Splashing The Cash

Last week a young Thai professional golfer, Jeeno Thitikul, (above) won the CME Group Tour Championship, the final event on this year’s LPGA (Ladies’ Professional Golf Association) schedule.  The last two decades have introduced us to a conveyor belt of phenomenal talent from Asia, so this is surely not all that memorable?

I beg to differ.  Jeeno scooped $4 million for her efforts at Tiburon Golf Club, Naples, Florida last Sunday.  FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!  I never thought I would see rewards like that in my lifetime for a woman professional golfer.  This was the largest first-place prize in women’s golf and one of the largest single prizes in all of women’s sports.  It’s a mind-blowing amount of money and more than many players will make in their entire careers and she will forever go down in history as the player who first won a cheque of that size.

I’m very conflicted at the moment as to how I feel about the money sloshing around in golf.  I’m delighted for the women;  I think they have worked hard, – very, very hard – since the formation of the LPGA back in the 1950s and I know the LET (Ladies’ European Tour) have done the same since they were formed in 1979.  It’s been a struggle.  A long, hard, uphill battle sustained over decades and recognition of their skills by virtue of bigger prize funds is much deserved.

I feel if I were a sponsor I would certainly be putting my resources into women’s golf.  It’s hard to meet a more grounded, humble, hard-working set of athletes.  I’ve been involved as a player, a coach and a broadcaster in the game and signs of entitlement among the women are rarer than hens’ teeth.  You get a lot of bang for your buck with them.

And so, with a sigh, I turn to the men’s game.  It’s a different world, for sure.  Scottie Scheffler’s on-course earnings this season topped $29 million while Jeeno, the highest earner amongst the women, topped out at just over $6 million.  Of course, there will be off-course deals to add in to those totals but I was intrigued to see how these earnings compared with those at the top of other sports’ pyramids.  So, I did a little digging into the three biggest sports in the good, ole USA.

Dak Prescott, the Dallas Cowboys’ quarterback’s 2024 salary was over $100 million.  His SALARY!  Not performance related, therefore.  Steph Curry, basketball’s superstar guard for the Golden State Warriors, banked a salary of $55.8 million for 2024 and Shohei Ohtani, baseball’s wonder boy, had a base salary of $70 million.

Now, consider this.  My theory is that the majority of top world-class golfers live or have bases in the States and it’s a world where successful sportspeople mix with each other often, not least because many stars from other sports just love their golf.  Perhaps this has created an arena where some golfers feel undervalued.  They compare their earnings to comparable players in other sports and they have become discontented.  This is only my theory, remember, but there must have been some malcontent for the LIV golf tour to splinter the tour and the game so successfully.

The golfers, however, are spectacularly missing the point.  Sponsors pour their money in to a sport, largely based on the numbers of “eyes on”.  How many folk are attending the events, but more importantly, how many are tuning in and streaming said spectacles?

Here are some ballpark figures to digest.  More than 20 million tuned into the NFL – PER GAME;  11.3 million watched the basketball finals;  15.8 million followed baseball’s 2024 World Series.  A whopping 123.7 million watched the 2024 Superbowl.  The average Sunday viewership on the PGA Tour, including the four majors, was 2.8 million.  Are the golfers perhaps overestimating their drawing power a teensy- weensy bit?

The cold hard facts are, whether we like it or not, that golf is a niche sport.  There is currently not enough interest to merit enormous prize funds to boost golfers’ earnings to a level comparable with those who participate in the really popular sports.  Golf fans are being turned off by what they perceive to be the greed and entitlement of the players.  The current solution of the PGA tour is to limit the number of all exempt players from 2026 onwards, to increase the purses, introduce more tournaments with no cut and to have smaller fields.

No, no and thrice no!  That cannot be the way to grow the game (ghastly expression!).  Stifling competition can never be a good thing, in my view.  The smaller fields with no cut will do that.  The argument in favour is twofold – the fans want to see the best players in the world play all four days.  Well, I don’t.  I don’t want to see an out-of-form player chopping around for a guaranteed amount of money at the bottom of the field.  I want to watch a journeyman who finds himself in with a chance of a win after ten years on tour.  I want to watch a young player who’s playing with his idol for, for him, potentially life-changing money.  THESE are the stories that capture the imagination – or, at least my imagination.

The second argument coming from the tour is that the smaller fields will ensure that the first two rounds will certainly be completed by Friday’s end thus setting up a riveting weekend.  My solution is to say to the players:  “Get a b….y move on!  Play faster.”  There never has been a collective will to speed the game up and that is, quite frankly, pathetic.  Don’t the players and the powers-that-be realise that slow play is the biggest turn off for the fans?  The TV companies have colluded with this by cutting all the faffing about out and playing everything on a slight delay.  Who can blame them?

The final straw for me is the American Ryder Cup team seems set to receive $400,000 per man for the honour of representing their country on golf’s biggest platform.  Many folk ask, “How can you expect the players, upon whom the whole spectacle depends, to be the only ones who don’t receive any remuneration for their week’s work?”

“Quite easily,” is my response.  These guys earn tons and tons of money – why CAN’T they revel in the purest form of competition there is?  This money grab is grubby and tainting.  That word “entitlement” seems to be at the forefront of everything.

For my part, I know lots of people from all sorts of walks of life who have very little and they give so much time, effort and money to charities and to those less fortunate.  Is it really such a stretch for some of those driving this change to understand that this demand for payment is wrong on every level?

I do not like the way my beloved golf is going but it seems set on a path that will be difficult to arrest.

Turning the Titanic comes to mind.