WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – It’s believed Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour’s new CEO, will be at the SoFi Center down the street Tuesday night when Tiger Woods’ TGL team takes on Steve Cohen’s other Team from New York in the second week of the second season of the made-for-TV golf competition. He attended the season opener last week. Does it matter that this is indoor and night golf, a game that has been played outdoors during the day for centuries? That is not the case. Rolapp has his eye on the real prize: In the first week, about 700,000 live viewers tuned in to ESPN and its cousins. Reasonable. Maybe the second week will be better.
On Wednesday night, Rolapp will likely be at The Breakers, the gold-plated five-star hotel across the Intracoastal Waterway, for a $300 Tiger Woods birthday party. If he knows anything about Woods, he knows these types of events are torture for him, but Woods will be there, with a smile on his face, raising money for his philanthropy, the TGR Foundation. If it’s important to Woods, it’s important to Rolapp. Woods is a member of the PGA Tour’s Policy Board, the Tour’s Enterprise Board (its for-profit arm) and the chairman of the Tour’s Future Competition Committee. As they tackle these issues and more – the Genesis Invitational, the Hero World Challenge – Rolapp and Woods will be the best of Zoom friends. Does it matter if he couldn’t tell Chris Como and Matt Killen, to name two of Woods’ instructors in recent years? That is not the case.
A long tea tray introduction to what’s going on here, in this whole path-back-to-the-Tour thing, with Brian Rolapp’s name and likeness on it. When Rolapp was named the PGA Tour’s new CEO shortly after last year’s U.S. Open, the refrain among those who knew him from the NFL was: smart, good business sense, not a golfer. Turns out that last part, originally intended as dis, is actually an asset (depending on your view of Monday’s news). Brian Rolapp’s main job is to let people watch PGA Tour events in person, and more importantly, on any screen of their choosing. If getting Brooks Koepka back into the fold will help Rolapp in this case, then he will do whatever it takes to get him back into the fold. There’s no reason for him to worry about how Koepka took the LIV Golf money when he could, how he hurt the PGA Tour by leaving, how irritated the grassroots players will be by this easy path back. He wants the eyeballs that Koepka brings. Point.
In his bid to bring back Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm (both winners of the US Open) and Cameron Smith (winner of both the ’22 Players Championship and the Open Championship), the same logic will apply.
Whatever happened, it happened. We want them back.
Monday’s news is the opening salvo. Rolapp said in August that his goal is not “incremental change. It’s significant change.” This is basically the antithesis of how Augusta National and the Masters operate, with the leaders there despising the word change and derive all their guidance from the word improvement. Golf has no tradition of ‘significant change’. Rolapp may not know and he certainly doesn’t care.
Brooks Koepka returns to the PGA Tour. Here are 10 questions you may have
By means of:
Dylan Dethier
When the LIV-Tour war first heated up in the summer of ’22, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said, “I’m not naive; if this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete.” That sounded very true at the time. Rolapp is here to tell you: dollar bills are not the only weapons in the LIV-PGA Tour battle. The PGA Tour offers something that LIV Golf does not and that is the freedom to create your own schedule. That opened the door to Koepka’s return.
As Rolapp tries to find a way back to the PGA Tour for Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith, the same logic will apply. DeChambeau thrived under LIV and has some bad PGA Tour memories. With Smith, it’s hard to know what he cares about. Rahm might be open to the “play where you want” argument. But for that he would have to leave behind a mountain of Saudi money.
It’s hard to imagine the Saudis simply walking away from LIV Golf. Running away is not in their cultural-business makeup. They are too rich, too smart and too ambitious. But Rolapp is going to do everything he can here to weaken LIV Golf. Working with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and a few other key figures, he will certainly pave some sort of narrow path back to the PGA Tour for Talor Gooch, Tyrrell Hatton and Joaquin Niemann and a few other LIV players who have won on the PGA Tour.
As for Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed, all major event winners, I suspect Rolapp has less interest in them or he would have extended the terms in Monday’s news. Mickelson is 55 and he has expressed so much disdain for the PGA Tour that it’s hard to imagine him coming back. Woods has never been fond of Sergio Garcia, so it’s not likely he pushed Rolapp to make it easy for him to return. Patrick Reed’s regulation debacles made him an outsider on the PGA Tour. As for Dustin Johnson, who knows anything about him? He can play in the Masters forever. His father-in-law is Wayne Gretzky. He has all the jet skis he needs.
Rolapp can’t kill LIV Golf, as the NFL helped destroy the USFL in 1986. But he can weaken it. He may diminish the star power and appeal of the international series for emerging golf talent. If he can weaken it enough, perhaps LIV Golf and the PGA Tour can achieve some sort of meeting of the minds, with the two leagues coexisting.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour CEO is shouting his unspoken message: I don’t care what happened. I want to fix what is broken now.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
#Brooks #Koepkas #coup #reveals #PGA #Tours #leader