the pro golf tour

Masters Tournament

Watch on espn+, 2024 masters golf tournament (esp), 2024 masters golf tournament, the masters: featured groups, the masters: holes 4, 5 & 6, the masters: amen corner, the masters: holes 15 & 16, latest golf videos, rory saves par after 'spectacular' shot from the sand.

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Your US State Privacy Rights
• Children's Online Privacy Policy
• Interest-Based Ads
• About Nielsen Measurement
• Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information
• Disney Ad Sales Site
• Work for ESPN
• Corrections

• Rex Hoggard ,

• John Newby ,

Trending Teams

• Golf Channel Podcast
• College Golf Talk
• Instruction

View Full Schedule

• Ryan Lavner ,

• Brentley Romine ,

SIGHTS AND SOUNDS

More PGA Tour

Update your browser for more security, speed and the best experience on this site.

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Learn more

Pro Golf Tour: Tournament series in europe

Things to know.

Information about the tour, the way to the tour, the most important questions, history & the team

What's the Pro Golf Tour?

The Pro Golf Tour was founded in 1997 and is a tournament series for young golf professionals and top amateurs who have set themselves the goal of becoming playing professionals. In addition to Langer Sport Marketing GmbH, the shareholder of the Pro Golf Tour is the PGA of Germany and its umbrella company Professional Golf AG.

The Pro Golf Tour is recognized by the European Tour as the gateway to the Challenge Tour and is therefore one of four official satellite tours. This means: Whoever occupies one of the top places in the Pro Golf Tour Order of Merit at the end of the season receives the right to play on the Challenge Tour for the following year. In addition, the best players are exempt from stage 1 of the Qualifying School and have thus already cleared the first hurdle on the way to the premier league of golf, the European Tour.

Last but not least, the steadily growing popularity of outstanding international players confirms that the Pro Golf Tour is becoming more and more popular every year and enjoys an excellent reputation as a professional tour and as a suitable gateway to the Challenge Tour. Accordingly, the quality and size of the participant fields are also continuously increasing. In total, up to 156 players compete in the Pro Golf Tour tournaments. The participants come from over 30 different nations.

The most prominent former member of the tour is Martin Kaymer from Mettmann, who won the ranking with five tournament victories in 2006, played a new German record round of 59 strokes at the Habsberg Classic and qualified for the European Tour via the Pro Golf Tour and the Challenge Tour (two victories) in the same year. On February 28, 2011, Martin Kaymer climbed to No. 1 in the world golf rankings.

Up-to-the-minute coverage of the Tour's tournaments is available on the website with live scoring and bilingual text and images, as well as on the Pro Golf Tour's social media channels on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. The Pro Golf Tour's headquarters and tour office are located in Diedorf near Augsburg. The managing directors of the Pro Golf Tour are Rainer Goldrian and Peter Zäh.

Pro Golf Tour questions

What is the pro golf tour.

The Pro Golf Tour founded in 1997 and run under the name EPD Tour until 2012 is taking place for the 25th time in 2021. Prize money of ca. EUR 500,000 will be distributed to participating professionals between April 2021 and October 2021 at about 16 tournaments in up to six countries. Besides Langer Sport Marketing GmbH from Diedorf in Germany the PGA of Germany respectively the Professional Golf AG based in Munich is the Pro Golf Tour's other shareholder.

The Pro Golf Tour is recognised by the DP World Tour as a gateway to the Challenge Tour and is therefore one of four official satellite tours. That means: anyone who occupies one of the top rankings in the Pro Golf Tour Order of Merit at the end of the season is authorised to play on the Challenge Tour the following year. The ranking list leaders are also exempt from level 1 of the Qualifying School and have therefore already overcome the first hurdle on their way to the premier league of golf, the European Tour.

Last but not least, the steadily growing popularity of outstanding international players confirms that the Pro Golf Tour is becoming more attractive from year to year and is enjoying a superb reputation as a professional tour and suitable gateway to the Challenge Tour. The quality and size of the field of participants is continuously rising accordingly. There are up to 156 players in total who tee off at the Pro Golf Tour tournaments. Participants come from over 25 different nations.

The most famous former member of the tour is Martin Kaymer from Mettmann, who won the ranking list in 2006 with five tournament wins, played a new record round of 59 at the Habsberg Classic and qualified in the same year for the European Tour via the EPD Tour and Challenge Tour (two wins). Martin Kaymer climbed to first place in the golf world rankings on 28th February 2011.

What conditions does a professional need to fulfil to play on the Pro Golf Tour?

Any professional can take part in the Pro Golf Tour tournaments. As a result there are no barriers to entry that players have to overcome. It is also possible to join the Pro Golf Tour at any time during the season.

Is a Q-School played on the Pro Golf Tour?

A Qualifying School takes place every year in October. The reason for the Qualifying School was to give new, and existing players the opportunity to gain or improve their category for the following season.

The Pro Golf Tour still remains a freely accessible tour, thus enabling all professionals and good amateurs (minimum Handicap-Index 3,4), to play in tournaments run by the Pro Golf Tour and gain experience as a tour golfer.

Please be aware that it is NOT a requirement to obtain a category to be able to participate in Pro Golf Tour tournaments, but it is advantageous. To take advantage of your category you have to be a member of the Pro Golf Tour.

Categories 2023

• Cat 1 - Winners of Pro Golf Tour Tournaments 2023
• Cat 2 - TOP 30 of the final Pro Golf Tour Ranking 2023
• Cat 3 - TOP 5 of the Pro Golf Tour Ranking 2024 & Winners of Pro Golf Tour Tournaments 2024
• Cat 4 - TOP 5 of the final Pro Golf Tour Ranking 2020-2022 & Players within 2023 Challenge Tour Category 1-20 (Members of the Pro Golf Tour season 2022)
• Cat 5 - TOP 10 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS I & TOP 10 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS II
• Cat 6 - 12 invitations to be decided by the Pro Golf Tour
• Cat 7 - Players finishing in positions 31-65 in the final Pro Golf Tour Ranking 2023
• Cat 8 - Players finishing in positions 11-30 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS I & Players finishing in positions 11-30 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS II
• Cat 9 - Players finishing in positions 66-90 in the final Pro Golf Tour Ranking 2023
• Cat 10 - Players finishing in positions 31-45 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS I & Players finishing in positions 31-45 of the Qualifying School 2023, QS II

Do I need to be a member of the Pro Golf Tour?

Any professional golfer can play up to three tournaments without being a member. Membership is required when you register for the fourth tournament. For amateurs, membership is not required, but without membership amateurs will not be listed in the final ranking (Order of Merit).

Can amateurs play on the Pro Golf Tour?

Yes, amateurs are always welcome on the Pro Golf Tour. Any amateur with a Handicap-Index of 3.4 or better can take part in a Pro Golf Tour event. Professionals are given preference with the awarding of starting places. In the summer months with fields of participants of up to 156 players it is generally not a problem for amateurs to take part in a Pro Golf Tour tournament.

How high are the starting fees and membership fees?

Starting fee per tournament:

• Pro Golf Tour members: EUR 300
• Non-members: EUR 350 (max. 3 tournaments)
• Amateurs: EUR 300
• Late entry fee: EUR 50 (in addition to starting fee)

Membership fee:

• 250 Euro per season

How can I register for the Pro Golf Tour?

Professionals and amateurs can create their own account on the Pro Golf Tour website under Player Login ( https://www.progolftour.de/login.html ) and register for all tournaments and membership here. All information about the Pro Golf Tour as well as the tour rules can be looked at in this area.

When is the registration deadline for each tournament?

The registration deadline is between 7 -21 days (midday) before the tournament. Late entry is always possible if there are any starting places left.

Please note the different entry closing date for tournaments in Egypt.

What are the requirements to be listed in the Order of Merit at the end of the season?

Tour office & management.

Pro Golf Tour Office

Contact person: EPDT Golf Tours GmbH Address: Hausener Str. 29, D-86420 Diedorf Phone number: +49 (0) 8238-902748 Email: [email protected]

Geschäftsführer / CEO EPDT Golf Tours GmbH

Contact person: Peter Zäh Phone number: +49 (0) 8238-902748 Email: [email protected]

Finance and Accounting

Contact person: Sabine Baur Phone number: +49 (0)8238-902748 Email: [email protected]

Masters Tournament

Augusta National Golf Club

A HISTORY OF EVERY HOLE AT AUGUSTA

EVERY HOLE AT AUGUSTA

Unification

Here's what a unified, global professional golf tour could look like

Viktor Hovland hits a drive during the Dubai Desert Classic at Emirates Golf Club.

Warren Little

The idea of a unified global circuit in professional golf is far from a novel concept, yet it mostly existed on the sport’s backburner as a cognitive exercise rather than a reality that could be achieved. The advent of LIV Golf and the strategic alliance between the PGA and DP World Tours, however, has brought that idea to the forefront, especially following the PGA Tour’s partnership with private equity and the possibility of a deal with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Some of the game’s leaders are publicly championing for a global circuit to come to fruition, and in this new world order of golf the only constraints are imagination.

“Going forward, if everything is on the table, venues have to be a big part of the consideration,” Rory McIlroy told Golf Digest’s John Huggan last month . “We need to make sure the courses are worthy of the players who are going to be competing. My dream scenario is a world tour, with the proviso that corporate America has to remain a big part of it all. Saudi Arabia, too. That’s just basic economics. But there is an untapped commercial opportunity out there. Investors always want to make a return on their money. Revenues at the PGA Tour right now are about $2.3 billion. So how do we get that number up to four or six? To me, it is by looking outward. They need to think internationally and spread their wings a bit.”

But what would a more international schedule look like? We put together a blueprint for a 22-event global circuit, one that would serve as an elevated series of sorts to the sport’s professional circuits in the same vein as the former World Golf Championship events. Meaning, these would not replace the PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LIV Golf, etc., but work in conjunction with them. The operative word is “international,” for one of the many failures of the WGCs was forgetting what the “W” stood for, with almost all of the competitions eventually becoming American-centric. Our theoretical league tries its best to visit as many regions as possible, both those where golf is already loved and where it has a chance to grow.

We followed a cadence of two tournaments per month, with the understanding that a player has no minimum requirement for appearances. If a region already has a prominent place on a schedule (the Masters in April, the Ryder Cup in the fall) we tried to keep it within the same time frame. And, like McIlroy mentioned, venues matter, so—save for a few instances—if we’re traveling around the world, we’re going to make those travels worth it by visiting the best courses the regions have to offer. Here is our framework for a global, unified professional tour.

January: The Middle East, India

Dubai is already on the golf map, as the DP World Tour has three tournaments scattered across its schedule in the region, including its season finale. It is far from perfect; the course architecture tends to be resort-y and forgettable. Yet the sport needs a presence in the Middle East and Dubai has the infrastructure, facilities and thirst to make it a worthwhile destination … India surpassed China last year as the most populous country in the world. Due to the nation’s extreme poverty rates, it’s not viewed as a great untapped market as its population numbers suggest. Conversely, there’s still a potential audience that’s mostly being ignored, to say nothing of the fact that golf can be used as a force for good. Like Dubai, India is already on the Euro Tour schedule with the Indian Open, although the tournament is skipped by most of the DP World Tour’s talent and no American stars have made the trip in some time. However, the tournament has a zealous backer in Hero Motor Corps. (which also sponsors Tiger Woods’ exhibition event) and the megacity of Delhi boasts a half-dozen venues that could serve as hosts. Similar to Dubai, architectural aficionados will be disappointed with what’s on display, but a stop in India is a smart long term investment for the game.

