DOES PRO GOLF NEED A PREMIER LEAGUE?

If you were looking to reinvent the world of professional golf, and attempting to make it a more attractive product for global TV audiences and for the players themselves, it’s highly unlikely that you’d come up with golf in its current state.

With the PGA Tour and the European Tour fighting it out for the attentions
of the world’s best players, and the Ladies European Tour serving as little more than a satellite training ground for the LPGA Tour, and the other tours merely serving their domestic markets – it’s fair to say that elite professional golf, with its bloated schedules and limited number of genuine stars – is currently a heavily diluted product.

Given the chance to rip it up and start again, you’d probably come up with something closely resembling the current schedule being bandied about by a new operation that goes by the name of the ‘Premier Golf League’.

In simple terms, Premier Golf League wants to sign up the top 48 players in the world to a new tour that would feature 18 tournaments from January to September – 10 of which would be in the US. With each event played over just 54 holes, with no cut, and offering a guaranteed $10 million prize fund, if I were
a top player, those kind of numbers would certainly get my attention. It’s worked for cricket with the Indian Premier League, the ATP Tour Masters in tennis, and F1 for motorsport, so why not golf?

Well, for lots of reasons as it turns out. While the PGA Tour and the European Tour have been judiciously tight- lipped about the wolf at their door, it goes without saying that they will fight tooth and nail to cling on to what they’ve got, and will no doubt be warning any potential ship jumpers that they will be ruling themselves out of tour membership, WGC events and Ryder Cup consideration should they sign up to the PGL.

And it’s not like the world’s top players aren’t already swilling in cash. The PGA Tour is about to sign a new TV deal that will further swell the prize fund coffers still further, some events by almost 50%, while the Rolex Series is offering European Tour players rewards that they could only have dreamed about a few years ago. Brooks Koepka, who is fast earning a reputation for speaking his mind, just about summed it up when he said: “If somebody gave me $200 million tomorrow it’s not going to change my life. I already have enough money to retire on, but I just want to play golf.”

The success or failure of the PGL venture will clearly not hang on the participation of one player. Tiger Woods, golf’s needle mover for the last 25 years, will be 47 should it get off the ground in 2022 – hardily in the prime of his golfing life – and judging by his recent schedule, Woods doesn’t look in the kind of shape to handle 18 events in eight months, let alone 12.

Of more relevance was world No.1 Rory McIlroy’s complete rejection of the Premier Golf League’s advances. As a freelancer, he objected to the idea of being told when and where to play, and as someone with more

cash in the bank than he could already ever spend, he, like most of the top 20 players the world, hardily need put themselves out to serve the needs of others. Those lower down the world rankings might take a different view, but few are prepared to air them quite so publicly at this early stage of negotiations.

Either way, it feels inevitable that the landscape at the top level of the professional game will change in the not-so-distant future, whether it be through the PGL or a coming together of the various existing tours, so that golf fans get to see the world’s best players play against each other more often.

Whatever the outcome, the fairways will soon be paved with even more gold, with the rich getting ever richer. T’was ever thus.