Pity the PGA Tour’s proletariat, who are now fretting about two votes in November that could jeopardize much of what they feel entitled to. Some of them might even be less wary of a former California prosecutor than they are of a prosecutorial Californian. After all, Kamala Harris doesn’t much care about reshaping the PGA Tour, but Patrick Cantlay sure does.
On Nov. 18, Cantlay and his fellow Policy Board members will vote on an extensive slate of proposals that will have an enormous impact on rank and file Tour members. Potential changes include reducing fields in most regular tournaments from 156 competitors to 144, and in many cases 120; cutting the number of fully exempt players from 125 to 100; slashing by one-third the number of cards earned via the Korn Ferry Tour; and reducing or eliminating Monday qualifiers, which award four spots most weeks.
Some players will see an unfair narrowing of pathways to make a living; others will welcome a toughening of competitive standards. Either way, it represents revolutionary change for an organization whose members revere Adam Smith but are accustomed to seeing their workplace run as though Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were the commish.
Capitalism for thee, socialism for me!
Unlike most recent innovations — signature events, equity ownership grants, huge growth in prize money — these latest proposals aren’t a counter against LIV Golf but rather a reflection of the PGA Tour’s new for-profit status. After all, who prizes streamlined simplicity more than the private equity investors players took on board 10 months ago?
The Tour’s longstanding raison d’être — creating playing opportunities for members, an objective on which its executives were bonused — is dead. Remaking a complacent product for a competitive market means it’s now about earning opportunities. Every proposal is defensible, if debatable. (Except the elimination of Monday qualifiers; that’s the ultimate meritocracy and ought to be expanded and streamed as additive to the Tour’s weekly narrative.) And while it’s easy to characterize these likely changes as another sop to top stars, the truth is that any reform is unlikely to ever discomfit the Tour’s one percent.
These proposals emerged from the Players Advisory Council, a 16-man committee made up of both superstars and journeymen, and they administer an overdue dose of reality. Players are fond of pointing the finger at HQ when it comes to bloat — not unfairly, it must be said — so there’s irony in the first announced layoffs being players themselves. Whether in the glass-walled offices of Ponte Vedra or the wood-paneled locker rooms on Tour, too many people are paid too much money for too little. More than 600 guys have made starts on Tour this year, and the average inside-the-ropes earnings currently stands at $2,030,418. That’s a lot of money for what is, comparatively speaking, a lot of mediocrity.
Finally, the Tour has reached the stage of making incremental changes to better its product rather than to slake the cash thirst of its stars. There’s a long way to go — not least in delivering a product that focuses more on fans than players — but the fact that proper improvements are imminent doesn’t necessarily mean the right folks are making the decisions.
The Tour has always boasted of being a member-led organization, even when it was only nominally so. Since the backlash to the Framework Agreement with the Saudis and the subsequent governance reforms, players are now absolutely calling the shots. In fact, three Policy Board members who will vote on the recommendations — Peter Malnati, Webb Simpson and Jordan Spieth — are perilously close to finding themselves at the mercy of the unforgiving new dispensation they could usher in.
It won’t happen — not imminently, and probably not at all — but Tour players need to step back and defer to executives on fraught decisions around eligibility. And if they don’t trust executives to weigh the greater good of the business, they ought to find replacements. If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the last few years it’s that golfers will make selfish decisions based on where they are in their careers, so empowering them to determine the ability of colleagues to earn a living won’t end well. Just consider the delicate (and legally perilous) decisions that are looming, not least permitting the return of LIV defectors — the same guys they don’t currently have to beat to win tournaments and FedEx Cup bonuses.
Rank-and-file members squeezed out of opportunities, sponsors paying major league prices for minor-league lineups, tournaments diminished in the schedule abyss between premier events, broadcasters paying for a product they aren’t getting, fans woefully underserved with a commodity that is both diluted and repetitive, employees at headquarters facing the prospect of redundancies — the collateral damage of the ‘git me some’ era is widespread. The only constituency that will emerge unscathed is those whose greed set it all in motion: the elite players.
But even those who will be hurt by the proposed changes largely accept that the Nov. 18 vote — unlike that other one, 13 days earlier — is a foregone conclusion. And necessary. As it has been written, so it shall be done.