Riviera Country Club is one of the most iconic venues on the PGA Tour.

Keyur Khamar

February: South America, Riviera/Pebble Beach

Argentina has a rich golf history and has over 300 courses scattered across the country, yet the sport at large has mostly ignored the it, save for a few visits from the PGA Tour Americas minor-league circuit. Sticking in South America, Brazil is loaded with potential, but the game is underdeveloped there despite a population of 250 million and the fact golf made its return to the Olympics outside Rio in 2016. Augusta National, the USGA and R&A have made strides with the Latin America Amateur Championship in promoting the game, but it’s time golf takes that effort to the professional level, which is why our new circuit will have a rotating tournament between Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo/Rio de Janeiro. … Speaking of rotating, the PGA Tour has two crown jewels on the West Coast Swing in Pebble Beach and Riviera. We briefly toyed with putting both of these stops on the new circuit, but California is already overrepresented on the PGA Tour as is (with six different events last year alone). Rather than pitting these two gems against each other, they will be used in a joint venture, with a California event going back-and-forth between Monterey and Los Angeles.

The Players could become a more international event in the future.

Chris Condon

March: Texas, Players Championship

The emphasis on the Middle East, India and South America tour stops are market potential, and as an upshot the quality of venue takes a backseat. We don’t have that problem in Texas, which is not short on courses that are sound from a design and aesthetic standpoint while also having the needed infrastructure to host a pro event. Our Texas event will have a rota of the Dallas metroplex (Colonial, Trinity Forest), Houston (Bluejack National, Memorial Park) and Austin (Austin C.C.). The quirky nature of Austin C.C. was perfect for match play but could be a bit more problematic in stroke, and Bluejack might be a bit too easy for pros, which is why we’re proposing this event use the Stableford scoring system to make things interesting. … Buy-in from the PGA Tour is imperative for a global circuit, and if the tour’s involved it will want the Players to be a marquee event. The only modification will be making its field more open to other circuits, meaning the top 10 finishers on the Order of Merit get in along with exemptions for Australasia, Japan, Sunshine and, yes, LIV Golf tours.

April: The Masters, Mexico

No need to waste words on the obvious: A circuit without the Masters doesn’t mean much. … A large portion of the golf in Mexico is constrained to resorts. With so much land, and a population of 130 million people (10th most in the world), there’s so much room for the sport to grow. Clearly, other professional sports see this too, which is why the NBA and NFL have hosted games in Mexico in recent years. For golf to take advantage there needs to be a yearly tournament in the heart of the country. Because, while Los Cabos and Playa del Carmen may have more beautiful backdrops, skipping Mexico City’s populace seems like a miss. It only had a four-year run as host of a WGC but Club de Golf Chapultepec outside Mexico City proved to be a charming venue capable of facilitating drama and producing proven winners. It’s also a good spot to revitalize the recently sidelined Match Play event. One sentiment that hurt the last iteration of Match Play is its proximity to the Masters; by moving it after Augusta, the format is not seen as a possible detriment to Masters prep. And though this format instills a pressure that stroke play often lacks, a late-April Match Play could be enticing as an assimilation back into a competitive mindset after the inevitable post-Masters malaise.

RELATED: Augusta National expansion debate

Brooks Koepka is the reigning PGA champion.

Kevin C. Cox

May: PGA Championship, Canadian Open

The Canadian Open has got the shaft in recent years, as it’s been moved around on the tour schedule changes while the country’s health and safety protocols during the pandemic kept the tournament from being played. Putting it on the global circuit ensures a good field for one of the most storied events in golf. … There’s going to be a lot of talk over the next few months (maybe even years) about PGA Tour Enterprises circling the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup as possible assets under its umbrella. Whether that happens or not, it would be interesting to see the PGA Championship becoming a major that travels outside the United States. Australia has long been cited as a country warranting major championship golf, but the same could be said for France, Spain and Japan. While it has long shed its “black sheep” stigma among the majors, the PGA—compared to its Big 4 brethren—remains searching for an identity. Making the Wanamaker Trophy go global allows the championship to finally realize what it is, and to get out of the shadow of the Masters and U.S. Open.

June: U.S. Open

There are a few reasons for the U.S. Open as the only tentpole June event. The first is the Canadian Open could bleed into the first weekend of June. Second, the U.S. Open is the brute of majors, the one that is prone to breaking scorecards and bullying players. While the Travelers Championship has carved out a niche of sorts by serving as friendly confines in the week-after spot, let’s give our globetrotters some time off from elevated/mandated events. Especially since they will be hit with a three-week stretch in July …

RELATED: The one thing that Saudi golf can't buy

David Cannon/R&A

July: Irish Open, Scottish Open, Open Championship

We advocated last summer for the PGA Tour to host a links swing, and this falls along the same premise. Historically, the Irish Open and Scottish Open have preceded the Open Championship, and when played at the proper venues the Irish and Scottish serve as a two-week Open Championship primer to both players and fans. However, issues with sponsorship, fields, the DP World Tour schedule, infrastructure and attendance have kept the Irish and Scottish Opens from consistently visiting the best links courses each country has to offer, instead defaulting to hosts that are seeking exposure or relevance. Financial backing from a global circuit could return past Irish Open hosts like Lahinch, Ballyliffin and Portmarnock into the rotation, along with Royal County Down—arguably the best links in the world and host of four Irish Opens. As for the Scottish, Gullane has been a past Scottish Open favorite and certainly has the property to host again, and there’s the case that the global circuit should shoot its shot and attempt to get North Berwick’s West Links into the mix. The links may be somewhat on the easier side for the world’s best but it’s so full of character and romanticism that fans won’t worry about the low scores.

RELATED: It's time for the PGA Tour to host a European Swing

England's Wentworth is the yearly host of the BMW PGA Championship.

Ross Kinnaird

August: Europe, Wentworth

Ideally, the Europe event would rotate between a number of countries like France, Spain and Germany, and the focus isn’t so much potential courses as it is the markets they are in, similar to how the NFL, NBA and now Major League Baseball are tapping into these regions by bringing regular-season contests to Europe. Might we suggest France's Morfontaine? (Yes, we know it's short. Yes, we know it's exclusive. We'll make it work.) In a related note, the PGA Tour might be wondering why the global circuit skips the United States during the summer months. It’s no secret that European players and officials are wondering what exactly the DP World Tour is receiving from the PGA Tour in the strategic alliance, especially now that the PGA Tour has the SSG backing along with contemplating a Saudi offer that the PGA Tour convinced the DP World Tour not to take. Bringing two more European events—including the DP World Tour’s flagship event at Wentworth—won’t totally assuage hurt and bruised egos, but it’s a start.

Europe celebrates winning the 2023 Ryder Cup.

Naomi Baker

September: Ryder Cup/World Cup, Tour Championship

No offense to the Presidents Cup, but it’s a spitting format image of the Ryder Cup, and in the latter’s off-years we want something a bit more inclusive. Reviving the World Cup allows all countries to get in the mix, and permits the global circuit to travel to regions that currently don’t have a spot on the schedule (such as Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.) … As for the Tour Championship—which, under our proposal, becomes a fusion of the best from the PGA Tour’s regular season along with the best from the global circuit—we are moving it from its East Lake confines to make it a traveling tournament. This helps the tour rectify the fact that it has no presence in big cities such as New York, Boston or Chicago, while also bestowing a chance to get creative in how it presents its season finale. For example, imagine the Tour Championship (with a field of 50 golfers) at Bandon! First three days are stroke play at Trails, Old Mac and Pacific. The top eight move to match play (with top seeds picking their opponent) with the quarters at Sheep Ranch and semis/championship at Bandon Dunes. Any playoff goes to the Preserve. The Tour Championship should feel like a celebration, and because professional golf is mostly a television product, reward the fans who have watched all year long with something that gets them excited.

RELATED: The Ryder Cup underscores golf's biggest problem

Sungjae Im of South Korea is one of the most prominent PGA Tour players from Asia.

October: South Korea, Japan

Japan is the second-largest golf market in the world, accounting for roughly 20 percent of all golf-related business. Korea is right behind in third. Hirono G.C. is a masterpiece featuring some of the most dynamic greens in the world, and though it has hosted many of Japan’s top tournaments it is more than worthy of a global gathering despite its relative lack of length. South Korea is not short on viable venues, highlighted by Wellington C.C and Nine Bridges. … It’s worth noting one of the reasons LIV Golf and rogue leagues were fun thought exercises is because the professional game had fallen into stasis. A lot of this has to do with the PGA Tour and DP World Tour’s subservience to their respective points and money lists, putting 72-hole stroke play as a top priority to determine the winners of said lists which in turn benches creativity with different formats. A global circuit would not have the same strings attached, which is why the Korean and Japan spots could serve as logical hosts for mixed events. Ten of the top 22 women in the Rolex Rankings have Asian backgrounds and the women’s game is just as big of a draw, if not bigger, than the men in South Korea. A mixed event is not just a fun experiment; it could be a roadmap for future competitions for other professional tours around the world.

The 2019 Presidents Cup was played at Royal Melbourne.

Quinn Rooney

November: Australia, South Africa

Australia is a pro golf-starved continent and one that’s been an underutilized asset by the game; it should be no surprise that LIV Golf’s most successful event to date has been Down Under, and arguably the most memorable Presidents Cups have been played at Royal Melbourne (inarguably a top-10 course in the world). The best way to get Australia onto the global circuit? Make the Australian Open a major championship with Royal Melbourne its annual host. … South Africa has six events on the DP World Tour schedule and produces some of the best golfers in the world. Given the DP World Tour usually swings through in late November to early December, elevating the South African Open—one of the oldest national championships in the sport—is an easy call.

More from Golf Digest

Trending now.

What’s The Difference Between A Tour Pro And A PGA Pro?

Modern golf professionals make their living in a variety of ways

• Sign up to Golf Monthly Newsletter Newsletter

First thing to say when looking at the difference between a Tour Pro and a PGA Pro is that the two are not mutually exclusive – a PGA Pro may often play as a Tour Pro, competing in the same events, and many Tour Pros are also PGA Pros.

But at both ends of the spectrum of what golf professionals do for work, there are clear differences in how your average Tour Pro and regular PGA Pro earn their coin.

Here, in a nutshell, is how the Tour Pro and PGA Pro ply their trades - 

Rory McIlroy is one of the most famous and successful Tour Pros, who competes in all the Majors and biggest PGA Tour events

A Tour Pro or touring professional golfer predominantly aims to make their living by enjoying a successful competitive playing career. They focus their energies on getting everything they can from their games. The modern tour pro is an athlete who will spend every day trying to improve – practising golf, working on fitness , nutrition, mental strength … Exploring all avenues to give them a competitive edge.

