The PGA Tour has undergone myriad changes since its formation in 1968, and it’s about to change quite a bit more starting in 2028 with a reformation into two tiers, one reserved for the top-shelf elites in professional golf and a secondary level competing for the chance to join the more lucrative Championship Series.
Many players competing in this week’s US Senior Open featuring golfers 50 years and older have seen a lot of alterations to the tour product over the course of their careers. This is just one more. Or is it?
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PGA Tour chief executive and commissioner-in-waiting Brian Rolapp provided the broad strokes of his new vision last week at the Travelers Championship. The Championship Series will feature a schedule of $US20 million events with fields of about 120 players, while the Challenger Series will have 144-man fields playing for considerably less, starting at about $US4 million. Some players will graduate to the upper level after the season while others will be relegated from Championship to Challenger. There will be cuts at every event on each tour.
How it’s all going to work still has yet to be finalised, causing a fair bit of consternation among the current tour membership. Davis Love III [below], who served on the PGA Tour Policy Board numerous times, takes the position that plans are never set in stone in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
“I haven’t studied it enough to know it all top to bottom, but I know that all the guys that I hang around with at home [in Sea Island, Georgia], they’re on committees and everything, they all really like it,” Love said after an opening three-over-par 73 at Scioto Country Club. “And what I tell guys that don’t understand it like me, or guys that are complaining, I go, ‘Hey, look, I was on the board and we came up with the FedEx Cup, and we changed it so many times since. Don’t think that this is the absolute end all the rest of history. If something doesn’t quite work, you can always change it.
“Look at the [FIFA] World Cup. This is not traditional to have this many teams this year. Look at NCAA basketball or football or really any sport. Changes are always being made.”
After taking the pulse of senior golfers at Scioto, it’s clear that most are cautiously optimistic about Rolapp’s plan, formulated with the help of the Future Competitions Committee chaired by Tiger Woods. The elimination of no-cut tournaments and a re-emphasis on meritocracy received a hearty thumbs up. The fact that 90 players on the upper tier will keep their cards from year to year isn’t as well supported. In other words, meritocracy could go further.
Photo: Edward M. Pio Roda
“You don’t have to play that great to stay in the top 90,” said one past tour winner. “They want to make it more dynamic, how about top 60 keep their top status? Top 90 is a joke.”
“One thing right now I can’t decide is, do I wish I was 25 again and had like a chance to get into this new world that’s coming out and try to work my way up to the top? Or am I glad that I’m 53? I don’t know,” said former Open Championship winner Stewart Cink, who is enjoying a breakout season on PGA Tour Champions with victories in the year’s first two majors.
“Big picture, it was kind of sad for me to see that we have been shrinking the tour and shrinking fields because I feel like the game of golf is exploding with parity and talent, and the bottom 10 players in every tournament are so much better than the bottom 10 players were when I started. If you think about all they’re really doing, is they’re making what was the Korn Ferry Tour and bumping those to $4 million and calling it something else and the Korn Ferry Tour is still there but it’s going to be a third tier.
“Look, we had a Major League [PGA Tour] and Triple-A [Korn Ferry]. Now we’re going to have Major League, Triple-A and Double-A. It’s just that Triple-A is getting paid way more than the old AAA was. That’s what we’re having. So the players that are not in the top rung are going to be taking a pay cut – a pretty big pay cut.”
Ryan Armour, a former Policy Board member and a vocal critic of the signature-event model that was formulated by Woods and Rory McIlroy in 2022 – and on which Woods has got a finger on the detonator blowing it up – thinks the proposed two-tier make-up is an encouraging development.
“I’m cautiously optimistic. If they can figure out the eligibility, having 120 and then 144 playing opportunities, that’s 264 playing opportunities over $4 million a week. I think that’s amazing because that’s more than you’re getting right now,” Armour said. “I was always an advocate when I was on the Player Advisory Council about playing opportunities. I think that was one of the mandates by [former commissioner] Deane Beman that was paramount to our membership – that we get as many members in the field as we can.
“I think if he can figure out a way to get these communities to rally around all these events and the sponsorships, I think it’s great for the players to have more playing opportunities… I think it’s better for the on-site experience for the fans. It grows the game more. The kids come out all day and watch golf. That’s how you grow the game. When you have this tight little TV window that you want to fit it all in, that’s not growing the game.”
“It seems largely OK what they want to do, except they’ve made half the tour look like the minor leagues,” Steve Flesch said. “The tour, going back to Tim Finchem, they always said it was never good if purses are going down. So the question I have is: are $20 million purses sustainable? I don’t know.”
Well, if not, the tour can always make changes. It’s happened before, you know.
