A Warning for the PGA Tour: It Can All Come Crashing Down
Opinion by Dan Vukelich, Sun Country Editor
Just like the banking industry, professional golf is due for a major correction and it’s about to get bloody.
On the horizon: dropped sponsorships, anemic Tour events, reduced purses and continuing erosion of TV viewership. Click here for an earlier post on the Wall Street Journal’s take on the future of PGA Tour sponsorships.
It’s time we recognized there’s just too much money in golf, an anachronistic, obscene “Last Days of the Roman Empire” conspicuous-consumption amount.
Does this money build the game at the ground level? Or is it making a very few people rich and distancing professional golf and the fat cats in the hospitality tents from the rest of us who are asked to buy the goods they peddle?
Even that dried-out fig leaf that historically has justified the obscene flood of cash in golf — money raised for local charities — crumbles completely when the world’s best players shamelessly abandon a revered local event, the Hope Desert Classic, for appearance money in Dubai.
It’s always been about the money with these people, hasn’t it? It’s just more obvious now that money is tighter.
Who’s trying to reverse the decline in rounds? Besides front-line club and muni pros, who’s getting serious about bringing kids into the game? What can be done to bring people of all ages back to the game they are leaving in droves?
Are the national golf writers writing about the problem and looking for solutions? Are they writing about gritty ground-level programs? Is anyone critiquing what works and what doesn’t, or are they leaving it to hollow PR slogans like “We are Golf” to magically make it all right?
Do the national golf media give a damn or are they doing what they’ve always done — jetting off on somebody else’s dime to write about exotic golf locales most people couldn’t afford to visit.
Is fawning coverage of the PGA Tour and its insiders and their pieces on exclusive golf-retirement properties about our need to know these things, or is it about a need to maintain the opulent lifestyle to which these writers have grown accustomed?
Pick up a national golf magazine and you’d think we’re still in the 1990s. Luxury courses, luxury vacation homes, Cadillacs, Rolexes and big-ticket golf equipment. Golf Digest is set to run a package on why you should chuck those outdated clubs for new hybrid-heavy set.
The magazine acknowledges only backhandedly that maybe you’re holding on to your old set because, oh, yeah, we’re in the worst economy since the 1930s.
While people continue to lose their homes and jobs, and many have been out of work so long they given up looking, the insiders, the royalty of professional golf are scrambling to squeeze the last couple million dollars out of the game in the same cynical fashion Wall Street predators squeezed the last billion out of the real estate bubble.
Since nothing is real until it happens on TV, news that jig is finally up and the bubble of golf has burst for good will likely come on TV when the camera carelessly pans wide on a Champions Tour event and the gallery is revealed to be — not there.
So, instead of squeezing out more money, maybe players on the PGA Tour and their Rolex-wearing toadies should ask, what if they held a golf tournament and nobody cared?
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