Whether they compete at the very highest level – The PGA Tour, The DP World Tour, LPGA or LET circuits, or even the new LIV Golf tour – or at a lower level on a feeder tour or domestic circuit, their principal focus is winning golf tournaments, or at least finishing as high up on the final leaderboard as possible to earn prize money and status to get their name noticed by potential sponsors.

Across the globe there are thousands of Tour Pros, plying their trade on numerous circuits in each corner of the golfing globe. Those on the lower rungs of the ladder may be trying to climb upwards through the rankings to reach the loftier heights of the professional game – to play in those televised tournaments we see each week on the main pro Tours and even to make it into the Majors.

There will also be Tour Pros who play at a lower level and are content to stay at that level – In some cases being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can be more lucrative. The cost of playing on one of the main, international, professional tours is extremely high due to travel fees, hotels, food, caddies, insurance etc. and, if a Tour Pro doesn’t enjoy a level of success, they can easily spend more than they earn.

Get the Golf Monthly Newsletter

Subscribe to the Golf Monthly newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest tour news, equipment news, reviews, head-to-heads and buyer’s guides from our team of experienced experts.

Playing a circuit closer to home with lower prize funds is a more sensible financial set-up for many, given the far lower expenses incurred.

Tour Pros will supplement the prize money they earn with sponsorship money from golf manufacturers and businesses outside of golf. They will have a certain number of responsibilities each year through their sponsorship deals – to meet clients of their sponsor, to deal with the media, to use the right equipment and wear the correct badges/labels on the golf course.

At the highest level, these sponsorship deals will often earn the top players more money than they pick up in prizes. At a lower level, the sponsorship deals are often crucial to keep the journeying professional afloat.

PGA Professional

A PGA Professional is a member of the Professional Golfers’ Association. To become a member of the association in this country one must undertake a three-year training programme which since 2003 has been a nationally recognised qualification – a Foundation Degree in Professional Golf.

You also have to obtain an Association of Sports Qualification’s Level 2 certificate in coaching golf, as well as attaining a first aid certificate, undergoing a background check and to have competed at a professional level to an agreed standard – it’s a highly regarded qualification and one that opens doors .

The options for a PGA Professional are wide ranging. These days, there’s a great deal more to choose from than the inaccurate old cliché of simply, “selling Mars bars in a shop.” PGA Professionals work in coaching, managing, retail, administration and manufacturing. From designing courses to coaching an elite player – there are hugely exciting options to explore.

There is also the opportunity to work all over the world – The PGA in the UK has 8,000 members, with 1,500 of these working internationally in more than 80 countries. The PGA of America has tens of thousands of members, with 20 of its PGA Pros earning a spot into the PGA Championship Major each year - that's how Michael Block skyrocketed to fame after his incredible T15th finish in 2023.

Michael Block is the head pro at Arroyo Trabuco Golf Club in Mission Viejo, California

The modern PGA Professional working at a golf club or facility has a raft of responsibilities that far exceed those of the traditional “club pro.” The role has transformed from that of a shopkeeper doing the odd repair job and giving an occasional lesson to one that’s far more dynamic with PGA Pros involved in at least some, if not all areas of golf club management as well as coaching, PR, finance, retail and sharing general golfing expertise in equipment, technique, Rules and golf technology.

Once a member of the PGA, it’s possible to progress up the ranks – from PGA Professional to PGA Advanced Professional, PGA Fellow Professional, PGA Advanced Fellow Professional, then, at the top of the pile – PGA Master Professional.

But, of course, most PGA Professionals are in the business because they love golf and there are many opportunities for PGA Pros to play the game competitively – there are PGA events in every region and, as qualified pros, they are able to enter qualifying for larger events and even tours. Ryder Cup players like Paul Lawrie and Ian Poulter began their careers as PGA assistant professionals and made their way into Tour golf.

The fundamental difference between a Tour Pro and a PGA Pro is a Tour Pro predominantly makes their living from playing the game, whereas a PGA Pro makes their living by using their knowledge of golf to instruct, manage, sell, make or promote within or around the game.

Fergus is Golf Monthly's resident expert on the history of the game and has written extensively on that subject. He is a golf obsessive and 1-handicapper. Growing up in the North East of Scotland, golf runs through his veins and his passion for the sport was bolstered during his time at St Andrews university studying history. He went on to earn a post graduate diploma from the London School of Journalism. Fergus has worked for Golf Monthly since 2004 and has written two books on the game; "Great Golf Debates" together with Jezz Ellwood of Golf Monthly and the history section of "The Ultimate Golf Book" together with Neil Tappin , also of Golf Monthly. 

Fergus once shanked a ball from just over Granny Clark's Wynd on the 18th of the Old Course that struck the St Andrews Golf Club and rebounded into the Valley of Sin, from where he saved par. Who says there's no golfing god?

The 2020 US Open champion led the 13-strong LIV Golf contingent – and the rest of the field – after a hot start in his first round

By Joel Kulasingham Published 12 April 24

Woods played 13 holes in one-under-par on Thursday afternoon before play was called due to darkness

By Elliott Heath Published 12 April 24

• Contact Future's experts
• Terms and conditions
• Privacy policy
• Accessibility statement
• Cookies policy
• Advertise with us

Golf Monthly is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site . © Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share by Email

Pinehurst #10 opened last week. Want to play it?

Pro golf is calling for a global tour. But what does that look like?

Rory McIlroy hits a tee shot against the skyline of Dubai's Marina district.

Getty Images

DUBAI — There’s plenty to look at from the back of the driving range here at the Dubai Desert Classic. For one, there are the divots of lush, green grass flying off the prettiest golf swings on the planet. And behind them, one of the most iconic skylines in the world — the Dubai Marina district and its many, many skyscrapers, which loom over every image of this tournament.

At the base of that skyline is a massive, black wall sporting a map of the world outlined in yellow. On the map are 45 numbered circles, one for each of the 45 locations of tournaments on the DP World Tour. Nos. 1 and 3 are in Australia while 2, 4 and 5 are in South Africa. There are four dots in the United States, five in the United Kingdom and five more here, in a much different place, the United Arab Emirates. 

Next to all of that, four words protruded from the sign in bold, white lettering:

“A TRULY GLOBAL TOUR”

Ahhh — so it does exist! 

Prudent golf fans who follow the quotes and the money and the decisions of the game’s leaders would have you believe that a truly global tour doesn’t exist. The next step for pro golf in the age of PGA Tour/LIV peace, they say, is the creation of a tour spanning timezones and continents and hemispheres. Technically, they’d be wrong, as evidenced by the DP World Tour’s clever tournament signage, but figuratively they’d be right. Because many of the game’s biggest names discuss the idea of a truly global tour as something the sport doesn’t have. At least not yet.

Just last week, Rory McIlroy shared his dream for the future of the pro game: a globetrotting schedule for golf’s most elite players which spends the majority of its time tapping the dominant American market, but also visits the Far East, the Middle East, Australia, Singapore, etc. 

“I think if we really want to,” McIlroy said, “if everyone is talking about growing the game, especially if these investors are going to come into our game and they want a return on their capital, I think everyone needs to start thinking more globally around it. But globally in a holistic way, not like this tour, that tour and another tour.”

The complexities of McIlroy’s “dream” didn’t get litigated during that press conference, but they were illustrated at an intimate gathering Tuesday between outgoing DP World Tour chief Keith Pelley and a gaggle of reporters. Pelley is bound for Toronto , where he hails from, to become the CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, but not before April 2, and certainly not before the next couple of months provide a clearer picture of how the game’s leading tours chart a future either with or without billions of dollars from the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Asked simply about what he would like to see moving forward, Pelley was prescriptive.

“I think the growth of the game is global. I think that’s where the focus needs to be,” he said. “I think with the emergence of [Fenway Sports Group], which owns Liverpool, you know, they understand the importance of global. PIF certainly understands the importance of being global. This is a global game. Every business now that is growing wants to be global. You see that here in Dubai. You saw that last week with the Dubai Invitational. I think for me, what I would like to see is the game becoming unified with a global strategy.”

Global, global, global. Pelley used that terminology relentlessly during the 40-minute sitdown — 18 times in total — but an interesting turn came from the immediate follow-up question.

Does the PGA Tour view it that way, too? 

“I think the PGA Tour is coming to the realization that globality is the key for growth,” he said. “They have heard me say it once or twice.” 

That last part may have been a touch sarcastic, but his tone was serious. Pro golf’s global future depends greatly on how much the PGA Tour embraces the look of a dotted map on the back of a driving range. This week’s event is being played for the 35th time in Dubai, a city whose population has grown by nearly 700 percent since the tournament was founded in 1989. What was once a single Arabian spot on the calendar has now become the site of the DP World Tour’s second headquarters. And why not? Dubai is one of just nine cities to earn the distinction of Alpha+ (or higher) from the Globalization and World Rankings Research Institute, a metric that attempts to rank cities by their impact on the global economy. Dubai is a travel pipeline between continents and a financial hub for international trade. It charges no income tax, which makes it particularly attractive to pro golfers, who are more than happy to find residency where they will be taxed the least. (The same reason pro golfers born and raised in California find themselves buying houses in Nevada, Florida or Texas.)

Where pro golfers play and how much they play for are perhaps the two most important questions of the job for golf tour CEOs like Pelley. He views it as one of the highlights of his tenure that 10 golfers from the DP World Tour now have full status on the PGA Tour each year.

“[I went] back-and-forth last night with Matthieu Pavon,” Pelley noted, “who finished seventh in his first tournament and won a quarter of a million. And he says, ‘Thanks, Boss.’” A frenchman earned a huge paycheck on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean thanks to status he received after great performances in Spain, Dubai and South Africa. No wonder Pelley had a twinkle in his eye.

It’s likely Pelley’s term will be remembered most for the strategic alliance he signed with the PGA Tour , ultimately sacrificing a percentage of his tour for greater financial stability, but it was far from the only agreement he made with global intentions. There was a separate strategic alliance signed with the PGA of Australasia. And one with the Korean PGA, too. A week ago the DPWT signed another agreement with the China Golf Association. The building blocks for global connectivity. 

Pelley was on the short list of executives who pushed the Ryder Cup to Rome, Italy for the first time, bringing golf’s most beloved match play event to one of the cultural capitals of the world. That decision proved as controversial as it was simple. The price was right , with promises from various Italian bodies to invest more than $100 million over the course of a decade. On Tuesday Pelley called it, “the greatest Ryder Cup ever,” — an iteration that elevated the Cup “to another level.”

In many ways, he had to be right.

Latest In News

Playing with phil mickelson at the masters has its benefits  , 3 revealing scenes tell masters story for rory, scottie, xander, 1 striking tiger woods moment you missed on masters thursday, a former masters champ decided to play last minute. he's in 4th place.

Zak is a writer at GOLF Magazine and just finished a book about the summer he spent in St. Andrews .

