Editor’s Note: Tyler Strong is an employee of the PGA Tour as well as a correspondent for The Augusta Press.
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan laid out seismic changes on August 24 to the Tour’s tournament purses and schedule, all effective immediately for its 2022-2023 season.
The most significant changes involve increasing the average purse size at 12 “elevated events” to $20 million. Monahan made the announcement at a press conference at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
Those elevated events include the three FedEx Cup playoff events, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Memorial Tournament, WGC Dell Match Play, Genesis Invitational, Sentry Tournament of Champions, and four existing events that will rotate year over year.
MORE: Woods, McIlroy behind tech-infused golf league in TV venture
A group of “top players” will be required to play in these events, Monahan said. The golfers comprising the “top players” category will be defined by the PGA Tour’s Player Impact Program.
The PIP is an existing concept for the Tour that kicked off in 2021. It awarded a cash bonus to 10 golfers who drove popularity of and interest in the game of golf. Tiger Woods took home the 2021 top PIP prize, a sum of $8 million. Now-LIV Golf member Phil Mickelson was second, cashing in for $6 million.
Other top performers on the 2021 list included Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Bryson DeChambeau. DeChambeau is now also a part of LIV Golf, as were fellow prize-winners Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson.
The PIP purse has been doubled to $100 million and will now include 20 players instead of 10.
The changes are all designed to encourage the top players on the PGA Tour to join up more often throughout the competitive golf season.
In January 2021, former Masters winner and current No. 32 player in the world Adam Scott told Golf Digest, “I think you’ve got to identify that there’s probably 10 or 12 serious competition events during the calendar year and then the rest is a bit of entertainment, really.”
Monahan’s approach to realigning the tour’s schedule will see the field strength rise at a number of events throughout the year and would even offer a boost to the smaller events on the tour’s schedule when the event’s number comes up to be “elevated.”
Speaking with the media after Monahan’s press conference Wednesday, Rory McIlroy said, “When I tune into a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game, I expect to see Tom Brady throw a football. Sometimes what’s happened on the PGA Tour is we all act independently, and we sort of have our own schedules, and that means that we never really get together all that often.”
He continued, “I think what came out of the meeting last week and what Jay just was up here announcing is the fact that we’ve all made a commitment to get together more often to make the product more compelling.”
The meeting McIlroy referred to took place in Delaware at last week’s penultimate playoff event, the BMW Championship. Nearly two dozen top players gathered at a closed-door meeting with Monahan to discuss the potential changes in a focus-group capacity before the announcements were made on Wednesday. Tiger Woods flew in to consult with Monahan and the top players, helping to guide the next few decades of PGA Tour formatting.
MORE: SEC: Alabama, Georgia, Texas A&M in hunt for national title
Top players were not the only party to be affected by the changes. A $500,000 credit against on-course earnings is now promised to every fully exempt member of the Tour. This means that PGA Tour rookies and younger players will have an immediate inflow of cash to aid in their first years of competition. It will also impact players that haven’t experienced massive success and are returning the Tour after re-acquiring a Tour card, which is essentially a license for competitive membership. A travel stipend will aid their tour-grinding schedules until some break through with a win — and financial breathing room.
“We believe it meets the challenging dynamic of how players manage and invest in their careers, and it’s comparable to how other leagues approach their athlete compensation,” Monahan said.
The rapid changes announced Wednesday come as an unspoken but direct counter to LIV Golf, a Saudi Arabian-funded rival golf league commissioned by Greg Norman. It was rumored that a number of top tour pros would be leaving the PGA Tour for LIV after the conclusion of the FedEx Cup playoffs on Aug. 28.
When pressed on whether the PGA Tour would consider lifting the ban on PGA Tour players that signed on with LIV, Monahan’s response was short: “No.”
