Brian Rolapp’s resume may be several pages long, but it is actually three letters.
N.F.L.
Three letters mean a lot in golf, but in football they may be even more preoccupied. The PGA Tour’s new CEO’s journey to the top spot on the largest professional golf tour has been almost exclusively through the NFL, the most profitable sports entity in the world. His agenda as the league’s leader in media rights and innovation transformed his career from an NFL intern to a commissioner Roger Goodell’s right-hand man, and the NFL’s business from a few billion dollars to a few one hundred billion dollars. It doesn’t take an expert in the inner machinations of the PGA Tour to understand the appeal behind his candidacy for Tour leader: to bring a new three-letter word, N.F.Lto play golf.
The logic is sound, if not absolute. Rolapp would like to implement some of the lessons that have made the NFL such a success over the past two decades. (He helped create the NFL, after all terribly rich.) From all indications, he plans to do this. He teased “significant change” during his opening press conference as CEO.
But what change is on the menu? And how much of the NFL is a good thing? As the calendar shifts to the fall of 2025, that’s golf’s biggest question.
“I say it all the time in America: golf doesn’t have to be the NFL,” said Rory McIlroy, one of the professionals who will have to convince Rolapp. “It doesn’t have to be those other sports. Golf is golf, and that’s fine.”
McIlroy was speaking from the kind of venture Rolapp might appreciate: a paid golf ambassadorship in India, where he is competing in this week’s DP World Tour Event. McIlroy is just the latest professional to compete in an event in the world’s most populous country — an untapped market for golf that could produce the kind of “global growth” often trumpeted by its executives.
He was talking about something largely unrelated to Rolapp’s change agenda in pro golf: the harshness that seems to pervade fan behavior in other sports, but has largely remained removed from golf.
And yet there was something intriguing about the timing of McIlroy’s comments. He enters India after his closest taste of the NFL-ification of pro golf – a hotly contested Ryder Cup at Bethpage, in which McIlroy and his wife were the headliners. frequent targets of public ridicule well beyond the typical behavior of a golf tournament. Even then, McIlroy seemed disturbed by the behavior at Bethpage – and what it meant for his sport more broadly.
With the Tour embracing the ideals of the NFL, McIlroy seemed to ensure his enthusiasm for golf’s growth wouldn’t come at the expense of its individuality.
“I think [golf] can certainly grow,” he said. “But you also want to preserve the traditions and the values that make golf golf.”
Of course, there’s no indication that Rolapp (or anyone on the PGA Tour) is hungry for a Ryder Cup-like crowd every week on the PGA Tour. And McIlroy has made his position clear as an advocate for positive change in the golf world, devoting no shortage of his waking hours in the early 1920s to efforts aimed at maintaining the Tour’s stronghold in the aftermath of the LIV raid.
But was there perhaps a bit of politics in McIlroy’s response? Maybe.
“You don’t want your sport to be unwelcoming to newcomers. I absolutely understand that,” McIlroy said. “But you also don’t want newcomers coming into the game and ruining centuries of traditions and values of what this game represents or what it means.”
In many ways, McIlroy’s comments epitomized the tightrope that Rolapp and the rest of pro golf must now walk: innovating without going too far, honoring the past but not clinging to it too tightly.
This is the world the Tour signed up for when it ushered in the era of player equity from a group of outside investors. It is also the mountain Rolapp knew he would have to climb in the Tour before taking the lead.
“I think there has to be a balance,” he said. “I certainly think golf can grow, but it can grow in a way where the people who participate in the game still respect and recognize that this is a little bit different than other sports.”
Golf may be different, but it is far from the only sport entering the modernization debate. Basketball exploded the regular season and created a “seasonal tournament.” Football created a brand new kick-off from scratch. Baseball introduced a pitch clock and a ghost runner and a larger base and a replay review.
Some of those changes were accepted or even appreciated. Many were detested. It will be Rolapp’s job to find the balance.
The aim is to increase the size and popularity of the professional game, ensuring a significant financial windfall for everyone at the time of the Tour’s next TV rights deal at the end of the decade. That’s an image that most people in the golf world, especially those who cash checks on the PGA Tour, can appreciate.
But in golf, nothing is as simple as three letters. Not even close.
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