• Author Twitter Account
• Author Instagram Account

Related Articles

2024 masters friday tee times: round 2 groupings, 2024 masters thursday tee times: round 1 groupings, 2024 masters odds: last week's runner-up is this week's long shot pick at augusta national, pro explains distraction that preceded shocking playoff water ball, akshay bhatia overcomes bizarre injury to win texas open, earn masters invite, 2024 valero texas open money: how much every player made, 2024 valero texas open money: purse, payout breakdown, winner’s share, 2024 valero texas open sunday tv coverage: how to watch round 4, on masters eve, all this pro wants is to punch his ticket to augusta.

• CBSSports.com
• Fanatics Sportsbook
• CBS Sports Home
• Masters Live
• Champions League
• Motor Sports
• High School
• Horse Racing 

Men's Brackets

Women's Brackets

Fantasy Baseball

Fantasy football, football pick'em, college pick'em, fantasy basketball, fantasy hockey, franchise games, 24/7 sports news network.

• CBS Sports Golazo Network
• PGA Tour on CBS
• UEFA Champions League
• UEFA Europa League
• Italian Serie A
• Watch CBS Sports Network
• TV Shows & Listings

The Early Edge

A Daily SportsLine Betting Podcast

With the First Pick

NFL Draft is coming up!

• Podcasts Home
• The First Cut Golf
• Beyond the Arc
• Eye On College Basketball
• NFL Pick Six
• Cover 3 College Football
• Fantasy Football Today
• My Teams Organize / See All Teams Help Account Settings Log Out

Masters 2024 props, golf odds: Expert reveals top PGA Tour prop bets, parlay picks for Augusta National

Mike mcclure locked in his expert pga golf prop picks and parlay for the masters 2024 at augusta national.

The first 2024 Masters tee times will begin at 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday after weather delayed the start of the opening round. At 100-1 to win outright in the 2024 Masters odds, it's unlikely that Tiger Woods will pick up his sixth career green jacket this week at the Masters 2024. However, there are still plenty of intriguing Masters Tiger props on the board for golf bettors to consider before he tees off. The latest 2024 Masters prop bets list Woods' Round 1 score over/under at 73.5, with the Over favored at -165 (risk $165 to win $100).

Other Tiger prop picks include a top-10 overall finish paying +900 and a top-20 performance returning +350. Which 2024 Masters props should you target involving Woods and every other golfer in the 2024 Masters field? Before locking in your 2024 Masters prop picks or entering Masters pool picks, you need to see what SportsLine DFS pro and PGA expert Mike McClure has to say . 

McClure is a DFS legend with over $2 million in career winnings, and he's been red-hot on his PGA picks dating back to the PGA Tour restart in June of 2020. McClure uses his proprietary simulation model to analyze the field and crush his  golf picks . He is up almost $9,500 on his best bets since the restart.  

McClure's model predicted Jon Rahm would finish on top of the leaderboard at the 2023 Sentry Tournament of Champions and The American Express. At the 2023 Masters, the model was all over Rahm's second career major victory heading into the weekend. It was the second straight Masters win for the model, which also nailed Scheffler winning in 2022. 

This same model has also nailed a whopping 10 majors entering the weekend. Anyone who has followed McClure's picks has seen massive returns.  

Now, McClure has dialed in on the Masters golf tournament and just locked in his top prop picks and PGA predictions. You can only see McClure's Masters 2024 prop picks at SportsLine .

Top 2024 Masters prop picks

We can tell you that one of McClure's favorite Masters prop picks is Ludvig Aberg to be the top debutant at +275. Despite turning pro less than a year ago, Aberg comes to Augusta in strong form. He's already picked up wins on both the PGA Tour and European Tour in the past seven months.

He's also made every cut during his 2024 PGA Tour schedule and hasn't finished worse than 25th in his past six events. His average finish position during that span is 12.8 and he's posted four rounds of 66 or lower this year, including an astonishing 63 in Round 4 of the Sentry. Wyndham Clark is the only other first-time Masters player who can claim a comparable recent run to Aberg, so McClure loves the value of betting on Aberg at a return that approaches 3-1.  You can see who else to back at SportsLine .

How to make Masters 2024 prop picks

McClure has also locked in a slew of other prop bets for the 2024 Masters, including a prop that pays almost 20-1 and comes from an unlikely player. You can find out who it is, and check out all of McClure's Masters prop picks at SportsLine .

Who wins the Masters 2024, and which golfer should you target for almost a 20-1 payout? Visit SportsLine now to get Mike McClure's Masters 2024 prop picks, all from the golf expert who is up almost $9,500 on his best bets since 2020 , and find out.

Our Latest Golf Stories

Tiger sets Masters record with 24th straight made cut

Patrick mcdonald • 3 min read.

2024 Masters TV schedule, coverage, live stream

Adam silverstein • 5 min read.

How to watch 2024 Masters Live on Friday

Adam silverstein • 2 min read.

How to watch Round 2 featured groups at the Masters

Patrick mcdonald • 1 min read.

Round 2 tee times, pairings at 2024 Masters on Friday

Patrick mcdonald • 2 min read.

Tiger Woods looks solid in return to golf at Masters

Share video.

2024 Masters prop picks, bets, parlay, odds

Tiger sets Masters record making cut

2024 Masters TV schedule, complete viewer's guide

88th Masters starts with ceremonial tee shots

Tiger Woods: 'I hurt every day' ahead of 2024 Masters

Will Scheffler's patient play be enough at Masters?

Davis Love III enthused about golf's young stars

Johnny Damon: How I started loving golf

Jim Furyk offers key advice to Ryder Cup captains

Tom Watson explains tech's importance to the future of golf

Advertisement

Jack nicklaus, gary player, tom watson want 'best outcome' of pga tour-liv dispute, share this article.

AUGUSTA, Ga. – Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson want to see the PGA Tour-LIV Golf dispute get settled.

Speaking during a joint press conference after the three legends hit the ceremonial tee shots to the 88 th edition of the Masters , Watson shared a special moment during the Champions Dinner , which brought together 33 of the past winners – seven of them members of LIV – in their Green Jackets and Augusta National Golf Club Chairman Fred Ridley, on Tuesday evening.

“We were sitting down and we were having great stories about Seve Ballesteros and people were laughing and talking. I said to Mr. Ridley, I said, ‘Do you mind if I say something about being here together with everybody?’ He said, ‘Please do.’

“And I got up and I said – I’m looking around the room, and I’m seeing just a wonderful experience everybody is having. They are jovial. They are having a great time. They are laughing. I said, ‘Ain’t it good to be together again?’ ” Watson recalled.

He added that he hoped the players would take it upon themselves to reach a resolution, sooner rather than later.

“We have to do something,” Watson said. “We all know it’s a difficult situation for professional golf right now. The players really kind of have control I think in a sense. What do they want to do? We’ll see where it goes. We don’t have the information or the answers. I don’t think the PGA Tour or the LIV Tour really have an answer right now. But I think in this room, I know the three of us want to get together. We want to get together like we were at that Champions Dinner, happy, the best players playing against each other. The bottom line: that’s what we want in professional golf, and right now, we don’t have it.”

Nicklaus echoed that sentiment and placed his trust in PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan to lead the way.

“The best outcome is the best players play against each other all the time. That’s what I feel about it. And how it’s going, I don’t know, I don’t want to be privy to it,” Nicklaus said. “I talked to Jay not very long ago, and I said, ‘Jay, don’t tell me what’s going on because I don’t want to have to lie to the press and people that ask me questions.’ I said, ‘How are you doing?’ He said, ‘We’re doing fine.’ I said, “OK, that’s all I want to know.’ If Jay thinks we’re doing fine, we’ll get there, I think we’ll get there. And I certainly hope that happens, the sooner the better.”

Player touched on how that division in golf and attention on the greed in the game has turned off the public. But he also noted that the players who had stayed loyal to the PGA Tour needed to be compensated in some way (which they will be through the infusion of capital into the Tour’s new for-profit arm from private equity investment.)

“Anytime in any business whatsoever, not only in the golf business, there’s confrontation, it’s unhealthy. You’ve got to get together and come to a solution. If you cannot, it’s not good. The public don’t like it, and we as professionals don’t like it, either,” Player said. “But it’s a big problem because they paid all these guys to join the LIV Tour fortunes, I mean, beyond one’s comprehension and the players that were loyal, three of us and others. Now these guys come back and play, I really believe the players, that if they are loyal, should be compensated in some way or another. Otherwise, there’s going to be dissension.”

Wise words from three of the all-time greats, who still care deeply about the state of professional golf.

More Masters

Masters 2024 leaderboard: live round 2 updates, tiger woods score, scottie scheffler, zach johnson gives weird explanation for '(expletive) off' comment made at 2024 masters, lynch: if only the masters awarded green jackets to trolls, greg norman would finally win at augusta national, max homa among leaders at masters, but 'being out in the wind for that long just got old', masters tv ratings for thursday's first round highest in nine years on espn.

Check out the latest from Augusta with our live Masters leaderboard and coverage .

How did the amateurs do in the second round of the 2024 Masters?

Verne Lundquist chokes up about his final Masters. What to know about the legendary broadcaster

Tommy Fleetwood climbs Masters 2024 leaderboard behind help of local Augusta caddie

Get $300 in Masters Bonus Bets With DraftKings & FanDuel Promo Codes | Grab Both Deals Now!

Greg Norman is haunting Augusta National. Here's what patrons thought of him at the Masters

Most popular, bryson dechambeau leading masters using 3-d printed irons only approved by usga on monday, social media reacts to jason day's pants at 2024 masters that would make mc hammer proud, these notables are in danger of missing the cut after first day of the 2024 masters, if you thought jason day’s pants were bad thursday, check out his friday vest at 2024 masters, photos: all the cute kids at the masters 2024 par 3 contest at augusta national, meet the 13 liv golf players competing at the 2024 masters at augusta national.

• Tournaments / Results
• 2024 Season Information
• 2024 ENTRY / MEMBERSHIP
• PLAYER HANDBOOK
• 2024 Hard Card
• Mental Mastery
• Gpro Member Login
• BlueGolf Live Scoring

Leaderboard: Self Updating

Gprotour tournaments.

HUNTSVILLE POSTPONED

Huntsville CC

Huntsville , AL

FOREST OAKS CLASSIC

Forest Oaks CC

Greensboro , NC

May 8-10  ·  $920+

AP CHAMPIONSHIP

Albemarle Plantation

Hertford , NC

May 23-25  ·  $1,020+

KANNAPOLIS OPEN

The Club at Irish Creek

Kannapolis , NC

May 29-31  ·  $920+

Player of the Year: EMPACT CUP

Current events, quick links, contact info, get connected.

© 2024 GProTour

Cookie banner

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy . Please also read our Privacy Notice and Terms of Use , which became effective December 20, 2019.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Filed under:

Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution?

Nearly a year after the announcement that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf would merge, pro golf is in a confusing place. The tours are still separate; government investigations are ongoing; players are defecting; and fans are lost. So where does the sport stand in 2024? And where is it going?

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution?

Last December, after a professional golfer named Jon Rahm showed up on Fox News wearing a varsity jacket with the LIV Golf logo, a Reddit user going by the name Golfhood started a thread with the subject line: “I’m done with pro golf .”

