ORLANDO, Fla. — Let us all first acknowledge what Tiger Woods has meant to the PGA Tour.
In short, he has meant everything.
Nobody can deny that Tiger’s mere presence and past dominance are largely responsible for the Tour’s $3 billion TV package and tournament purses that have skyrocketed to nearly half-a-billion dollars this season.
However, Tiger is no longer present on the Tour and hasn’t been dominant in years. Isn’t it time for golf to move past the Tiger Era and stop making him the focal point of the sport?
The reason I bring this up is because on the eve of one of Tour’s premier events — The Arnold Palmer Invitational — the biggest news in the sport was that Tiger had won the $8 million top prize for being the Tour’s most popular golfer in the inaugural Player Impact Program (PIP).
That’s right, the PGA Tour gave $8 million in bonus money to a golfer who is ranked 857th in the world and didn’t play a single Tour event last year due to his ongoing recovery from a serious car accident. This is an insult to all of the great young players on Tour who did play last year and deserve much more recognition (and money) than they are getting.
How ridiculous is it that Tiger was gifted $8 million for doing nothing while Jon Rahm, the world’s No. 1-ranked golfer, earned just $7.7 million as the PGA Tour’s money leader last year? How ludicrous is it that Tiger’s $8 million PIP prize is more than $7.6 million in combined winnings for his record eight victories at The Arnie?
As it stands, the PIP is calculated by a player’s appeal and social media popularity and is based upon Nielsen ratings, Google searches, MVP Index, Meltwater Mentions and Q-Rating. If you throw in the Dunkel Index and the Sagarin Ratings, this sounds like the same setup the old BCS system used when trying to determine who should play in college football’s national championship game.
Um, just a suggestion for the PGA Tour, but you might want to add one more very important criterion for winning the Player Impact bonus: You have to actually PLAY!!! How incredibly stupid is it that the PGA Tour’s biggest annual monetary award goes to a player who didn’t even play last year?
There are some players who have publicly and privately criticized the PIP — not because Tiger won the top bonus but because they would rather see the $40 million pool of PIP money dispersed at least partly based on how you perform between the ropes.
“I think I’m old-school in the respect that I would like the money to be doled out relative to play, and I don’t think the PIP does that,” FedEx champion Patrick Cantlay said. “It may be the first departure that the Tour has had from rewarding good play to rewarding social media or popularity presence, so I don’t like that departure.”
I get it. Tiger is by far the most famous name in golf and more people do Google searches on his name than any other player on Tour.
Guess what? Jack Nicklaus probably gets more Google searches than Justin Thomas. Does that mean the Golden Bear — at age 82 — should be eligible for a PIP bonus too? And while we’re at it, let’s give Arnie’s estate some PIP money, too.
The PGA Tour needs to quickly tweak the rules to make sure the sport’s top active players are the only ones eligible for the massive monetary PIP award. Phil Mickelson finished second in the PIP standings for last year and earned $6 million. But Phil not only played, he provided the game with one of its most historic moments when he became the oldest player to win a major by prevailing at the PGA Championship.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not Tiger’s fault that he continues to move the needle more than any other athlete in his sport. We all want Tiger to fully recovery from the car wreck and make a triumphant return to the Tour, but it’s a longshot to think he will ever be major factor again. Even before the auto accident, Woods had won just three tournaments in the previous eight years.
It’s just not good for a sport — any sport — when somebody who isn’t even playing continues to overshadow the current stars. It would be as if we’re halfway through the NFL season next year and the retired Tom Brady is still selling more jerseys and creating more conversation than Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes and the other young stars.
Tiger’s immense popularity once spawned golf’s massive growth spurt but now is stunting its further development.
This is why the PGA Tour needs to do everything possible to lessen his impact on the game, not strengthen it.
