As the PGA Tour kicks off the calendar 2025 season in Hawaii at the Sentry Open at the Plantation Course in Maui,  Hawaii, the state of professional golf is as unsettled as ever.  PGA viewership is down by double-digits as the schism with the LIV Tour enters another year without any resolution.  Viewership loss is not reverting to the LIV Tour as their ratings are so low that they are hardly measurable.  The public doesn’t understand the LIV Tour team rankings and the Tour has done little if anything to educate the public.   The governance structure of the professional game lacks the leadership skills  to resolve the situation with LIV and unify professional golf.  The public wants to see all of these players competing all of the time in all events, major championships and Ryder Cups alike.  The PGA Tour has changed a number of its events to increase purses to compensate its members and hold off defections to LIV.  An example of this type of change is the AT&T Pro-Am at Pebble Beach in February.  This event was created by Bing Crosby many years ago as a clambake to have a fun event with a bunch of professional golfers.  It was the best and only Pro-Am on Tour where the amateur could play a minimum of three rounds of golf with a professional partner.   The Tour players grew weary of the event and stopped showing up leaving a fairly thin field as playing six hour rounds with a bunch of amateur entertainment and sports personalities was not something the professional wanted to do.     The Tour converted the AT&T to a “designated” event by requiring attendance while increasing the purse significantly.  The Pro-AM that was unique to the AT&T was reduced to a normal PGA Tour pro-am event minus the celebrities and corporate sponsors reducing the pro am to a standard Tour Pro-AM.   Entertainers and show business starts were now excluded from the event and the non golfer who used to come to the tournament to see some of the stars now stay home.  Bing Crosby’s event is no more.  The PGA Tour’s strategy will only result  in complete failure if the issue is money.  The Tour will never be able to compete with the LIV Tour from a financial resources point of view as the sponsorship of the Sovereign Fund of Saudi Arabia, which has all of the money in the world, will never be outspent by the PGA Tour.  Players will continue to defect to LIV lured by money and security.  The players that defect to LIV will make far more money than they could ever make on the PGA Tour, since the LIV purses are as lucrative as they need to be.  What the players that defect don’t realize is that their brand and reputation are essentially eliminated or greatly diminished from public view.  Golfers that reached professional status did so by learning the principles of competition and most of them have had outstanding amateur careers and have been competing for years and pursuing the mantra of being the best they can be.  I would argue that LIV removes the highest level of competition as the LIV Tour is awash in purse money for “losers” as well as winners.  Only players such as Bryson DeChambeau and Brookes Koepka have been able to keep their names in the highlights of professional golf by their excellent performances in major championships.

It seems pretty clear to me that the public is not interested in the LIV golf format but is always interested in the LIV players.  It also seems that when you are trying to introduce a new product in the market, such as LIV, you have to focus on educating the consumer to embrace the product.  LIV has done not the work to improve its market share to capture the professional golf consumer.  The absence of any agreement or merger to coexist is essentially encouraging the professional golf fan to either abandon watching the sport or limit watching it to the major championships.

In my view the PGA players have a vested interest in supporting their game and hanging with the PGA Tour.  Golf is more than money and brand and reputation matters.  The LIV guys have all of the money in the world they will ever need but very few, if any professional golf fans, have any idea how they are performing or even playing.  Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, Phil Mickelsen–Who are those guys???

With a significant lack of transparency, the professional golf fan has no idea as to how this will be resolved and the fan will either continue to watch the PGA Tour or reduce watching professional golf altogether.  What we do know is that the game of golf will persevere over the moneyed interests of the professional game.  The Saudi’s don’t seem to understand or care about any of this–it seems that golf, MMA, soccer are all fair game for their unlimited investments in sport.  Meanwhile, the soap opera that is professional golf prattles on.