Golfhood claimed to be a former mini-tour player who had been working in the golf industry for nearly 15 years. The game, to Golfhood, was a way to break free of everyday life for a few hours, talk trash with friends, and eat hot dogs at the turn. But the protracted power struggle between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia–backed LIV Golf over the future of the professional game had shattered that illusion of escape. The joy had been swept away by pointed debates about business and laws and ethics and politics and money … so, so, so much money. Golfhood watched Rahm make his announcement about defecting from the PGA Tour to LIV—after previously pledging his fealty to the PGA Tour and insisting he was in it “ for the love of golf ”—and saw yet another dude who had embraced hypocrisy for the paycheck.

“This is the first time in my life,” Golfhood wrote, “that I have felt like I don’t love golf anymore.”

Golfhood’s post received over a thousand replies, most of which agreed with the overarching sentiment. Some said they might still watch the major tournaments, such as this week’s Masters, but that they had no reason to watch week to week anymore; some said they’d rather watch women’s golf or amateur golf, which, to them, feel like purer products. Some mentioned that they had long ago severed the relationship between playing golf and watching golf—that their love of the game had become separate from their need for the sport .

“Just watch the big 4 [major tournaments] like the rest of us and then go be a weekend warrior,” someone replied.

Golfhood’s five-paragraph missive—punctuated with a plaintive “fuck”—captured the visceral frustration many are feeling with the sport these days, from the fans to the players to the media members who cover it on a daily basis. And it raised the same questions they’ve been asking for months, like: What the hell is even going on anymore? Will LIV and the PGA Tour ever actually merge? Is there even a right side and a wrong side anymore, or have morals and ethics been rendered irrelevant by the money? When does it end? How does it end?

And will we still care in the same way when it does?

“Everything in golf over the past two years has shouldered this existential weight that no one has been able to shed,” Joel Beall, a senior writer for Golf Digest , told me over email. “For the most part, golf’s stakeholders have taken fans’ attention for granted, assuming it will always be there because it always has been. … I don’t think fans are ignorant to the fact that professional sports are a business. It’s just that this business is also the passion of millions.”

Such is the state of professional golf leading into its most prestigious tournament: mired in arguments about laws and ethics and morality and politics as it faces down central questions about its future. How do we even know what this sport is anymore? And will we recognize what it eventually becomes?

Let us begin by cutting back to last June, which is when it seemed, for a time, like this whole conflict was ending. After more than a year of constant warring, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf appeared to reach a détente: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan announced , alongside LIV Golf’s leadership, that the two bodies would merge to form one unified commercial entity. LIV players would eventually be invited to reapply to the tour; a binding framework had been agreed upon, they said, though the financial details had yet to be worked out. “How did we go from a confrontation to now being partners?” Monahan told the media . “We just realized that we were better off together than we were fighting or apart.”

This announcement was an utter shock to pretty much everyone involved, including many PGA Tour players themselves. Perhaps most of all Rory McIlroy, who had served as the face of the tour’s supposedly principled stand against a competitor backed by a Saudi regime that has a deeply problematic geopolitical history , including a paragraph-long list of what the State Department calls “significant human rights issues.” For months, McIlroy had fought against LIV’s very existence, against what he saw as the greed of the players who had sacrificed their personal ethics for an admittedly tremendous financial gain. If you make a decision “purely for money,” McIlroy said , it “doesn’t usually end up going the right way.” Over that time, McIlroy presumed the PGA Tour leadership was on his side.

And then, facing the prospect of additional player defections and up against a seemingly endless stream of Saudi money, it appeared as if the tour abruptly caved. Two entities that despised each other—LIV was born out of grudges that former tour pro Greg Norman, LIV’s CEO and commissioner, had carried against the tour for 30 years —would find a way to join forces. All the hard feelings would soon be papered over by a wall of cash. McIlroy, captured behind the scenes on Netflix’s reality series Full Swing , said he’d pretty much reached his breaking point with the tour. “Fuck it,” he said. “Do what you want to do.”

It felt, to many, like one of the most transparently cynical moments in the modern history of sports. “Bought,”’ wrote Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post. “That’s the only word for Monahan and his henchies on the PGA Tour policy board.”

Such was the condemnation. But then the actual resolution never came.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs opened an antitrust probe into the merger and held hearings last summer; Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal condemned it as an attempt by a “repressive” regime to “buy influence” in the United States. To this point, the investigation has been stymied by LIV’s backer, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which reportedly threatened to jail its advisers if they cooperated with the inquiry. The U.S. Department of Justice also said it would investigate the merger over antitrust concerns but has made no announcements on the subject since June. A late-2023 deadline to iron out the details of the merger passed with negotiations supposedly progressing , but nothing concrete was announced. And so, as the bargaining goes on, the struggle for leverage continues.

Rahm—one of the best players on tour—abruptly defected to LIV in December, potentially swinging the momentum of the ongoing negotiations in the direction of the PIF. The PGA Tour, in response, signed an agreement with a deep-pocketed group of American sports team owners and investors called Strategic Sports Group , seemingly trying to wrest back some power from LIV’s endless flow of cash. Monahan appeared at the Players Championship in March and gave an update on the merger that revealed nothing and was most notable for his prickly response to questions about Rahm’s departure. (“I’m focused on every single member of the PGA Tour,” he said .) Asked whether the PGA Tour could go on if the merger didn’t happen at all, Monahan said, “I guess I’ll answer that question if a deal isn’t concluded.”

Now, here we are in April, when we should be talking about the Masters. Instead, we’re still ensnared in speculation about various consortiums of ultrarich people hiding behind a jumble of acronyms—PIF, SSG—that don’t mean a damn thing to the vast majority of people who actually watch the sport. In short, Beall wrote in a March piece, “No one knows anything.”

“It’s like the worst soap opera ever,” says Don Heider, ​​chief executive of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

Last week, McIlroy told the publication Golf Monthly that he believes “we’re probably still quite a long ways from” a merger, if one happens at all. And the longer this push and pull for power and leverage and influence goes on, McIlroy said, the less sustainable this fractured landscape becomes for everyone, from players to sponsors to fans. In the meantime, it feels increasingly like there’s no normalcy to be found anywhere in men’s professional golf. There’s just the cynical view that another crumbling American institution sold out to the highest bidder.

Years ago, Lee McGinnis, a professor at Stonehill College who has studied the culture and fandom of golf, wrote a thesis about the notion of the golf course as a “sacred space.” “You consider the golf time that you have with your friends, your buddies, your associates to be sacred time,” McGinnis says. “There are certain norms you don’t violate in terms of etiquette.”

But over the course of the past couple of years, McGinnis says, that notion has been fractured. The sport’s trials have begun to encroach on the joy of the game. “For lack of a better term,” McGinnis says, “it feels dirty.”

Scroll down on Golfhood’s Reddit thread, and the vitriol is apparent: “I wouldn’t watch LIV even if every top 25 PGA player jumped ship,” one respondent says. “Fuck LIV and the people that own it,” says another. The presumption, among many of those fans, is that there’s no point even bothering to watch. Because what is LIV as an actual product, anyhow, beyond the noise? What does it aspire to be, beyond a money-driven construction?

The team format —13 groups of four, plus two wild cards, with a team championship tournament at the end of the season—has rung hollow. (With team names like Fireballs, Crushers, and RangeGoats, it comes across like a Ryder Cup for loudmouths.) And LIV tournaments themselves have no history. Most Americans don’t care about watching three rounds of golf in Singapore or Mayakoba on a course they know nothing about. David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University, compared it to the NFL’s employment of replacement players during the 1987 strike. “It was like, ‘What am I watching here?’” Berri says. “‘I’m not watching the Eagles. These aren’t the Eagles. These are just 50 guys you found up the street.’”

You might argue that Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka are not Shane Falco , and that would certainly be fair, but the larger point is that the whole concept still feels artificial . A more apt comparison might be Vince McMahon’s XFL: a brash challenger that deliberately and aggressively tried to shatter the sanctity of the sport in order to wedge its way into the culture. At least for now, it mostly seems to exist just to create chaos.

“Going to the LIV” event in Boston, McGinnis says, “I thought, Oh my gosh, this felt … Vegas-ish or Niagara Falls or something. It felt like, Oh my God, this is supposed to be really nice and pristine. … You get in there, and the pros are wearing shorts. It’s like, no, no, this isn’t some kind of a practice round that you hang out with your buddies. It didn’t feel professional.”

“It didn’t feel like a sanctioned event,” he continues. “It violated golf’s sacred spaces.”

The television ratings show how many people would still rather watch the PGA Tour: In February, LIV set a new viewing record of 432,000 people for its tournament in Mayakoba … which was roughly a third of the number of viewers who tuned in to a re-airing of the third round of the rain-shortened Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The vast majority of fans, at least, still don’t understand why or how LIV Golf should be a meaningful force in their lives.

“And that’s why, thus far, LIV Golf has not worked,” Beall says.

But the irony is that the PIF, in backing LIV, may not care about meaning. Not if it can buy that meaning. Not if it can merge its money with the PGA Tour’s legitimacy and, in so doing, perhaps legitimize itself to the world—without the need for the government that backs the PIF to alter its behavior. (This is a concept that experts refer to as “ sportswashing .”) The PIF can wait out the final terms for years if the merger continues to stall; it can focus on recruiting the next generation of young talent with lucrative contracts and keep toying with format and location. It can hang around and see if the fans eventually decide to follow its product. This is its leverage in these negotiations: money and time.

“It just appears to me the Saudis really want to be involved in this,” Berri says. “And the PGA [Tour] people are like, ‘We have to let them be involved because they have enough money to take the golfers away, but they also don’t have any ability to create something that replaces us.’”

It is common, in a politically and culturally fraught situation like this, to lose track of who’s right and who’s wrong. In a way, one fundamental answer to that question is simple, says Heider, the ethics expert at Santa Clara: While there is an argument to be made that a competing tour could be good for the players, the golfers who joined LIV made a poor ethical decision by knowingly joining a competing tour that’s tied to the Saudi government. Period. End of story. “If you’re a player,” Heider says, “you have to really hold your nose and understand that you’re taking money indirectly from a regime … [that’s done] all sorts of horrible things.”

Except it’s not the end of the story. If the players are acting unethically, what about the PGA Tour, which appears to be chasing reunification at all costs to discourage the very idea of competition? Here is where Jodi Balsam, a professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School and an expert in antitrust law, brings up the concept of a “natural monopoly.”

A natural monopoly is what we conceive of when we think of most professional sports, Balsam says. A natural monopoly means there is one dominant sports league, in which all of the best players compete against each other. As fans, that’s what we want; it creates the purest form of a meritocracy. But a natural monopoly, in terms of antitrust law, is not considered credible, because in the U.S., monopolies are still (theoretically) supposed to be illegal.

A natural monopoly “seems to be sort of a reflexive statement about any market in which a dominant existing firm is trying to block competitive entry,” Balsam says. “And to be fair to the golfers, if you’re measuring how competitive the market is in selling your services, you want many bidders.”

