Golf’s biggest star, Tiger Woods, is pulling the strings behind the scenes as the PGA Tour’s future takes shape
NASSAU, Bahamas — It’s impossible to measure Tiger Woods’ impact on professional golf — from 15 major championship victories and 82 PGA Tour titles to the cultural shockwave he sent through the game when he arrived in the late 1990s.
But of all the things the “Little Kid from Cypress, California,” — his words — accomplished, it may be his backroom maneuvering in the twilight of his professional career that leaves the most significant legacy.
Brian Rolapp’s vision of PGA Tour 2.0 is as sweeping as it is iconoclastic. This is not “incremental” change — again, his words; this is “significant” change, and to that end, the PGA Tour’s new front man has enlisted the only person, either outside or inside the confines of PGA Tour HQ, that can get him there. Naming Woods chair of the Future Competitions Committee wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity with force-multiplier implications.
What is to come as early as 2027 to the PGA Tour will be a foundational change that will leave the circuit indistinguishable to many.
To get to that seminal transition, Rolapp has tasked Woods and the FCC with three not-so-simple tenets: “parity, scarcity and simplicity.”
Most will skip past “simplicity” and acknowledge that the Tour’s season-long points race is no closer to an easily-digestible product now than it was when it was unveiled in 2007; and “parity,” at least to Woods, is the easiest box to check.
“Party is something that’s inherent in the game of golf because of the meritocracy of the game. It’s just there; we already have parity. We play each and every week starting at zero,” Woods said Tuesday at the Hero World Challenge, which he hosts. “So with the parity part, it was the easiest part to figure out because it’s already there.
“Now, the simplicity part, that’s another part that you didn’t say that we have to try and simplify. Simplify the point structure on the FedExCup so not only the players understand but the fans can understand it, what goes on every week, week to week, how they can follow and how we can make it better.”
And then there’s “scarcity.”
In simplest terms and in this context, scarcity means less will be more for the PGA Tour’s future. In practical terms, that appears to mean a 20-to-30-event schedule with the biggest tournaments played on the best courses with the best fields at the best time of year. This will be done, it goes without saying, well outside the long shadow of professional and semi-professional college football.
“We’ve torn down and looked at so many different models. It’s been a lot. We’ve talked to title sponsors, we talked to CMOs, we talked to tournament directors, we talked to media partners, we’ve talked to a lot of different people and taken a lot in of what they would like to see,” Woods said of the ongoing process to overhaul a product that has stood for decades.
As one Tour official explained, the current overhaul is like trying to build a plane while it’s flying, with countless partners and contracts and constituencies to account for.
Harris English inadvertently made headlines two weeks ago at the RSM Classic when he talked about a schedule, beginning in 2027, that begins after the Super Bowl and is done well before the semi-pros take the field for Week Zero in the fall. That, to some, sounds like the pathway forward, but it ignores how complicated the Tour’s current business model is with countless interested parties.
“We are trying to do that in the best way possible so we can introduce this in ’27. Hopefully we get there, hopefully we get to that point,” Woods said with considerably less bass in his voice.
“We’re working with all of our partners to create the best schedule and product to deliver all that in ’27 is something we’re trying to do. I don’t know if we can get there, I don’t know if we will get there, but that’s what we’re trying to do.”
But if Woods’ pleas for patience in what is understandably a wildly complicated process went largely unnoticed, his thoughts on the mutually exclusive notion of “scarcity” and “parity” will be dissected for months by an increasingly uneasy and vocal middle class on Tour.
