KONA, Hawaii — Miller Brady points out in the distance at the Pacific Ocean as another stunning sunset unfolds and says, “Look, there’s a whale spout. It’s right in line with that palm tree.”
It never gets old for Brady, president of PGA Tour Champions, to start the new season at Four Seasons Hualalai, home of the Mitsubishi Electric Championship. This is the 28th consecutive year the senior circuit has kicked off the year here in paradise and the 17th in a row for Brady, who is in his sixth year leading the Champions Tour and embarking on his 25th year with the PGA Tour, the last 18 with the over-50 crowd.
“I had the chance to go to the regular tour a couple different times,” he said. “But I just sort of like this niche.”
It’s a niche playing for some $67 million this season, and its top players don’t need signature events or bloated FedEx Cup points to show up. A couple hours later, nearly all the stars of senior golf will attend the pro-am draw party and make their way to the stage when emcee Dave Marr III calls their name.
“It’s one of the coolest pictures you’ll see,” Brady said.
During a wide-ranging conversation, Brady shared why he’s bullish on the future for PGA Tour Champions, the back story on the change in title sponsor for one of its three playoff events and prepping for Tigermania at 50.
PGA Tour Champions: Key storylines as 2024 season kicks off
GWK: So how does it feel to be the president of the best tour in golf?
MB: You know, I don’t know if it’s the best tour, but it’s the only tour without a ton of drama right now.
We’re here, and we’re on an island playing golf. I told my team, look, there’s a lot going on in the world of golf right now. We have a really good thing going let’s not get distracted by all that other noise because there’s nothing we can do. We can’t control any of that. So, let’s stay on our island, control what we can control really, which is our title sponsors, our tournaments, our players, and the overall product, that’s all we can control.
GWK: On the 2024 schedule, how did the new Charles Schwab Cup playoff event in Little Rock, Arkansas, come about?
MB: Simmons Bank is going to be title sponsor. They also sponsor an event on the Korn Ferry Tour. I met their CEO a couple years ago, in St. Louis, at our tournament when he was playing in the pro-am. He’s also friends with Ken Duke and Glen Day on our tour, and he said, I think I want to bring a Champions Tour event to our hometown of Little Rock. I said, that’s great, I don’t really have anywhere on the schedule right now. If something opens up, let’s have a conversation. To be honest, he wanted a regular season event not a playoff. And so a little background, TimberTech was our sponsor in Boca Raton as our second playoff event.
They wanted to renew but they wanted to renew for a shorter term than what we asked for and the same dollars, and I just felt like our tour is better than that right now. So I said, we’re gonna move on. I felt strongly that I had Simmons Bank. So I went back to their CEO and said, Will you do a deal to be our playoff sponsor? And he was like, ‘Absolutely, we’re in.’ So we did a five-year deal with Simmons Bank. Those are the right markets. We’re not good when we played in Sherwood in L.A. Wrong market, too big.
But when we play in Birmingham, Alabama, Des Moines, Iowa, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, those markets work really, really well for us.
At the end of the day, our tour serves a significant purpose for the overall organization. We’re lifting the overall brand and markets where the PGA Tour is never going to play. The PGA Tour is never going to go to Sioux Falls but our brand is there and I think it helps everybody. So I think those are the right markets for us.
GWK: The PGA Tour made quite a few new demands of its tournaments, including increased contributions to prize money. Are there any similar demands on the PGA Tour Champions to help the bottom line but potentially hurt charitable giving by tournaments?
MB: No, not at this time. You know, our goal is to continue to improve all the events that are under our umbrella by every means possible, so making sure that the player experience is as good as possible to add the experience is just as good. That’s been important for us. Our team focuses on making sure that every single tournament does something to improve the caddie experience from the previous year. We’re announcing that we have an official caddie hat sponsor, $500,000, that’s not insignificant. So little things like that. I’m not going to require these tournaments to have porta potties every other hole.