So what does that actually mean?

“Right now in professional golf,” Balsam says, “consumers’ and golfers’ self-interests are in conflict.”

The players who defected to LIV were chasing their own economic interests, which is what we would expect pretty much anyone else in any other industry to do. But these players also accomplished that goal by accepting money from the Saudi regime, which, Balsam says, “is not a rational economic actor.” And yet in every other industry, foreign investment is an acceptable way of growing a company. Why, Balsam asks, do we care that Saudi Arabia invested in golf but don’t care that it has also invested in corporations such as Uber and Meta ?

The answer, she says, is because sports are different. It’s because athletes represent these aspirational human ideals. It’s because, frankly, we expect more from them. And when people like Golfhood see that those athletes are just as susceptible to self-interest as the rest of us—when they see these impure concepts encroaching on something they hold in higher regard—it shatters people’s illusions. The burden of this civil war has increasingly shifted onto the consumer, who now has to endure a diluted product that’s been weighed down by the heaviness of geopolitics and whose interests feel increasingly marginalized. There is no escape from it. Not even at Augusta National.

Ideally, this week’s Masters would serve as a sort of Swiss summit, in which the best golfers in the world—regardless of their stance in this civil war—would convene in the placid setting of Augusta National Golf Club and compete for the right to drape themselves in the sport’s most sacred piece of bright green haberdashery. The Masters is itself a throwback, a tournament that, as Golf Digest ’s Jerry Tarde wrote in February, has a time-honored strategy of leaving money on the table in exchange for control and sustainability.”

But this year’s Masters is happening as golf is mired in a battle that symbolizes the opposite of that time-honored strategy—one that also resurfaces the issue of golf’s ugly past. “Golf in America is already viewed as an elitist, exclusive game,” says Beall, author of an upcoming book about this era in the sport called Playing Dirty . “Golf is in this position because of entitlement and greed. ... The sport has never been more detached from reality.”

You might argue that a certain detachment from reality is part of the Masters’ charm: The whole event is constructed as a kind of time warp, a step back into a more tranquil era in American life. But for all the cheap sandwiches and reasonably priced souvenirs that Augusta National sells during Masters week—for all the money it really does leave on the table—the club cannot obscure the fact that its insistence on control was why it did not accept a single Black member until 1990 and didn’t have a female member until 2012 . And the sport as a whole cannot erase a shameful history of exclusion; even now, a generation after Tiger Woods upended the status quo—and despite efforts to make change —there are still only a handful of minority professional golfers.

“Maybe golf has blinders on about the issues relating to individual rights and persecution of women and minorities because golf has not been as open historically to women and minorities,” Balsam says. “Now, that has certainly changed. And maybe what that means for the PGA Tour is that, in this partnership, they have to be even more vocal going forward about opening up the sport to everybody.”

If you think that sounds like a vision that is slightly detached from the brutal realities of the modern world, I can’t blame you. And neither can the writers who cover the sport on a regular basis, the ones who have witnessed golf’s grand vision of itself completely collapse. “It appears like most of golf’s central actors have cared more about getting paid or taken care of,” Beall says, “rather than where their actions could be taking golf as a whole.”

The origins of the modern PGA Tour date back to the late 1960s, when a group of pros including Jack Nicklaus, dissatisfied with the lack of control and with their cut of the television money from the PGA of America, chose to break off and form their own organization. At the time, the PGA of America oversaw 6,000-plus golfers, the vast majority of whom were teaching pros rather than touring pros. When the PGA of America refused to sanction a $200,000 event sponsored by Frank Sinatra, feeling it would conflict with the existing Bob Hope Classic, the players began an open revolt.

Over the course of a couple of contentious years, pro golf appeared to be crumbling. Arnold Palmer tried to play peacemaker and failed. Boycotts were threatened; a competing entity called American Professional Golfers Inc. began forming a splinter tour (something Max Elbin, then the president of the PGA of America, called “a thirst for power resulting possibly from too much prosperity”). And then in 1968, a settlement was reached . The modern PGA Tour split off from the PGA of America, which still oversees teaching pros and administers the PGA Championship. And the whole thing became a historical footnote, so much so that most of us don’t even know it happened.

Which made me wonder: Are we being overly histrionic about this whole thing?

“This is sort of the problem with being a sportswriter,” Berri, the economics professor, tells me. “I wrote an article years ago about strikes and lockouts and noted that strikes and lockouts don’t have any permanent effect on attendance when the strike ends. But when you listen to the sportswriters write about strikes and lockouts, when these things were happening, it was always, ‘The world is ending,’ and, ‘These strikes are going to ruin the sport permanently.’”

Maybe Berri is right. Maybe this thing will get resolved sooner rather than later, and maybe the next Tiger Woods will emerge and golf will cycle through another boom period, the way baseball did when the Mark McGwire–Sammy Sosa home run chase of 1998 briefly erased the anger over the 1994 strike (at least until we realized none of that was entirely real, either).

“That’s the thing about sports that is so weird compared to every other type of good people consume,” Berri says. “The fans are addicted.”

But this is also where golf is different: Fans like Golfhood and the thousands who responded to that Reddit post can still play the game without caring about the sport . As Beall—a sportswriter himself— wrote in a column for Golf Digest , “Fans don’t need the tour, but the tour sure as hell needs fans.”

It’s a small sample size, Beall says, but television audiences for recent tour events are shrinking , even as interest in playing golf has steadily grown since the pandemic . What if the merger takes place and the Saudis continue to act problematically on the geopolitical stage, and their very presence continues to tarnish the sport? What if the hard feelings between PGA Tour and LIV players still exist even after unification? What if the whole enterprise still feels dirty enough that it fundamentally alters the relationship between the sport and the game?

“This just feels like a huge turning point in pro golf as a product,” Golfhood wrote in that Reddit post. “No other sport is as intertwined between people who play it casually and the top players in the world.”

Maybe Golfhood is right. Or maybe Berri is right, and nothing is sacred anymore, because it never really was. Isn’t this how the addiction to golf works, anyhow? We cycle through periods of frustration and despair, we swear we’re done with it, we curse its very existence—and in the end, we just keep coming back.

Michael Weinreb is a freelance writer and the author of four books.

Mets Right the Ship, Yankees With Another Series Win, and Sean Fennessey on the Knicks’ Playoff Hopes

Nuggets control the west, the kentucky job, and nba draft talk with j. kyle mann. plus, what it’s like to play the masters with michael kim., uconn going for a third plus, the impact of giannis’s injury and picks for the masters..

The Masters Pro Golf Tour

• Add an advert
• 2024 Tour Schedule
• Tournament Entry
• Latest Entries
• Annual Membership & Current members
• The Paul Broadhurst Order of Merit
• Start Sheets
• Tour Regulations

Are you a professional golfer aged 48 or older? Do you enjoy a challenge? The “Masters Pro Golf Tour” events are open to all declared Professional Golfers from the U.K and overseas of an age of 48+, with no restrictions on nationality or gender. The tour is also open to 48+ year old amateur golfers with a recognised index of 9 or less. We aim to run at least ten events per year in the UK and some overseas during the winter.  A mixture of one and two-day events and sometimes preceded with a Pro-Am. At most events we will run, in conjunction with the main event a Super Seniors section for those players aged 58 or over.

Membership of the tour has been set at £100  for the 2023 season.

Membership and entry fees are payable, in advance, by bank transfer, and the declared prize fund will depend on level of entries. Approximately one-third of the field will receive a share of the prize fund.

For any further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us, The admin manager, Mark Spooner will be happy to accept your enquiries, please call or text on 07399 476717 Alternatively Email enquiries to [email protected] 

Latest News

New for 2023 season.

For the 2023 season all entry fees must be paid in advance of the event. Click Read more for details....

Masters greats tee off on PGA Tour/LIV split

• Medium Text

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Steve Keating, Editing by Ed Osmond

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

Sports Chevron

Baseball star Ohtani's ex-interpreter released on $25,000 bond after court appearance

The former interpreter for Japanese baseball great Shohei Ohtani was ordered released on $25,000 bond after his first court appearance to face a bank fraud charge accusing him of stealing $16 million from the Los Angeles Dodgers star to cover illegal gambling expenses.

The Pittsburgh Penguins are on some kind of roll yet are guaranteed nothing as they get ready to host one of the top teams in the NHL on Saturday, the Boston Bruins.

French big man Alex Sarr, projected among the top three picks in the 2024 NBA Draft, made his intentions official Friday on ESPN.

As golf comes together for the Masters, a chasm still divides the sport

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Golf’s biggest buzzword on the eve of its biggest tournament has nothing to do with technique or equipment or any of the superstars converging this week on Augusta National . The topic du jour is sustainability — or, rather, the perceived unsustainability of the current landscape, which has the world’s best pros competing on separate tours, their much-anticipated alliance still up in the air , and a sport enjoying surging participation but fearing a decline in fan interest.

“Things need a correction,” Rory McIlroy, one of the faces of the PGA Tour, said last week in Texas, “and things are unsustainable.”

“And it needs to happen fast,” Bryson DeChambeau, the LIV Golf star, said in Florida. “It’s not a two-year thing. It needs to happen quicker rather than later just for the good of the sport. Too many people are losing interest.”

While there’s more money than ever flowing through the sport, the dueling pro circuits are fighting for relevance. They’re tweaking and overhauling their business models in hopes of unlocking a return on investment, trying to funnel unprecedented sums of money to their players while still building profitable businesses. Meanwhile, a growing chorus is calling for some form of reconciliation.

This week, 13 LIV players will compete at the Masters with their PGA Tour counterparts, distinguishable only by the LIV team gear they’ll be sporting on golf’s most hallowed grounds — Sergio García, the Fireball; Bubba Watson, the RangeGoat. And for four days, fans will be reminded both of what today’s game isn’t — a unified tour where the best players consistently play against one another — and what they hope it might again become.

The sustainability discussion is two-pronged: Can the sport remain relevant and engaging to fans in its fractured state? And is the sport economically viable enough to support the current pace of spending?

“I just think with the fighting and everything that’s went on over the past couple years, people are just getting really fatigued of it, and it’s turning people off men’s professional golf,” McIlroy told reporters last week. “And that’s not a good thing for anyone.”

More than 10 months have passed since the PGA Tour announced plans to partner with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund , which owns LIV Golf. The sides blew past a Dec. 31 deadline and continue to work through details, but no deal is imminent.

LIV Golf continues to pour money into personnel on and off the course, even as its product has yet to reach a critical mass, particularly in the United States. And the PGA Tour responded to LIV’s flurry of activity by going on its own spending spree — with new expenses seemingly outpacing new revenue streams.

Because the game’s top players haven’t competed against one another in an individual event since last year’s British Open, fans have endured lackluster tournament fields and forgettable Sunday finishes. While LIV’s linear TV ratings aren’t publicized, LIV officials say their numbers on the CW Network are up 40 percent from last year and they’re pleased with early streaming viewership. The PGA Tour’s TV figures, which includes a much larger audience domestically, are down more than 15 percent.

