I know it’s all Ryder Cup and stuff but the guests of that generation are really hit or miss. Azinger has already been on once right? Don’t need him again. I get tired of bike enough on the NBC broadcasts.
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Please. Get off your high horse. Our whole society is a cash grab. The tax exempt PGA Tour included. Let’s not drink the kool aid for a second and look at real markets that could host with ease:
Tokyo
Sydney
Paris
Cape Town
Rio
London
Melbourne
Toronto
Honolulu
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Emphasis on:
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Yeah, I think it’s a safe assumption that if you could host the Olympics, Ryder Cup or another golf event you have the needed infrastructure to host a 48 person cash grab.
Seoul
Dublin
Glasgow
Amsterdam
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The more team based it is the more excited I will be about it.
Country/region teams would be pretty cool.
US (maybe 2 or 3 teams)
GB&I
Spain
South Africa
Australia/Zealand
South Korea
Japan
Sweden/Norway/Denmark
Japan
South America
I think that hurts the product. It’s an individual game.
Meanwhile I’m waiting for @ANTIFAldo to finish his search of golf clubs in Tokyo so he can tell me there’s not a long enough course to host the bomb squad.
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Of all the things PJ said, I found it particularly exasperating when he slid in mention of tour pensions and the benefits everyone is getting.
It’s late so I’m not tying to dive into all my thoughts, but there’s an over saturation of golf tournaments to provide a life for the non top X amount of elite players. 10 US based tournaments is like college football to me. It only comes around for a short time and it’s the people and teams I want to see. I’ll tune in. The current tour schedule is a 162 game MLB season that is exhausting.
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Tiger has been underpaid by literally a billion dollars minimum during his career. Every useless slapdick Tour employee owes their livelihood to that guy. It’s easy for anyone other than Tiger/Brooks/Rory and maybe a few others to sanctimoniously rail against the top players being paid market wages.
It’s basically the general boomer attitude of “fuck you, got mine, shut up.” Could not be more out on that.
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I liked how Jacobsen glossed over how the PGA Tour came about because the top players wanted to guarantee themselves more money. There are many problems with the PGL, but I don’t think the money grab motivation is that big of a deal.
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The irony of talking about the tour splitting off from the PGA of America as a good thing and then dumping on anything else was glaring. Lost his credibility right there in the argument. Nobody is a fan of the PGA tour. They are fans of players who happen to play on the tour. Take those players somewhere else and the fans will follow. I think he’s worried about the deferred compensation package that he is drawing from which depends on the success of the tour.
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Not to mention his current employer is part of a $700M. I would imagine he’s more worried about that than the Tour’s pension fund being under funded.
That too. That part was mostly in jest.
I mean, there are already guys who play in these events who aren’t affiliated with the PGA Tour. A brief reminder for those who have forgotten:
US Am winner
US Mid-Am winner
Asia/Pacific Am winner
Latin America Am winner
some guys who have OWGR points from the Euro Tour
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I’d much rather see changes to the current model than a whole new thing that’s being discussed. Don’t care for this PGL deal at all. Just my two cents.
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I’m not sure I completely follow “we wouldn’t know about tiger if the Norman WGC tour would’ve happened” BS. So…more tournaments = more players getting exposure, right?. There’s enough good golfers worldwide to spread out competition . Everybody whines about Billy Bob on the KFC tour not getting enough shots At the big stage. And honestly think about how much better the WWE was when WCW came out- it’s all sports entertainment anyway
One point to consider is are tour pro’s today really independent contractors.
The PGA Tour is an American corporation and seems to want to own the top players. I’m just a golf fan so can not give you any supporting evidence for this or some random pie chart either. It just seems that way to me sometimes.
Having to be told what you can and cannot say, being asked to do things to promote a single tour and being required to play a certain amount of events doesn’t seem to be totally independent.
Adding a pension plan might be comfortable and might offer insurance against injury, but surely a pro can find their own financial and insurance from others than the tour these days of player management etc.
It’s great to see the worlds top players play against each other each week, but does it have to be every week, the same product in just one country?
Is the FedEx cup and it’s point system really the Super Bowl of golf? Is gaining points over a season the best way to get into the playoffs?
If nothing else I am glad that people are looking at Pro Golf and how it’s run. Too many big corporations get lazy and stagnate. You are never too big to fail, but you will fail if you don’t ever listen.
Read from the book of Yardage.,…
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There’s a lot of holes in what Jacobsen said on the podcast, and a lot I don’t necessarily agree with. In his defense, we had to start and stop several times on the pod, I had to ask him to back up to cover things a second time due to the audio mishaps, and the whole thing lacked a rhythm in person that’s hard to explain on the back end. I was sweating from how horribly unorganized I became once the software went haywire, so I can’t even admit to hearing much of anything that he said.
