New PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp was interviewed just before Thanksgiving by CNBC, which shared the video with the world via its YouTube Channel, thus allowing us to find out exactly what he meant by parity on the PGA Tour and whether he really wants golf to start after the Super Bowl.
“Golf is not football,” said Rolapp, who worked with the NFL for more than two decades. “So, I still have a lot to learn.”
Between the season-ending RSM Classic and now, Rolapp didn’t bother to deny what Harris English said at the RSM Classic, which was that the PGA Tour might start the season after the Super Bowl, might not play in the fall, might only have 20 events, and so on. But none of those are facts written in stone.
Apparently, they are concepts, along with many others brought up at the Competition Committee meetings and in discussions with everyone, from players to sponsors to fans to TV networks, including those who don’t even have a PGA Tour contract at present.
The ideas were the result of what most people call brainstorming sessions.
Here’s how it works. You all want to create something or solve a problem or change how something is being done, and the rule is you come into a room with other people and bravely throw out your ideas on the topic, no matter how crazy. Some people call it throwing stuff on a wall to see what sticks.
They were trying to think outside the box. Golf, as most know, is wholly rooted in tradition, the past, and what's always been done. That's its charm and its current dilemma.
“Part of professional golf's issue is it has grown up as a series of events that happen to be on television as opposed to how do you actually take those events, making them meaningful in their own right,” Rolapp explained.
Professional golf happened that way because that’s the way professional golf grew.
And that wasn’t the only sacred cow Rolapp addressed. He grabbed the third rail of Tour “stars” versus those who are not on the Wheaties box. His example was a surprise.
“Everyone has this premise that a tournament only matters if one or two players are in it. There's no data that supports that,” he said.
He used the recent FedEx St. Jude event as an example. Rory McIlroy, he noted, skipped the tournament to rest up for the final two events of the season. There was much hand-wringing with McIlroy absent.
However, Rolapp noted that what happened on Sunday was that Justin Rose and J.J. Spaun were in a playoff. You can't get any more competitive than that.
“Justin ended up winning, and I think we did, towards the end of that telecast, close to five or six million viewers,” he said. “The six million people who were watching that playoff hole weren't saying, 'Gosh, this sporting event stinks because one player isn't in it.'”
Rolapp said it might have been a been a better event with McIlroy, but that the way it worked out, it was a success.
“Any sport worth its salt (that) says, ‘This competition only works if there's a couple people in it,’ is not a sport. It's the circus,” he said.
(I don't know about you, but I'm warming up to Rolapp.)
Golf, he thinks, has been doing better than people think, ratings and popularity-wise. He offered up some facts to prove it.
According to Rolapp, golf is up in participation 40 percent since COVID. On television, Sunday audiences are averaging three to five million viewers.
“To put that in perspective, that was higher than a first-round NBA game. That was four times the viewership of Sunday Night Baseball,” he added.
In other words, the PGA Tour golf has a solid base of devoted fans and followers.
However, he said it’s going to be the Competition Committee’s job to figure out how to make bigger and better events, how to put them in the calendar where fans will watch more golf more often, and how to put them in a competitive model that golf fans and sports fans will want to watch. And nothing has been decided yet.
The fortunate thing for golf, according to Rolapp, is that golf has already conquered the hard part of any sport, what he calls parity, which is slightly different from what most golf fans might think of as parity. Most golf fans think of parity as two guys they have never heard of playing for a title. His idea of parity is different than that.
“On any given Sunday, you don't know who's going to win. Golf has that,” he said. “The difference between the 10th-best golfer in the world and the 50th is razor-thin. That is incredible strength. Golf already has the hard part.”
( I don't know about you, but I'm thinking of putting him on the Christmas card list now that I've heard what he means by parity.)
Even better, Rolapp is looking to the future, far into the future, with the best quote of the interview: “You cannot build a life-long sport that outlives your stars if you don't build a system that is works beyond your stars.”
Wow. The next few seasons are going to be interesting on a whole new level.