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BMW PGA Championship Brings Players From PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf
Players from the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the upstart LIV Golf series will all be competing at this week’s BMW PGA Championship in England.All but a half dozen professional golf tournaments — out of hundreds of events held each year — rely on a marquee sponsor and dozens of other co-sponsors to pay millions of dollars for each event to happen.There are a few notable exceptions: the Masters, the United States Open, the P.G.A. Championship and the British Open.But even an event as prestigious as this week’s BMW PGA Championship at the Wentworth Club in Surrey, England — one of the top events on the DP World Tour — relies on the German carmaker plus another dozen sponsors, like Zoom, Rolex and Hilton, to fund the event, pay the players and have something left over for charity.There’s just one problem. The BMW PGA Championship will have more than a dozen players from the rival Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf series in the field, including fan favorites Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood and several players that could win the event like Kevin Na, Patrick Reed and Martin Kaymer.Unlike the PGA Tour, which has suspended members who have joined LIV and barred them from playing in PGA Tour events, the DP World Tour has a slightly different policy. Members who qualify for tournaments, like Wentworth, based on their world rankings or other criteria, are allowed, for now, to play in the event.Given the amount of money sponsors pledge to an event on the DP World Tour, the PGA Tour or any of the other tours around the world, they want something in return. Corporate perks and television coverage for sure, but they also want great players to create compelling drama. That’s what happened in the final round of the Tour Championship on the PGA Tour on Aug. 28, when Rory McIlroy beat his playing partner, Scottie Scheffler, by one stroke to win the FedEx Cup, the PGA Tour’s season-long points competition. (Southern Company, Coca-Cola and Accenture are sponsors of the Tour Championship, not to mention FedEx, who as a season-long sponsor of the PGA Tour contributes a large part of the $18 million first-prize check.)And having a winner from LIV Golf creates a difficult situation for sponsors and the DP World Tour itself, which is a strategic partner of the PGA Tour but has allowed LIV players to compete.Before the tournament even started, the LIV presence at Wentworth was criticized by top tour members like the U.S. Open champion Matt Fitzpatrick, who called the LIV presence “disappointing.” Billy Horschel, who won the BMW PGA Championship in 2021, said the LIV golfers shouldn’t be allowed to play on the DP World Tour at all: “They decided to go play on that tour and they should go play there.”Greenskeepers working on the 18th hole at Wentworth Golf Club on Sept. 6.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesIts sponsor has remained neutral. “The focus of the BMW Group is to host a world-class event and provide a premium experience for players, fans and enthusiasts at all our sport engagements,” said Tim Holzmüller, a spokesman for BMW Group Sport Engagement.Great players bring in fans and television viewers at home. And a battle between a LIV golfer and a PGA or DP World Tour member would certainly juice ratings. But what happens afterward for sponsors would be hard to say.The traditional measure of a tournament is its “strength of field,” which is important to ensure sponsorship dollars are well spent. In layman’s terms, the term refers to the quality of the players committed to playing the event. And for sponsors, the bigger the stars the bigger the audience.The DP World Tour says its marquee event has a strong roster of players.“The field for this year’s event is projected to be significantly stronger than last year’s event,” said Steve Todd, deputy media communications director for the DP World Tour, noting that three top-10 players are in the field — McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Fitzpatrick. The last time that happened was in 2019 — the last BMW PGA Championship unaffected by the pandemic.Todd added that there were plenty of fan favorites to draw in viewers and satisfy sponsors.“The field also features defending champion Billy Horschel and a number of Ryder Cup players including Viktor Hovland, Shane Lowry, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, Justin Rose and Francesco Molinari, all of whom have strong records in the tournament and are particularly popular with the Wentworth crowds,” he said. “Also playing is [Ryder Cup] European captain Luke Donald, who won the event back-to-back in front of his home English fans in 2011 and 2012.”Westwood, a three-time winner of the DP World Tour’s Race to Dubai and a winner on the PGA Tour, is now a LIV golfer who is playing at Wentworth this week. He said he didn’t believe it made any difference who won.“Everyone playing at Wentworth has qualified to play by right,” he said in an interview. “It’s the strongest field at the BMW PGA Championship for years.”He added: “If a LIV golfer wins, then he’ll be the person that’s played the best and will fully deserve it. I don’t think the public in general are bothered what tour people play on. They just want to see the best players play great golf.”Andrew “Chubby” Chandler, a longtime agent for players on the DP World Tour, said the competing tours at Wentworth “adds a lot to the event both in star names and intrigue. I don’t see a problem if a LIV golfer wins at Wentworth. I think it possibly shows what might have happened if the [DP World Tour] could have accepted all the LIV golfers as full members when it was suggested four months ago.”The tournament also comes just weeks after the PGA Tour made significant changes on how it operates that may not align with what the DP World Tour is doing.For one, top players on the PGA Tour need to commit to 20 events, which could be challenging for European players. The Tour has also created so-called elevated events with greater prize money. Both are meant to get the top players competing against each other more often.Patrick Reed of the United States plays his second shot on the 1st hole at the Wentworth Golf Club during a practice round before the BMW PGA Championship.Warren Little/Getty ImagesMcIlroy said that sports fans want to see the best in the game when they tune in to watch, drawing a comparison to U.S. football fans wanting to see Tom Brady at quarterback if they’re watching a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game.Yet the up-and-coming players are being given a $500,000 draw against their PGA Tour earnings to help them compete. This goes for both U.S. players who have made it to the PGA Tour and international players who have qualified through the DP World Tour rankings. In other words, it’s helping to end the economic disadvantage that young players have in golf that they don’t in other professional sports.“It’s comparable to how other leagues approach their athlete compensation,” said the PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan at a news conference. “For rookies, coming out here and knowing that that’s payable on day one we think will help put those rookies in a better position to compete because they can invest in the infrastructure they need to succeed.”(Players who miss the cut also get a $5,000 stipend to help cover their expenses.)The PGA Tour’s August announcement also has given LIV players fodder to play both sides of the debate, since what it means for the tour’s partner, the DP World Tour, wasn’t mentioned.“The goal for the DP World Tour is finding a way to get the top Europeans that play on the PGA Tour to come back and play in Europe more often, not just the odd big one or two tournaments where they get appearance money,” Westwood said. “This is all going to be made harder by the new concept that Jay [Monahan] announced that is designed to guarantee 20 strong fields in the U.S. with not much thought given to the DP World Tour and other tours. It’s an odd decision considering the new ‘strategic alliance’ supposedly in place.”But a PGA Tour official who was not authorized to speak because of ongoing litigation involving LIV Golf said the strength of fields on the tour remains strong even without the players who have left.And that, at the end of the day, is what some observers believe companies want. “Sponsors,” Chandler said, “want the best fields at their events so BMW will be pleased.” More
- in Golf
The PGA and DP World Tours Allied. Then LIV Golf Happened.