The PGA Tour breaking off from the PGA of America is not the comp in this situation that some are making it out to be. Of course this was done for business purposes, but in this scenario, tour players as a whole benefited tremendously from the split and the reorganization. The PGA of America was not looking after the players well enough at the time, and a decent chunk of the money that was coming in was going towards the PGA of America and not to the players. Does that describe, even remotely, what PGA Tour life is like now? Say what you want about the tour from the fan perspective, but this is not the fan perspective. Tour players are not out there crying poor. They have an incredible amount of power within the tour, they make a ton of money from it, and they stand to make even more from it with the new TV deal.
Now, the issue he has is when the top guys want to undo all of the work that generations before have put in to building the strength of the tour. Again, this is from someone who lived it, so of course he has skin in the game. As fans, we don’t have to like what he says, but we also haven’t devoted 44 years of our lives towards the organization in question here. This was the point in bringing him on.
To be honest, on the Arnie story, I didn’t even think about the opportunities those guys must have had to break off and keep all of the benefits for themselves until he told it. I’m sure they also had plenty of reasons not to do it, but I believe his point to be, if those guys were against breaking off in that era, which is very clearly not even close to as financially beneficial in this era, then who are these players to break off now when they are making absolute bank from this tour? Which is where his comment on “if it’s about money, I’m out” or whatever comes into play. Of course this whole thing is about money. But the point is, these guys have money! Lots of it!
Of all of the rumblings on tour that we hear, I’ve legitimately never heard a tour player say once that they need more money from the tour. The greed level it would take to nuke the tour that has helped you so much is an enormous turn off for many people (myself included), and especially to those that played on the tour for many years prior, like PJ. You can call that Boomer AF, but in that regard, I believe he’s got a good point. Do the players have every right to break off? Of course. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be enormous backlash.
Regarding never hearing of Phil and Tiger, honestly I blame that on the frantic nature of the interview and I don’t believe he would use those words again. I believe the point he was trying to make was that the path to professional golf would end up looking a lot different, and we can’t measure what kind of an effect the PGA Tour had on the Woods family, the Mickelson family, etc., to encourage them to put clubs in their hands as kids. Do they work as hard if the world tours are fragmented, and such. The competition level in golf has increased a million fold in the last 20 years, due in large part to the enormous sums of money that are available for the 100th ranked player in the world. The butterfly effect of Arnie and Jack and Gary breaking off for their world tour is impossible to measure. Do I believe we never would have heard of Tiger or Phil? No, not in the way that he phrased it. But it does raise a ton of questions about what the sport would look like today had that happened. We’d all love to pretend the pro game doesn’t have an enormous trickle down effect on the rest of the golf world, but the reality is that it does.
Regarding the world ranking points: A top player that I contacted about this new league immediately shot down his potential inclusion in it, citing that he would never “give up the world rankings points.” It’s not a foregone conclusion that this league would be welcomed with open arms across the sport.
It is when you are already the richest of the rich, and you’re going to be stabbing your other fellow competitors in the back by reaching for an even bigger part of the pie. Again, sure, it’s their right to do it, but they can’t expect zero backlash if they do this.
The entire point of talking to Jacobsen was that he literally was presented a similar scenario in the '90’s and the players said no. It’s not, I got mine, shut up. It’s hey, I had this chance, we all had this chance, and we looked around and decided it would be a shitty move to pull on our other competitors. (And hey, also, we’ve got it pretty damn good out here as is).
There’s enormous issues with the tour from the fan’s perspective. But in all of my time doing this, I’m realizing more and more how little that matters. I don’t know how, but honestly it doesn’t appear to matter. No one is watching golf and the TV contract almost just doubled. Are there a million things I’d like to change about the tour from the fan perspective? Sure! But I can’t stress enough how little the fans matter in this scenario.
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For the record, I was never saying that any of the above places couldn’t host a golf tournament. Hell, if Memphis (ducks) can host a WGC, so can any city/country that’s ever hosted the Olympics or World Cup. We’re in agreement on that one.
My point was that, yes, these places could host a tournament. Undoubtedly. But that’s not where the money is, and that’s not where a player-run tour is going to schedule stops. They could easily schedule two events in Japan and two in the Sandbelt. But we know that they’re more likely to schedule two in Abu Dhabi and two at familiar, player-friendly East Coast stops.
You have more optimism than I do. I’d like to be wrong!
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If anything, I’d think that the equivalent to “fuck you, got mine, shut up” would be the 50 top players nuking the pipelines (PGA Tour and Euro Tour) and riding the rails on a big cash grab tour around the world for a decade, shutting down the growth opportunities for younger and middling players.
I don’t think it’s their obligation to keep the current system in place “just because,” and I’m willing to entertain the idea that guys like Tiger and Brooks and even Rickie are underpaid, but there’s little altruism in codifying the WGC system like the proposed PGL would.
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