another on the short road to Aron mink for the PGA Championship.
It’s a schedule that doesn’t make sense.
From the first major at the Masters through the second major at the PGA Championship, the top players face three $20 million signature events and two majors over six weeks. That followed another brutal stretch of three $20 million events and The Players Championship over five weeks on both sides of the country.
What’s the solution? The Future Competition Committee is working on it, and no doubt has found it difficult to blow up and rebuild a model in place for 100 years with tweaks along the way.
The idea was to get the best players competing against each other more often, and not many would be opposed to a concept like that. It was four years ago when 23 players met privately in Delaware to rally around the tour and against LIV Golf (three of them later defected to LIV).
From that emerged a 2023 schedule where the top players committed to a 20-event schedule in which they would compete against each other at least 17 times. Rory McIlroy skipped two of them.
And McIlroy already has missed two signature events this year after winning another Masters. Four other players from the top 15 in the world didn’t enter the Cadillac Championship last week at Doral. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler isn’t playing this week at Quail Hollow because he faces as many as four in a row — two of them home events in the Dallas area — starting with the PGA Championship. Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour CEO who appointed Tiger Woods to lead the competition committee, was aware of this crunch when it was announced last August.