The alliance made it easier for players to compete in more tournaments, but the new golf tour is testing the partnership.Fabrizio Zanotti had been waiting to hear where he’d be this week.Ranked 38th on the DP World Tour, he was on the cusp of getting into the Genesis Scottish Open. But as of last summer, an alliance between the PGA Tour and the DP tour means that he had a spot in the PGA Tour’s Barbasol Championship, nearly 4,000 miles away in Nicholasville, Ky., if he didn’t get into the Scottish Open.Zanotti, who is from Paraguay, wasn’t complaining. “It’s really good,” he said. “The partnership is nice for us here in Europe to have the opportunity to get there.”Just a few months ago, the PGA Tour and the European Tour, which oversees the DP World Tour, had an alliance that looked fruitful. After competing for players for several decades, the tours came together in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic and by November 2020 they had formalized a partnership.Last August, the tours announced that they were co-sanctioning three events: the Scottish Open and the Barbasol, which run Thursday through Sunday, and the Barracuda Championship next week in Reno, Nev., opposite the British Open.This meant players on the PGA and DP World Tours could compete in either event if their ranking was sufficient to get in. But mostly it meant if they didn’t get into the Scottish or British Opens, they had a great consolation prize in playing lesser tournaments on the more prestigious PGA Tour.Fabrizio Zanotti of Paraguay said an alliance between the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour should mean more opportunities for him to play and compete.Murad Sezer/ReutersWhen this deal was announced in August, it was heralded as a sign of the deepening cooperation between the tours and sold as a benefit to both tours’ members.“With us co-sanctioning three events this year, we are no longer competing for top players,” Keith Pelley, the European Tour commissioner, said in an interview earlier this year.“Everything changed after November 2020. It was a mind-set shift for both of our organizations to work as closely together as we could and share all facets of our businesses. We went from competitors to partners.”Those were the days. That alliance is being tested publicly and politically by the new Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour. The high-dollar invitational series has lured a group of PGA and DP World Tour players away and sent more established tours scrambling to make changes.In the first event, the winner took home $4 million, but there was guaranteed money for every player, including the last-place finisher, Andy Ogletree, who won the U.S. Amateur in 2019. (He didn’t make the field at the first LIV event in the United States, at Pumpkin Ridge in Oregon, throwing into doubt his professional future.)For golfers trying to play their way up the rankings and into tournaments, money surely matters, but it’s the Official World Golf Ranking points that matter the most. They’re what determines how much control players have over their schedules.“The playing opportunities with the merger are great,” said Maverick Antcliff, who played in college at Augusta State University in Georgia and is ranked 171st on the DP tour. “If you have a good week in that opposite field event, you have an opportunity to transfer to the U.S. That’s the avenue I want to go. That strategic alliance has given us a clearer pathway.”Before the alliance, the way players in Europe got invites onto the PGA Tour and into the majors was by being ranked in the top 50 in the world — not just on a particular tour — or by qualifying for the United States or British Opens through their qualifying process. The strategic alliance has given talented but lower-ranked players a chance to compete on the PGA Tour and possibly finish high enough to gain more control over their schedule.While it presents larger, existential questions for professional golf, it has more practical week-to-week consequences for players trying to get into tournaments like the Scottish Open. Will defectors to the LIV Golf being excluded from events give other players a chance to compete? And that’s another way of players on the cusp asking if they have a spot in events after remaining loyal to the tour where they’ve been playing.The answers aren’t clear. For one, the two tours are structured differently. The PGA Tour is a nonprofit. The European Tour is essentially a union of its members. So their punishments have differed because their members ostensibly have a say.Jay Monahan, commissioner of the PGA Tour, has threatened to suspend or bar players who go to the LIV tour (with a number of players like Dustin Johnson and Kevin Na resigning their memberships upon moving to LIV).The LIV Golf Invitational Series presents existential questions for professional golf and has also changed the week-to-week dynamics for players trying to get into tournaments like the Scottish Open.Troy Wayrynen/EPA, via ShutterstockPelley, the European Tour commissioner, had to take a different tact with his players: They were fined $120,000 for playing in the first LIV event in London and barred from playing in the three co-sanctioned events. Pablo Larrazabal and Oliver Bekker paid their fines and were back playing on the European Tour at the recent Horizon Irish Open.Yet the LIV Tour, which set out to challenge the existing tours, is doing so at the cost of upcoming players. Consider Ogletree, who has struggled on the PGA Tour but had his U.S. Amateur champion status to fall back on. Now the question remains what his defection to the LIV Tour means for his professional career.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 5A new series. More
