Weekend Wrap - