NLU Podcast 278: Jacobsen toes the company line

NLU Content Discussion
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Listened to @Soly and Peter Jacobsen yesterday. What a gift to the world Peter Jacobsen is. He’s seriously a treasure.

I took issue with his views on the World Tour/PGL. Some serious gaps in his logic in my opinion.

First, as we all know change is inevitable. Let’s keep that at the forefront of this discussion. Fully realizing golf is a time-honored game with many traditions, but the PGA Tour is not golf, it’s a business. So here we go.

32:00 mark: Jacobsen talks about a meeting Greg Norman called in the early nineties where Norman pitched a World Tour that would break away from the PGA Tour. Arnold Palmer, who was well past his prime but was hosting a PGA Tour event (read: has dog in fight) gets up and leaves the meeting because he doesn’t support the breakaway World Tour concept. The theory being that it would be “destructive” to the game to break away from the PGA Tour.

33:45 mark: Jacobsen discusses how in 1968 or so some players broke away from the PGA of America to form the PGA Tour. This shouldn’t be glossed over. Why is it OK for a group to break away from the PGA of America, but it’s not OK for the current stars to break from the PGA Tour? Jacobsen then says “if it’s about money, I want nothing to do with it.” OK. I see his point but it’s professional golf and last I checked a beer at an event is about $10 and parking is $30 so…forgive me, but it’s all about money. Let’s not be naive.

Jacobsen at 34:17 “If we had done the world tour with Norman back in the nineties, or the Big 3 would had broken off, you never would have heard of Tiger Woods, or Phil Mickelson, or Jordan Spieth or Justin Thomas because the Tour would have been fragmented…”
This is way off. The game exists outside the PGA Tour. There is this little group in Far Hills, New Jersey called the USGA that’s been around a hundred years or so. They do not depend on the Tour to survive. Tiger, Phil, Spieth, Thomas all thrived in the USGA structure and would have been elite professional players in any tour.

At about 41:30 Jacobsen take a swipe at the PGL’s position that 10 of the 18 events will be in the U.S. “Well, where are they gonna be?” Jacobsen asks hypothetically…as if that’s hard to figure out. Newsflash: If you put the Top 50 players in a 3-day event in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Miami, Milwaukee, Phoenix, etc. etc. etc. you would THROTTLE ticket sales. The better question is why have some of the markets listed about been denied for decades.

There are other holes in PJ’s case against the PGL/World Tour. I’m not going to get into all of them but I feel like it was a little closer to Peter Popoff than Peter Jacobsen.

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It’s not hard to figure out. Not at all.

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I heard this clip on their WMO open recap pod, I don’t think I can listen the Jacobsen pod because of it. Anyone with that willingness to ignore basic logic isn’t worth a chunk of my limited podcast consumption time. Seems like a nice guy but he’s clearly senile.

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I vehemently disagreed with that take as well, but for the most part, Jacobsen’s takes were really solid. It was a pretty insightful conversation.

Woulda liked to have seen him take Soly’s bait more on the problems with the PGA Tour’s current setup, but like Laz said, toeing the company line.

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I generally agree with all of the above. But I don’t think Jacobsen was way off re “you would have never heard of Tiger, etc.” At that time when the money wasn’t as big as it is now, if you had a chunk of players leave the PGA Tour to get involved in a competing product, the result could have been two middling tours cannibalizing each other, as opposed to a single tour flourishing in what was/is basically a monopoly for professional golf. With limited resources at the time(i.e. no internet), fans probably would not have been able to follow both tours as closely as they could just one, and tournament host sponsors would go with whichever tour cost them less.

Maybe I’m just trying to fight for a fellow Portlander, but I don’t think he was way off. The PGA Tour definitely benefited/benefits from being really the only show in town, and arguably competition was the last thing the Tour needed at the time, speaking from a purely bottom line perspective. At the same time it’s hard to say what really would have happened if there was a competing product, especially when you throw the emergence of Tiger into the equation. In that hypothetical two-tour model, I think whoever Tiger had decided to go with would have won out and we probably would have ended up in the same place anyways.

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i was more than a little disappointed with the lack of Jake Trout and the Flounders information divulged on the pod.

https://refuge.nolayingup.com/t/jake-trout-the-flounders-golfs-original-viral-sensation/5210?u=3wiggle

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Would the majors have ceased to exist as well? Pretty sure that’s what made Tiger, not tour events.

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We were watching Tiger long before he won his first major.

I used to bartend back in 96’ and we had on the US Amateur that year just to watch him play.

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One of the reasons that the casual fan can’t get excited about golf is that there is too much to know! Too many people to know! If there was an 18 event circuit where the big time guys were playing big time courses for big time money, that would be appointment viewing. Sports need stars, or they have nothing. Smaller fields makes it possible to add to everyone’s narratives and make the broadcasts more interesting at the same time. And maybe–MAYBE–more golf shots on TV.

It’s complete crap that Tiger doesn’t get 20% of the tour’s TV money right off the top. Because he is the thing, for TV. He drives the ratings.

No reason for the top 10 guys not to get more. Jacobsen saying it’s not about the money is bogus. It’s all about the money. Arnie didn’t care because he was 62 and ran a tournament that was paid for by companies paying him big-time money, already. He couldn’t have helped the World Tour, anyway.

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“Appointment viewing.”

You setting your alarm for 2:00 AM to catch these tournaments?

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Lumping Tiger into it was probably a bad example, since he’s one of the most popular athletes of all time.

I don’t know how much of this is attributable to the fact that there is one successful tour that markets non-major events, but Jordan Spieth, a three-time major winner in golf, is probably more well-known and probably has higher career earnings than Stan Wawrinka, a three-time major winner in tennis.

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Oh yes! If the product was better? Better golfers, at better locations, innovative and insightful broadcast? I’m in. I might even do 1:30!

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Well, you’ll have your “better golfers,” at least.

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You don’t need to set an alarm if you just stay up crushing black market Four Lokos.

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Not a great comparison, since Spieth won his three majors before the age of 24, and is US-born. Even still, the Twitter follower difference between them (2 million to 1.7 million) is not particularly big.

The point is, golf would be golf whether or not Norman had succeeded. Tiger Woods would still be transcendent, and the best players, the sponsors, the advertisers, and TV all would have followed him.

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American vs. a Swiss. Think that’s why. Less to do about golf vs. tennis.

Martin Kaymer has won 2 majors and a Players and made the clinching cup at the Ryder Cup. He’s barely known outside golf’s die hards.

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I wonder if @Soly had to promise no coverage takes in order to get The Jac on the pod?

They haven’t held back for years…at his direct expense a few times. Was it last year where he had a particularly bad showing (Players maybe? Riv? a Major?) where he rambled and rambled and rambled over a potentially awesome caddie player convo?

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Golf is more popular in the US than Tennis. I would highly doubt that globally, Spieth is bigger than Wawrinka.

Spieth career prize earnings = $40m
Wawrinka career prize earnings = $31m
(Not commenting on endorsement deals.)

I don’t think it’s actually nearly as cut and dry as you think.

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Spieth also doesn’t really live in the shadow of anyone aside from Tiger…and MAYBE Phil, on a global scale.

Wawrinka is clearly in the shadows of Federer, Nadal, Djokovich, and Murray before that, however warranted or not Murray was. Pretty comparable career to Stan the Man.

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So your solution to having bigger stars is just cut out the lower level guys so the “real stars” don’t have to worry about losing to them? And I have zero confidence that any new tour would have a better broadcast. They still have to pay the bills and that means commercials and/or sucking up to corporate CEOs.