“Ratings fluctuate from year to year,” said Sean McManus, head of CBS Sports. “As we all know, to a large extent, it depends on who is on the leader board and how close the tournament is. … But the advertisers seem happy, the sponsors seem happy, so it’s a little early to predict where there is a trend out there on the ratings.”

Neither circuit has seen its biggest stars shine on a weekly basis — last weekend’s winners were 22-year-old Akshay Bhatia on the PGA Tour and South African Dean Burmester for LIV — and the headlines focus on the off-course intrigue and the sport’s uncertain future.

“We talk so much about how important it is for players to be in the right place mentally, and I just think there’s an epidemic of distraction on the PGA Tour, whether it’s greed or trying to solve problems that are almost unsolvable, however you want to put it,” said Brandel Chamblee, a Golf Channel analyst. “I just think they’re hugely distracted.”

After shifting its business away from the nonprofit model, the tour now has to pay taxes, reward players who want more money and answer to investors who seek a return — in addition to TV executives and advertisers who expect a product that will reliably attract a huge audience.

PGA Tour officials have put together a plan that is not wholly dependent on the PIF following through on its early investment plans. The tour took on a $1.5 billion investment from a collection of U.S. sports owners known as Strategic Sports Group ; the amount could double. That money helped the tour launch PGA Tour Enterprises, which will oversee all of its commercial ventures.

“Prior to creating the structure of PGA Tour Enterprises and taking on outside investment, we’ve always had in our previous structure this natural conflict between an organizational objective to maximize player earnings with growth investment,” said Jay Madara, the tour’s chief financial officer. “I liken it to meeting payroll this month [or] this quarter and not having anything left over for investment, if you will. … If there were things that made sense strategically that created long-term returns, there wasn’t patient capital for that.”

According to its most recent tax filings, the tour saw $1.9 billion in revenue in 2022, compared with $1.87 billion in expenses — and both figures have steadily risen over the years. The tour has high-dollar commitments — $4 billion due from sponsors through 2035 and $5 billion in media rights through 2030 — but also has taken on new expenses.

With an ambitious plan to offer golfers an equity stake in the tour and with tournament purses that have more than doubled over the past decade, tour officials have been trying to create new revenue streams and expand existing ones. While its broadcast rights deals run through 2030, the organization plans to open its own 70,000-square-foot production studio next year, which will enable the tour to create and distribute more of its own content.

The tour is also looking to generate more revenue from its weekly tournaments and has overhauled its event funding formula. The tour relies on local organizations to run most of its tournaments but makes money by staging six events on its own — and could take on more. The tour recently acquired a golf cart company and a logistics outfit, which will make it easier and more cost-effective to host tournaments.

One of its most audacious efforts to balance the books: The tour informed event organizers this week that they’ll soon be on the hook for a hosting fee — $250,000 for full-field events and $500,000 for the signature events next year, and twice those amounts beginning in 2026. The tour also expects organizers to kick back a percentage of hospitality sales — 1 percent next year and increasing to 2.5 percent in 2027.

Tour events traditionally have involved a philanthropic component, and while the new initiative has created fears that these fees will eat into charitable donations, tour officials said they’re confident that contributions will not suffer.

“It is something that is important to our tradition, honor and legacy. It’s something we have to balance as we move forward, as well, in terms of our new structure,” Madara said.

LIV, thanks to its deep-pocketed Saudi benefactors, does not appear to face the same economic pressures, with officials saying they’re financially ahead of schedule.

“The critical piece for us is the creation of new value through all of this,” said Jed Moore, a senior LIV consultant. “People have misunderstood the investment into players. They’ve misunderstood the investment in the Asian Tour. They’ve misunderstood why golf needed to find a way to create that new value. Sustainable economics in sports — it’s become front and center because it’s now an asset class.”

LIV officials view their product similar to Formula One — fewer events, with top-tier athletes globe-trotting between major cities. And one key cornerstone: a team-based format that LIV hopes will inspire fan loyalty and drive value.

While LIV owns a 75 percent stake in each of its 13 teams, they function as independent entities and create revenue as each sees fit. Moore said some are already profitable. None is close to reaching maturity as an asset, he said, but someday they could take on investors or be sold outright.

“Can you imagine what the Golden Bears would have been worth if Jack [Nicklaus] played in a form of LIV in his heyday? Arnie’s Army, the Big Easys, the Great White Sharks?” he said. “Imagine those teams.”

While the LIV product has been slow to catch on with golf fans in the United States, officials have been pleased with the interest they’ve seen in places such as Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

LIV’s season debut in Mexico marked its highest TV numbers to date — 432,000 watched on the CW for the final round, and more than 3.5 million streamed some portion of the three-day event on YouTube or LIV’s app. While not as lucrative to advertisers, the direct-to-consumer streaming options are a valuable metric to LIV officials, who say they’re targeting a younger audience. (The final round of last year’s Masters, won by Jon Rahm, averaged more than 12 million viewers.)

And while many thought LIV’s days were numbered when the PIF agreed to partner with the PGA Tour last June, LIV has only kept building. Signing Rahm before this season was a major coup, and this week LIV is hiring four senior-level executives and working on its 2025 schedule.

Even LIV’s biggest detractors (see: McIlroy, Rory) have come to reluctantly accept its place in the golf ecosystem. LIV launched in 2022 with no corporate signage at its events, but this year it has already announced more than 20 global partnerships, including with Panini and Google Cloud. Its teams have separately inked deals with more than a dozen corporate sponsors.

LIV officials say the plan was never to replace the PGA Tour, just as Formula One isn’t trying to replace U.S.-based auto racing circuits. They think the tours can coexist — different leagues coming together for a major championship, akin to the Super Bowl or World Series.

Left unsaid: While LIV tries to expand and the PGA Tour adopts a new business plan, what becomes of a weary fan base? The sport’s participation numbers have never been higher — some 45 million Americans swung a club last year, according to the National Golf Foundation — and while professional players have never been richer, the fans have been left wanting more.

“Right now, we are in the disruption phase,” Phil Mickelson, among the first to bolt for LIV, said last week, “so we are in the middle of the process. And when it’s all said and done, it’s going to be a lot brighter. But while we go through it, it’s challenging. But we’ll get there.”

The Masters 2024

Professional golf makes its annual visit to Augusta National Golf Club at the 2024 Masters, beginning Thursday and ending Sunday. See the latest Masters updates, scores and schedule .

Tee times: First- and second-round pairings and tee times have been announced. See the full schedule .

Who’s playing: The Masters field has 89 players, including five-time winner Tiger Woods , defending champion Jon Rahm and 2022 winner Scottie Scheffler . Five amateur golfers are also in the field .

LIV and PGA: Thirteen LIV players will compete at the Masters with their PGA Tour counterparts, distinguishable only by the LIV team gear they’ll be sporting. More than 10 months have passed since the PGA Tour announced plans to partner with LIV Golf’s Saudi backers, but no deal is imminent.

Betting: From historical performance to odds, here’s a breakdown of nine players who could win the Masters .

• The nine best bets to win this year’s Masters Earlier today The nine best bets to win this year’s Masters Earlier today
• Meet the five amateur golfers competing in the Masters this year Earlier today Meet the five amateur golfers competing in the Masters this year Earlier today
• No other golfer is doing what Scottie Scheffler makes look easy April 10, 2024 No other golfer is doing what Scottie Scheffler makes look easy April 10, 2024

PGA Tour sold out to LIV Golf and the Saudis. Pro golf will never be the same.

In less than a year, the saudis went from disruptors to forcing a complete capitulation that laid the pga tour’s moral high ground to waste. from top to bottom, they own professional golf now..

Editor's note: For the latest on the LIV Golf and PGA Tour merger, follow USA TODAY Sports' live updates here.

Frauds, all of them. But frauds now united in the only thing that actually matters to the world of professional golf: Making money. 

In the end, it didn’t actually matter to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan that the money came from a country, Saudi Arabia, that treats human rights like an inconvenience. The tradition and history of the PGA Tour, in fact, didn’t matter all that much to those who argued that LIV Golf was an unworthy, unserious rival whose guaranteed money and 54-hole events were mocking competition.

And as for the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Greg Norman, they did not, in fact, care all that much about growing the game. They wanted to own it. Now they do: The PGA Tour, brought to you by Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud.

They sold out. Professional golf will never be the same. 

MAJOR MOVE: PGA Tour, Saudi-backed LIV Golf announce merger in stunning move

Oh, you can already hear the preening and high-fiving from those even nicer private jets that have been paid for with Saudi oil. And why not?

A year ago, Monahan stood up in front of the world and argued that the way Saudi Arabia treats women, gay people and journalists should matter in a player's decision whether to jump at the guaranteed payday that came with a LIV invitation.

“I would ask any player that has left or any player that would consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”

Today? Not so much. 

“We are pleased to move forward, in step with LIV and PIF’s world-class investing experience, and I applaud PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan for his vision and collaborative and forward-thinking approach that is not just a solution to the rift in our game, but also a commitment to taking it to new heights.”

World-class investing experience? Are we talking about the future of pro golf or shares of Vandalay Industries? 

In its stunning announcement Tuesday, the PGA Tour positioned it as a merger. On paper, it looks more like a hostile takeover.

The full details, and exactly what it means for golf fans, are lacking at this point. It’s clear from the immediate reaction of PGA Tour players on social media that this decision came from out of the blue and was made well above their pay grade.

SPEAKING OUT: Mickelson, Koepka, Morikawa, others react to PGA Tour, LIV Golf merger

“Nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with,” world No. 67 Mackenzie Hughes said. 

Are the three entities still going to operate separately while being in business together? Will players go back and forth at will to play whatever tour they want in a given week? Or does the merger set up the top level pro golf as a globetrotting international tour that will regularly bring all the best players to Australia, Asia, the Middle East and Europe?

What does that mean for the mid-tier tournament in your hometown that brought thousands of tourists in for a weekend? What does it mean for television rights? And does it mean fans will now be subjected to more of LIV’s interminably boring team competition? 

There’s also the Donald Trump angle to figure out since the former president’s ties to LIV have been part of the Justice Department’s probe into his handling of classified documents, according to The New York Times. With his third bid for the presidency underway, Trump will no doubt be front and center claiming credit for the reunification of his favorite sport. 

From top to bottom, this is a solution that may indeed hold some benefits for players and fans. But underneath the hood, the details are guaranteed to be so unsavory you’d need a bottle of Maalox just to get through the day.

For the PGA Tour, though, it is undeniably the most convenient end game. With LIV’s limitless resources, the Saudis could muck things up with years of messy and expensive antitrust litigation, not to mention the ever-present threat of poaching more stars like Brooks Koepka. 

And any time the Saudis wanted to ratchet up the pressure, the PGA Tour was going to have to tap into reserves or hit up sponsors for more cash to keep the peace within its own ranks. 

Maybe Monahan and his employers saw an unending fight with no clear path to victory. Or maybe they just got tired of the fight. 

Either way, in less than a year, the Saudis went from disruptors to forcing a complete capitulation that laid the PGA Tour’s moral high ground to waste. From top to bottom, they own professional golf now. As was probably the intent all along, everyone else is just along for the ride. 

