Stoneage Ramblings

By John R. Stone

Maybe you have heard about LIV and maybe not, it is a new golf tour that is being promoted by Greg Norman, a 20-time winner on the PGA tour during the 1980s and 90s.

What is interesting is that it is being funded by Saudi Arabia and to get it started it has apparently handed out $100 million plus contracts to people like Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson to join and play for four years, or at least that is the number that is being tossed about.

This is competing with the PGA, the Professional Golf Association, that organizes most of the golf tournaments you might see on TV. One coming up this week is the 3M Championship which will be played near the Twin Cities. And there is the DP World Tour that used to be called the European Tour

Nobody understands Norman is up to, except maybe Norman. He says he is trying to promote golf world-wide.

Of course money is a big factor in this.

PGA golfers earn their keep. If you win or place you get paid. If not, you don’t. Plus if you’re good, personable and look good on TV you might get endorsements from everybody from golf equipment manufacturers to accounting firms and others.

You have to stay in the top 125 FedEx point winners to keep your PGA tournament entry privileges for the next year. Those are determined by placing in events and the number of events played. If you win a PGA event during the year you are good for the next two years of PGA play. If you lose your privileges you have to earn them back. You do this by going back to the Korn Ferry tour (kind of like baseball’s minor leagues) and graduate by winning three events in a season or several other routes. It’s not easy.

In a normal PGA event up to close to 150 can start on Wednesday of a four-day event. After two rounds the top 72 players advance to the weekend play, the others are done for the week. Those advancing play 18 holes Saturday and Sunday.

The winner of a regular PGA event gets roughly $1.5 million. There are four tournaments that are called “majors,” the U.S. Open, Masters, the PGA Championship and the Open Championship, sometimes called the British Open. The winners of those tournaments get around $2.5 million. The last place finisher in a regular PGA event will get around $15,000 in most PGA events.

Here’s where the money really comes in. On the LIV tour a winner gets $4 million. So far the events are smaller and feature only 48 golfers with the last place golfer guaranteed $120,000.

The speculation is that the money drew Johnson and Mickelson, and you probably can’t blame them. Johnson is 36. He would probably win a few more PGA events if he worked at it and with endorsements could pick up a $1 million a year or more. Mickelson is 51 but he is a crowd pleasure which is why he got the offer he did. His likelihood of winning a regular PGA event is close to zero. He could probably gather in a few more million in coming years so the attraction of $100 plus million would be very tempting.

Money for the PGA tour events comes from television rights that cover about 60 percent of tourney payouts. Then there is ticket income and sponsorship money, some of which goes to charity. The PGA affiliated events raise about $130 million for charity.

The average PGA player makes $1.5 million a year but when you figure the top players are getting $1.5 million for winning an event and $2.5 for a major there are many well below the $1.5 million. Even so there about 175 golfers good enough to be on the PGA tour.

Nobody is sure what LIV (that is the Roman numeral for 54, the number of holes played in LIV events) is really up to. Other than ticket and maybe some sponsor money it appears to have no other money stream than the Saudi government.

We might not know what LIV is up to for a couple of years.