GWK: Except for your major championships, 54 holes has been the trademark of PGA Tour Champions since its inception. Were you surprised when LIV came out with only 54-hole events? Did you see it as senior tour lite?
MB: I think there are some people that maybe tried to make that connection a little bit, but I haven’t given that much thought. Whatever they’re doing they’re doing; it doesn’t affect anything that we do.
GWK: Do you see a way for Phil Mickelson or others who went to LIV to ever play on the Champions Tour again?
MB: Sure, but I think that we’re probably in a wait-and-see mode like the regular tour on what happens with the overall partnership with SSG and PIF. Once that gets figured out, is there an overall pathway back to the organization, and should ours be the same for a Lee Westwood or Phil? We haven’t sat down to really think about them. I’d want to make sure that our players will embrace them, right? Because if not, it’s not worth the headache. Because our players all greatly appreciate their second lease on life. There’s no other professional sport where you can do what these guys are doing. They’re playing for over $67 million throughout the year. Pretty good.
GWK: Now that Paul Azinger is no longer broadcasting, do you have any indications he'll play some events at age 64?
MB: No, I don’t think he will. I saw Paul at the World Champions Cup (In December). I think it’s still pretty raw. It’s the whole way it went down. At the right time, I want to go see if maybe he’ll jump in the booth here. Why not? But the money’s vastly different. He has to want to do it. So I’ve got to find the right time. If I’m with him, just to say, hey, do you want to do a couple events? It’s too raw now.
GWK: Tell me about some of the players turning 50 this year and how much you expect them to play?
MB: Well, we’re in a little bit of a lull, which isn’t fair to those that are turning 50. But you know, we went through a really strong period where there was Ernie Els, Jim Furyk and Darren Clarke and Justin Leonard, these really strong names and they came out and they won and I think that helped us. This next two years is a little quiet from strong name recognition. So, I continue to focus on the guys that are the bigger names.
GWK: What preparations have you've started to make for Tiger turning 50?
MB: I knew that was coming.
I took our entire team, anyone who touches the product, middle of the year last year and we gathered and started a whiteboard of what ifs, the craziest things, whatever it was, you know, come up with it. Because it’s not too early to just think through everything. So we’ve done that, we’ve had conversations at the annual meetings with all of our tournaments about it. You know, you hear comments from time to time about how he can’t wait to have a golf cart. He has conversation with Steve Stricker or Ernie Els or some of these other guys. You know, they’ll come back and tell me they’ll say he’s looking forward, which is great. What does that mean? I have no illusions that he’s going to come out here and play 15 times. If he plays four times, that would be fantastic, if he plays 10 times that would be even better.
GWK: How do you see the metrics differing if Tiger commits to 5-10 events vs if he chooses not to play even the majors at 50?
MB: The TV side will be interesting. In hindsight, I wish that we would have held back the rights for this tour or at least had an option to get out of our current deal. No one at the time had the foresight way back when the deal was done and say, Hey, wait a second. Let’s carve that out. That would’ve been great. We’re locked in for the’same length of time as the PGA Tour.
But will our ratings go up? Absolutely. Could I see NBC and Golf Channel wanting to put an event on the network? Yeah. Tiger would have to commit early enough for us to make that happen. If he commits on the Friday before, we’ve had this conversation with tournaments, they won’t be prepared for it: ticket sales, which turns into an issue with your security, your transportation shuttles, concessions, everything. That was part of that white board that we did.
GWK: Have you had any talks with Tiger or his team about his intentions?
MB: I’ve had a conversation with (Mark) Steinberg, just more than anything just to educate them. We had a great conversation about the Champions Tour: how many events we have, the markets where we play, majors, some of the courses where we play early, a little bit about our cart policy. I don’t see Tiger ever wanting to file for ADA otherwise he would have done that already.
GWK: Do you receive similar complaints about lack of event access by bottom-rung players as we’ve heard from PGA Tour rank-and-file?