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election Results
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• March Madness
• AP Top 25 Poll
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Personal finance
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

As golf’s civil war rages, all the top PGA Tour and LIV players are at the Masters this week

Jon Rahm, of Spain, walks to the 10th green during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Brooks Koepka hands over his club on the second hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Bryson DeChambeau hands his driver to his caddie on the eighth hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Jon Rahm, of Spain, reacts on the 12th hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Jon Rahm, of Spain, hits on the 12th hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Jon Rahm, of Spain, and Nicolai Hojgaard, of Denmark, walk onto the 12th green during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

Brooks Koepka, from left, Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay hits on the second hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

Bryson DeChambeau tees off on the eighth hole during a practice round in preparation for the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National Golf Club Tuesday, April 9, 2024, in Augusta, Ga. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)

• Copy Link copied

AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — In some ways, golf finds itself at a point in time not unlike pro football in the 1960s, when two rival leagues duked it out but found a path to reconciliation that produced a game far bigger than anyone could’ve envisioned.

Bryson DeChambeau, for one, is hopeful that the still-smoldering split between the established PGA Tour and upstart LIV Golf could lead to a Super Bowl-like extravaganza that brings everyone together.

“You can look at it like the NFL and you could have NFC-AFC sort of working in their own fields and at the end they come together, put on a huge event at the end of the year,” said DeChambeau, who plays on the LIV circuit. “That could be really cool.”

If nothing else, major championships such as the Masters , which begins Thursday at Augusta National, provide a brief detente in this civil war of the links.

All the top players — from reigning Master champion Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka representing Team LIV to world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy teeing it up for the old guard — will be looking to not only claim a green jacket, but score bragging rights for their de facto team.

“Obviously, the more togetherness that you get, the better it is for everyone. There’s no doubt about that,” said Sergio Garcia, the 2017 Masters winner who bolted for LIV. “But there’s room for everyone. I don’t think that’s a problem at all.”

Even though LIV appears to have strengthened its hand with its stunning signing of Rahm , who was on the PGA Tour when he won at Augusta a year ago, there are actually five fewer players from the new tour than the 18 who played in 2023.

That’s largely because LIV events — with their smaller fields and 54-hole format — do not receive world ranking points, one of the main conduits for entry into the Masters.

Still, the Saudi-funded circuit has demonstrated that its top players can compete with the best of the PGA Tour.

Koepka and Phil Mickelson were runner-ups to Rahm a year ago at the Masters, and Koepka went on to capture his fifth career major title at the PGA Championship . Of the 27 major championships that have been staged since the beginning of 2017, 13 were won by golfers who now call LIV home.

Koepka took issue with those who say the split is ruining the game.

“Look, the best players in the world never got together week in, week out. I think that’s kind of forgotten,” Koepka said Tuesday. “It was the majors, (World Golf Championship tournaments) ... those were pretty much the 10 events where everyone was, for sure, going to be there. And then it was just kind of sprinkled in everywhere else. I think that’s kind of how it is” now.

But hard feelings remain, especially since a supposed merger agreement announced 10 months ago had yet to be finalized.

Just listen to Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters champion and outspoken critic of LIV.

“I don’t think I’ll ever understand it,” he said. “Now, everything can get better. But let me tell you, if the LIV tour is better for golf, I’m missing something there.”

Rahm acknowledged that when he accepted a reported $350 million offer to join LIV in December, he was hopeful that it would spur the two sides to reach some sort of reconciliation by the time the Masters rolled around.

Now, with a divide that seems as gaping as ever, he’s one of the most prominent faces on a tour that has been called everything from the future of the game — with its shotgun starts and team element — to a refuge of sellouts who are helping the Saudis sportswash the image of a repressive regime.

“It’s a bit of a detour on my path,” Rahm said. “But change can be better.”

Just how much things have changed was apparent from the attire he donned a year ago as he departed Augusta National to what he picked out for his practice rounds leading into this Masters.

Gone was the green jacket. Now he’s wearing a shirt emblazoned with a Legion XIII logo.

The team he now leads in LIV.

AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf

• Sport Betting
• Yearly calendar
• Latest results
• English Español French Italiano Nederlands

TheSports.org

  All sports Site

Field hockey - Dinamo Elektrostal Moscow

Hockey Club Dinamo Elektrostal is a field hockey team from Russia, based in Moscow. The club was founded in 1994.

Dinamo Elektrostal Moscow - Results

2021/2022 2018/2019 2017/2018 2017 2015/2016 2013/2014 2011/2012 2007/2008

Men's Euro Hockey League - Final Round - 2021/2022

Dinamo elektrostal moscow - identity.

• Official name : Hockey Club Dinamo Elektrostal
• Country : Russia
• Location : Moscow
• Founded : 1994
• Wikipedia link : http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinamo_Elektrostal

Dinamo Elektrostal Moscow - Titles, trophies and places of honor

• Best result : First Round in 2021/2022
• Best result : 1st
• 1 times first in 2010
• 1 times second in 2009
• 1 times third in 2017

Postal Address

Putin taunts the West by traveling to within 55 miles of the US

Posted: January 10, 2024 | Last updated: April 3, 2024

More for You

Famous Roles That 16 Actors Never Want to Play Again

Tech trick: How to tell who’s calling when you don’t recognize the phone number

Husband of former cheerleader who died after stillbirth describes what happened before her death

I Did a 25 Day Water Fast. I Lost 20lbs and My Skin Cleared Up

Here’s How Long You Should Walk Every Day to Keep Your Heart Healthy

I study people with high emotional intelligence for a living—8 things they never ever do when talking to others

Israeli army kills Hamas leader’s son in West Bank raid

Michael J. Fox Says ‘We Used to Bust Our Ass' to Be Famous and ‘You Had to Be Talented,' but Now It's: ‘What's That Dance Step? And You're the Most Famous Person in the World'

Secrets of ancient Herculaneum scroll deciphered by AI

I Lost 50lbs With 3 Lifestyle Changes

Burger King's menu adds a new twist on a British classic

16 Compliments You Didn’t Realize Are Actually Pretty Insulting

Senate Dems Finally Subpoena Supreme Court Puppetmaster

Masters neighbor refuses to sell home despite millions in offers from Augusta golf club

9 Insider Secrets You Should Know From a Goodwill Employee

50 Healthy Casseroles That Are Incredibly Delicious

Ex-Google recruiter shares the No. 1 thing to do after applying for a job: 'Everyone fails' at it

78 Riddles for Adults That Will Test Your Smarts

SpaceX all set for a record-breaking rocket launch on Friday

Tesla Owner Calls Police on Rivian Driver Using Supercharger

Check out best custom Masters gear at Augusta National

(David Cannon/Getty Images)

Change Text Size

A tradition unlike any other, the Masters offers an ideal setting for golf manufacturers – and players – to show off their creative side. When the PGA TOUR heads to Augusta National for the season’s first major, anything and everything is on the table when it comes to custom golf bags, clothing and gear.

There is a plethora of options for inspiration, and some stick to the traditions for stimulation: the Masters green jacket donned by patrons across the property, blooming azaleas lining Amen Corner or the iconic logo, a yellow United States outline with a red flagstick pinned in Georgia. Others go off-piste, thinking outside the box (like Waffle House-themed golf shoes in years past).

Some of the items promoted by the pros at Augusta National are available for purchase, or through company giveaways, while others were made specifically for players or caddies at the event. Take a look below at the best gear seen both at Augusta National and what is available for those watching at home.

TaylorMade traditional staff bags

TaylorMade’s 88th Masters edition staff bag sees a clean and traditional green-and-white color scheme with subtle design notes paying tribute to the ethos of the first major of the year. The company opted for the classic TaylorMade logo on the sides of the bag, while the more modern “T” logo is created with pink azaleas on the front. The handle displays commendation to Amen Corner with gold flags numbered 11 to 13 highlighted with a halo. Across the white sections of the bag, embossed azaleas bring a subtle 3D effect. In contrast, a collection of birth orange peaches lines the bag’s pockets, synonymous with Georgia’s state fruit.

(Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)

Callaway colorful staff bags

For 2024, Callaway decided on a fully white bag with the traditional Masters green as trim. The bag’s main feature is a floral collage of pink, purple, red and orange azaleas on each side of the bag. The same can be said for the headcovers and putter covers.

Spieth’s standout nametag

The 2015 Masters champion is known for his unique black-and-neon blue AT&T staff bag seen weekly on the PGA TOUR. However, Augusta National allows Jordan Spieth to change things up. This year’s Masters sees Spieth’s familiar caddie Michael Greller carrying a green-and-white version of the bag but with one standout feature. On the front of the bag is a metallic gold, flashy nametag displaying “Jordan Spieth.”

(Andrew Redington & Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Viktor’s vivacious clothing script

(J.Lindeberg)

Thomas’ custom Premiere Series FootJoys

The 15-time PGA TOUR winner debuted a slick pair of custom PLAYERS Championship spikes for TPC Sawgrass earlier in the season. This week in Augusta, Justin Thomas has been seen wearing a pair of Premiere Series FootJoys with a custom light pink azalea on the heel and a green-and-white gradient sole.

Gear available for those watching at home

Tp5x pix season opener.

The TaylorMade Pix range for TP5 and TP5x golf balls has offered various versions of logos from supporting college teams to Nelly Korda’s donut-printed design. This year for the Masters, TaylorMade has opted for unique placements of peaches across the golf ball. Each fresh “batch” comes in a textured box similar to the skin of a ripe Georgia peach.

(Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

Callaway Chrome Tour Major Series

Similar to the Pix design, Callaway’s Chrome Tour balls are available in a number of different designs. The Masters edition for 2024 has a springtime-inspired flower pattern celebrating the iconic April major championship.

Under Armour Drive Pro LE Golf Shoes “Patron’s Pack”

Look back to the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am in February, and between the storms Jordan Spieth was seen with a custom pair of Under Armour Drive Pro golf shoes. Fast forward to April, and Under Armour has released a Masters-themed version of the shoes that both Spieth and Maverick McNealy spent months designing. This version sees white-and-tan mesh with a classic Masters green-and-yellow trim and outsole. The insole features a Masters green checkered pattern with a playful Under Armour-branded pimento cheese logo.

(Under Armour)

PUMA PHANTOMCAT NITRO “Garden”

The aptly named “Garden” edition of the Puma PHANTOMCAT NITRO features a white leather design with green trim. The green-and-white sole of the golf shoe displays a black azalea with their re-imagined, bright yellow FLEXSPIKE.

(Puma Golf)

COBRA DARKSPEED Season Opener X Driver

While the term “Darkspeed” may contradict the colorful palette synonymous with the Masters, Cobra combines the iconic azalea blooms with the all-black look of DARKSPEED. The sole of the driver shows black-shadowed outlines of the Rhododendron with traditional green-and-yellow trim.

(Cobra Golf)

Alistair is a senior staff member at the PGA TOUR. Born and raised in England, he played golf professionally on the European Alps Tour before joining the PGA TOUR. Follow Alistair Cameron on Twitter .