Tiger Woods is extending his dominance of golf from the course to the boardroom.
Woods attended a players-only meeting last week designed to propose ways for the PGA Tour to meet the growing threat of LIV Golf. The details of that meeting are now leaking out, and the consensus is this: the PGA Tour could be headed for significant change, and Woods is among those leading the charge.
The Tour has spent most of the last few months taking body blow after body blow from LIV. Whether the Tour was too slow to recognize LIV’s threat, or whether LIV was more appealing to players than golf traditionalists expected, the result is the same: LIV is now a clear and present threat to the PGA Tour. And so an institution, and an entire sport, built on resistance to change must now reinvent itself to remain viable.
Both No Laying Up and The Firepit Collective have published details on the players’ meeting, held last week in Delaware before the BMW Championship. The upshot is this: Woods and Rory McIlroy are spearheading a series of proposals that would dramatically realign the PGA Tour to favor top players, creating a new tournament structure that would bring those players together more often for more money.
As the PGA Tour currently stands, events take place virtually every week of the year. The 2021-22 season concludes this week at the Tour Championship at East Lake … and the 2022-23 season begins two weeks later at the Fortinet Championship. The vast number of tournaments dilutes the talent pool at any individual event. Imagine an NFL season where the Chiefs and Buccaneers only played once every few weeks, while the Jaguars and Texans played every week.
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The reported plan proposed by the Woods-McIlroy consortium would include up to 15 limited-field events with increased purses, a tour-within-the-Tour that would offer both financial incentives and guaranteed stability via a no-cut format. If that sounds an awful lot like what LIV’s tournaments are already, that’s because LIV’s format was created to appeal to what players want, and what fans need — the top players, all together.