MB: The challenge is that we only play 78. It’s actually harder to come out here and stay out here if you didn’t have a really good career on the regular tour. Look, you’re always going to have some guys that think that either we should put more spots into our Q-School and more spots into our Monday Qualifiers but that’s not what drives us. We have just over 10 percent access for the event qualifiers and Q-School. That to me is plenty.
GWK: What are the biggest challenges with PGA Tour Champions currently?
MB: For me, we’re in a really good spot, we’re fully sponsored. We’re a B2B product, that’s what we are. TV is sort of secondary and ancillary for the sponsors. It is still important, but it’s not the driver. We’re not on network television. It’s trying to gain more notoriety and exposure for how good out tour is. People think we play these 6,500-yard golf courses and these guys aren’t really good. We average over 7,000 yards and these guys are really damn good. No offense to the regular tour, but they’re much easier to work with. If I ask a guy to come to a dinner with me, they’re going to do it as long as it works with their schedule, they’re gonna do it and they don’t ask to get paid because they understand they’re doing their job in order to have a place to play.
GWK: What would need to happen to spike interest in your product?
MB: I think Tiger can help with that, that’s the easiest solution, right? Having more events on network television would help but there’s no magic answer there. As long as our sponsors continue to see value in what they do when we play then it must be working.
GWK: What did you learn from the limited amount that Phil played that will help when Tiger turns 50?
MB: Phil had a small spike in crowds, but it’s nowhere near what Tiger will do. I think we learned a little bit about what the media is going to want.
GWK: Has there been a consideration to hold events Saturday, Sunday, Monday, or some other non-traditional slots in order to catch a larger potential TV audience?
MB: The Golf Channel would love nothing more than for us to play Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. It would take the right market. You’d need the title sponsor to be on board. You can do a pro-am on the weekend but will you be able to sell hospitality tents on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday? That’s the tournament’s biggest fear. Probably five years ago, we approached two or three different tournaments with this idea. They looked at it. They decided the risk wasn’t worth it.
GWK: Why is 50 still the right age for eligibility to join PGA Tour Champions?
MB: We looked at it extensively as an organization and we looked at it with in concert with the player directors on the regular tour two or three years ago. We were open to its because to be honest with you there’s been some push to lower it.
My response to that after looking at it, the guys that are going to move the needle out here, when they’re 48 the big names are still competitive on the regular tour, and they’re not going to come out here. At 48 I think Jim Furyk was still ranked in the top 10 in the world. I don’t need to lower the age for other journeymen, that doesn’t help us sell our product and it may push out a Tom Kite. While Kite may not be competitive anymore, he’s fantastic in the pro-am and he’s a Hall of Famer. So I don’t need to bring in a 48 year old who’s going to push out a big name. Now I may be told I have to do that at some point. But at least right now, everyone appreciates that it’s not something we should do.
GWK: What do you say to people that feel the tour is a dated concept and wish it would just go away?
MB: My response is why? We serve a purpose in the world. We have a great price point significantly below what a PGA Tour title is if you want to be a title sponsor in golf you can get into it with our tour and if you want to grow to the regular tour like 3M did, great, but you can still be a title sponsor. We generate over $40 million in charity in the markets where we play. We’re playing in markets where the regular tour isn’t going. I think that helps professional golf, helps the PGA Tour brand. We serve a really good purpose and we’re more financially solvent now that we’ve probably ever been.
GWK: Does the PGA Tour still underwrite the Champions Tour to a large degree?
MB: The Tour used to provide an annual subsidy to this tour. That went away two years ago. We still have our television rights fee, we draw down on that, official marketing partners that we draw on. You could probably argue do we get the right allocation or should that allocation be split differently? It was important for me over the past – call it 10 years since I was the COO – to stop having tournaments that we had to give an additional subsidy. If you can’t stand on your own then you’re gonna go away. We’re better than that and we’re stronger than that and we’ve made sure our tournaments operate in the right way.
