Years from now, when we look back on the 2024 golf season, we’ll probably point to Bryson DeChambeau’s 72nd-hole victory over Rory McIlroy in the U.S. Open as the year’s decisive moment. Maybe we’ll look to Scottie Scheffler’s tearful gratitude atop the podium at the Olympics as the year’s most emotional victory. Or maybe we’ll note Xander Schauffele’s decisive victories in both the PGA and Open Championships as 2024’s most steel-spine performances. Who’s to say?
You know what we won’t hold up as a season highlight? Scheffler winning the $25 million chunk of a $100 million FedEx Cup purse at the Tour Championship, or Jon Rahm capturing an $18 million bonus as LIV’s 2024 individual champion last weekend at LIV Golf Chicago. Congrats, guys. You took home another eight-figure check. That’s great news for you, your family, your agent, your accountant. And the fans — those who are still watching — shrug their shoulders.
The sport of golf isn’t built on paychecks, it’s built on moments — moments where the world’s best face down each other and themselves to capture titles and championships. The money is an incentive to the players, not the fans … and the fans are responding by bailing on the professional game in ever-greater numbers.
The money is also what’s apparently keeping the sport divided, resulting in a game where the sum of the parts is far less than the whole would be. The PGA Tour’s season concluded a few weeks ago with the Tour Championship, LIV’s wraps up this weekend with its team championship — and the sport seems no closer to unification than it was when the year started.
The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the financial backer of LIV Golf, announced a surprise “framework agreement” back in June 2023. The expectation — realistic or not — was that LIV Golf and the PGA Tour would reunite in some form within the next couple of years.
That hasn’t happened. We’ve heard plenty of “optimism” that “negotiations are progressing,” from a range of figures like Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth, but little in the way of actual progress. Indeed, the most visible outward sign of the negotiations’ status has been the resignation of one of the key figures in getting the deal done in the first place. When Jimmy Dunne stepped down from the board in May, citing “no meaningful progress,” that cut hard against the nothing-to-see-here, all-is-well pronouncements of the players and Tour officials involved in the negotiations.
It’s easy — perhaps too easy — to point to ratings as an indicator of the sport’s health. Ratings have declined across the board for virtually every tournament, across both tours. Fewer than 100,000 people tuned in for Rahm’s individual season victory last weekend, a number so astoundingly low it suggests that if people aren’t tuning into LIV now after three years, they never will.
But ratings are only as bad as the tournaments they’re measuring; better tournaments will turn around those figures in a hurry. The larger concern is that the PGA Tour is losing major sponsors, like Wells Fargo and Honda. The massive billion-plus-dollar investment from Strategic Sports Group will only go so far to replace departing sponsors; golf is in an unsustainable arms race right now.
Earlier this week, McIlroy suggested that the Department of Justice’s potential interest in a LIV-PGA Tour merger is holding up negotiations, which is certainly a valid concern. He also pointed out that there might just be a few voices — a few loud voices — who aren’t enamored with the idea of reunification.
“I’d say maybe half the players on LIV want the deal to get done; half probably don’t,” McIlroy said. “I’d say it’s probably similar on the PGA Tour. Because just like anything, everyone’s looking out for themselves and their best interests. You know, it would benefit some people for a deal not to get done, but it would obviously benefit some people for a deal to get done.”
He noted the difficulty involved when players are representing both their interest as players and their interest in the business, pointing out that those can often be in conflict with one another — that is, what’s good for the business might not be good for one individual.
“I think the tours want it to happen,” McIlroy said. “The investors certainly want it to happen because they can see the benefit for themselves. But right now, it’s DOJ and differing opinions of the players.”
There are signs of hope, but they’re coming from outside the negotiating room. The PGA Championship on Thursday codified what had been its de facto practice the last two years, allowing LIV players into its events if they qualify. More importantly, McIlroy and Scheffler will be playing DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka in a made-for-TV event later this year, as obvious a sign as any that at least some players want to get a deal done.
Are we, to use some creaky golf cliches, within sight of the clubhouse? Or are we at the turn? Or are we still on the equivalent of a tournament’s Thursday afternoon, where everything remains unsettled and the conclusion is a long way away?
Regardless, the game goes on — on separate paths — and there’s little outward urgency to get a deal done. Maybe appearances are deceiving, and maybe the continued poker-faced silence is a good negotiating tactic, but it sure comes off like golf’s power players are putting — and cashing massive checks — while the sport burns.