At times like these, the PGA Tour properly flexes its financial muscle. This week’s Tour Championship at East Lake concludes a four-event series which delivers $34m in prize monies. That’s before the epic bonus pool for the FedEx Cup, starting with a $10m first prize, is even taken into account.
These riches are deemed grotesque by some, even if they still lag behind the peak of American team sports. It also raises a smile that the PGA Tour’s strength is endorsed immediately before the Ryder Cup, an iconic competition to which it has no commercial attachment. Perhaps the proximity of this playoff series is actually detrimental to the biennial meeting of Europe and the United States, given how narratives overlap.
And yet, it is difficult to argue against Tim Finchem, the outgoing commissioner of the PGA Tour, doing his job perfectly well by providing such a lucrative season finale for the sport’s leading lights. When Finchem addressed the media for a final, formal time on Tuesday he did so with legitimate pride over how the business has grown under his watch.
Providing the perfect professional platform may not be easy but it also isn’t rocket science. Big name sponsors equal huge prize funds which, in turn, attract the best players. Likewise, those corporate partners are keen for involvement in the first place because they know the best names in any particular sport will be linked to their brand.
Which takes us to last week’s news from the European Tour. A dozen readings of the press release, which insisted the co-sanctioned World Super 6 Perth will “revolutionise golf”, still leaves one no further forward as to what will actually happen in Australia next February. In a sporting world where simplicity is key, an event featuring 54 holes of stroke play, six-hole match play games and a purpose-built 90m knockout hole (including nearest the pin element) is a total head-scratcher. Welcome to golf meets gimmick. All that was missing was the hitting of shots on the run, or through rings of fire.
The logic behind this move is simple; that a shortened form of golf is necessary to capture wider imagination, just as Twenty20 cricket and rugby sevens do. Yet those variations don’t involve tampering with the outline format of the sport. A basic, nine hole golf competition would be equivalent, not the sort of thing you require an Oxford degree in mathematics to understand. And here’s the key: the world’s leading players won’t be remotely tempted to alter schedules because of what has been proposed in a typical case of mutual back-slapping.
Keith Pelley, the European Tour’s chief executive, has been adamant since his arrival in office that innovation is required and good on him for that stance. Perhaps it is unfair to criticise golf for laziness on one hand and laugh at what fresh ideas arise with the other. Nonetheless, what has been provided here doesn’t actually cut to the heart of what golf needs to develop or maintain as an integral part of sporting discussion. It is convoluted tokenism, to the point where it is difficult to understand who could actually sit in a room and derive such a competition scenario. Taking such an extreme approach to competition format runs the risk of undermining this sport entirely.
Pelley was full of bullish rhetoric when replacing George O’Grady. Aside from a rather swift overhaul of personnel at the European Tour’s headquarters, it is safe to say none of this has been particularly backed up by action. The Italian Open prize fund has been meaningfully enhanced thanks to the desire of the country’s government to secure the Ryder Cup and Tiger Woods’s upcoming appearance in Turkey will endorse the strength of their home tournament but, elsewhere, blue chip sponsors and purses to rival the PGA Tour haven’t been forthcoming.
In Pelley’s defence, it is difficult to coax those partners without certainty of who will turn up to play. But he made the strong promises in the first place.
Golf’s ailments in a broad sense can be summed up rather easily: it can prove an expensive sport, which too often takes too long. At professional level, the European Tour still suffers from the talent drain which is the obvious consequence of the PGA Tour’s monetary pull.
The answer to these issues doesn’t resonate in the World Super 6, where the level of bravado attached was replicated only by the volume of people who said they didn’t understand it. Whatever next? Perhaps it is best not to ask, even if it automatically stands a far better chance of revolutionising golf.
