What Brooks Koepka’s coup reveals about the PGA Tour’s new leader

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – There is speculation that new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolup will be down the road from here at the SoFi Center on Tuesday night when Tiger Woods’ TGL team takes on Steve Cohen’s team. other New York teams in Week 2 of the second season of the Made-for-TV Golf League. He played in the season opener last week. Does it matter that this is indoor night golf, a game that has been played outdoors during the day for centuries? No. Mr. Lorup has his eyes on the real prize. In the first week, approximately 700,000 live viewers tuned in on ESPN and its stations. Proper. The second week might be even better.

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On Wednesday night, Lollup will likely be attending Tiger Woods’ 300-person birthday party at The Breakers, a gilded five-star hotel just across the Intracoastal Waterway from here. If you know Woods at all, you know that these types of events are painful for him, but he’ll be there with a smile on his face, raising money for his charity, the TGR Foundation. If it’s important to Woods, it’s important to Lolap. Woods is a member of the PGA Tour’s Policy Committee, the Tour’s Enterprise Committee (commercial sector), and is chairman of the Tour’s Future Competitions Committee. Lolap and Woods will be Zoom’s biggest friends as they tackle these issues, including the Genesis Invitational and the Hero World Challenge. Does it matter if Matt Killen couldn’t tell Chris Como, citing two of Woods’ recent instructors? it’s not.

Brian Rolup’s name and likeness appear throughout, and a long preamble that reads like tea leaves on what’s going on throughout the journey back to the tour. When Mr. Rolup was named the new CEO of the PGA Tour shortly after last year’s U.S. Open, those who had known him from his NFL days said: “He’s smart, he has a good business sense, and he’s not a golf guy.” That last part, which I was originally going to diss, actually turned out to be something of value (depending on how you look at Monday’s news). Brian Rolup’s most important mission is to get people to watch PGA Tour events in person and, more importantly, on any screen of their choice. If getting Brooks Koepka back on the team helps Lolap with this goal, he will do whatever he can to get him back on the team. There’s no reason for him to worry about how Koepka took as much of LIV Golf’s money as possible, what damage he did to the PGA Tour with his departure, or how frustrated regular players would be with this easy return. He wants the eyeballs Koepka brings. Full stop.

The same logic would apply to his efforts to bring back Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm (both U.S. Open champions) and Cameron Smith (winner of both the ’22 Players Championship and British Open Championship).

Whatever happened, happened. we want them back.

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Monday’s news is the opening salvo. Rolup said in August that his goal was “not incremental change. Big change.” This is the exact opposite of how Augusta National and the Masters are run (a term the leaders despise). change and receive all their instructions from the words improvement. Golf doesn’t have a tradition of “big changes.” Lorap may not know, and he certainly doesn’t care.

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When the war between LIV and the Tour first escalated in the summer of ’22, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said, “I’m not naive. If this was an arms race and the only weapon here was dollar bills, the PGA Tour wouldn’t be able to compete.” At the time, it sounded so true. What Lorup would like to tell you here is that dollar bills are do not have The only weapon in the LIV-PGA Tour battle. The PGA Tour has something that LIV Golf doesn’t. It’s the freedom to create your own schedule. The door to Koepka’s return began there.

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The same logic will apply as Lollup tries to find a way for Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith to return to the PGA Tour. DeChambeau grew up under LIV, but has some bad memories on the PGA Tour. In Smith’s case, it’s hard to know what he cares about. Rahm may be open to the argument that he can play wherever he wants. But that would require leaving behind mountains of Saudi money.

It’s hard to imagine Saudis walking away from LIV Golf. Walking away is not in the fabric of their cultural business. They are too rich, too smart, and too ambitious. However, Rolup is going to do everything in his power to undermine LIV Golf here. Working with Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and a few other key players, he’s sure to carve out some sort of narrow path back to the PGA Tour for Taylor Gooch, Tyrrell Hatton, Joaquin Niemann, and a handful of other LIV players who have won on the PGA Tour.

As for major championship winners Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed, my guess is that if Lollup had less interest in them, he would have expanded the terms with Monday’s news. Mickelson is 55 years old and has expressed so much disdain for the PGA Tour that it’s hard to imagine him ever returning. Woods never liked Sergio Garcia, so he probably didn’t put pressure on Lolap to ease his return. Patrick Reed’s rules debacle has made him an outsider on the PGA Tour. As for Dustin Johnson, does anyone know about him? He can play in the Masters forever. His stepfather is Wayne Gretzky. He has all the jet skis he needs.

Mr. Rolup can’t kill LIV golf, just as the NFL helped kill the USFL in 1986, but he can weaken the NFL. He could reduce its star power and the appeal of the international series to emerging golf talent. If he can weaken it enough, LIV Golf and the PGA Tour may be able to have some kind of meeting of the minds, with the two leagues coexisting.

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Meanwhile, the PGA Tour CEO is shouting an implicit message. I don’t care what happened. I want to fix what is currently broken.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

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