Shortly after PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan met the press on Tuesday at the Players Championship, offering a rosy assessment of the state of play, my phone rang. The caller was someone I’ve never met or even spoken with. He is the tournament director at an old, proud PGA Tour event and he wanted to vent. “With all the change happening at the Tour,” he said, “there is one side to the story that is not being told: ours. Monahan, Tiger, Rory, all the other top players—they seem to have forgotten their biggest customer, which is the title sponsors of the tournaments. Honda, Dell Computers, Mayakoba… they’re gone. If the Tour keeps losing big, longstanding sponsors, none of this other stuff matters because the business model is going to collapse. Those of us at the tournament level, we’re on the front lines right now, trying to hold everything together.”

This gent agreed to participate in a Q&A on the condition of anonymity, to avoid retribution from the Tour and blowback from his event’s sponsor. 

Fire Pit: Your tournament this year is not an elevated event. Do you feel like there’s a really exclusive party you weren’t invited to?

Tournament director: I enjoyed Bay Hill as much as everybody else. It was a great show and I’m happy for the Tour to have some wins. We’re fine this season because everyone knows this schedule was thrown together as part of a very transitional year. The real concern is 2024 and beyond. Nobody knows what the future will look like. We remain hopeful, but there are still so many unanswered questions. The most frustrating part is that the Tour has done so little to engage with the title sponsors and the tournaments. The communication has been clunky and minimal at best. It’s almost like a form of avoidance. They do the absolute minimum and that has led to a lot of animosity between the Tour and the sponsors, which is unbelievable to me. You would think they would be working overtime to make their corporate partners feel valued and get them to buy into this new vision they are trying to create.

FP: How concerned are you about your strength of field in the future?

TD: Very. We have been told nothing about how much the top 50 players will have to play non-designated events next year. [Ed. note: In 2023, top players must compete in three non-elevated events to collect their full Player Impact Program bonus.] The only information we get is from the public press releases and that language appears to have been stripped away now. Of course, we joke that’ll probably change three or four more times based on which players complain. This is part of the frustration and animosity: None of this feels like a well laid-out plan. From the very beginning, the Tour has been reactionary all the way across the board. They’re just making this stuff up by the seat of their pants.

FP: How is your title sponsor reacting to the changing landscape?

TD: We had already been in conversations about reupping. In our mind it was a done deal coming out of last year, when we had a spectacular field. Now, it’s how can we show them value? How can they justify a $15 million investment? And if they can’t, candidly, how do we find someone else? It’s getting harder to ask for more and more from the sponsor without having answers. If we knew that every third year we would be designated, that would calm a lot of nerves. When you lose starpower, it definitely hurts. It hurts more from a perception standpoint. Make no mistake, when no big names show up at a tournament, like Honda, the news media around non-designated events turns very negative. Casual fans take note and the perception becomes they are being sold an inferior product. All of our local golf fans have been pinched by inflation, and discretionary spending has never been tighter. Fans are asking why they should spend 50 or 60 or 70 bucks to watch a bunch of players they’ve never heard of. Objectively, it’s a valid question.

FP: The Tour hosts an annual end-of-the-year gathering for the tournament directors, and I know you talk among yourselves. How would you describe the mood among your peers?

TD: When the news broke last summer and big names started leaving for LIV, multiple sponsors looked into how they could get out of their contracts. They felt they could do it since the product had been irrevocably harmed, but nobody wanted to be first. It would have been a lose-lose for everyone involved. It never happened, but that tells you what the mood has been like. There is more animosity now because it’s become two tours. If you’re not a designated event, there is a lot of stress and uncertainty about how you are going to keep, or find, a title sponsor. It all boils down to eyeballs for the sponsors: Am they getting what they signed up for? The ratings have been pretty staggering for non-elevated events, down 20 percent or more. I’m curious what TV is going to feel like for non-designated events next year. How does NBC feel? They paid $1.3 billion for TV rights; now the Tour is switching up the game on them. If two-thirds of their events are shit fields, with nobody in the top 20, what incentive do they have to invest in the broadcast? We’re asking them to spend a lot of money on a fringe sport, a regional sport. If they’re not getting eyeballs, that is a huge problem.

FP: How can your tournament survive if it never gets designated status?

TD: Over the last five to seven years, we have tried to turn our tournament into an event that people in our community want to be a part of. That takes a lot of energy and work and investment from the title sponsor, putting in extra capital besides what they are contractually obligated to do. We’re doing everything we can. But ultimately golf fans want to see the best players. That’s what is so frustrating about what is happening right now: These top guys are making sure they get paid, but what will this do to the long-term health of the Tour? They are creating a closed loop. That’s great for the top guys, and a small number of tournaments, but what about the rest of us? 

FP: Even if you aren’t given designated status, are there things you can do to attract players?

TD: Our tournament doesn’t pay players. We just don’t. Do some ask? Absolutely. A lot of the guys who used to ask have gone to LIV, but others are still on Tour. How do you think Travelers gets so many top guys to show up? That tournament is the king of appearance fees, though they call them personal service contracts or something like that. Bubba [Watson] went public with some of these details, but it’s been going on for a long time, basically paying guys to show up at a cocktail party and things like that.

FP: How much money are we talking?

TD: I’ve been told $250,000 to $500,000. Must be nice. The CEO is a golf nut, and they turned that tournament into a top event. Now they’ve bought their way into designated status so it’s hard to argue with the results. 

FP: It seems inevitable there is going to be some contraction of the schedule. You come from the business world, you must understand the market forces involved. But how challenging is it to put all this effort into hosting a tournament under these circumstances?

TD: It makes me sad because the Tour is choosing the winners and losers. Yes, in the past there had always been different tiers of tournaments based on how the schedule fell, but it wasn’t official policy and you always felt like you could overcome it. Maybe you’d give a sponsor’s exemption to a kid and he’d become a superstar and keep coming back year after year. Or maybe some top players would want to work on their game and add your event. But now we can’t control our own destiny and that is frustrating. You can do everything right but one or two decisions in Ponte Vedra Beach, or even from Tiger and Rory, can change everything. And that has a big effect on how your tournament is viewed in your community and the charitable impact you can have. And for what? Just so the top guys can make more money, even though they were already making a ton of it. It’s really sad.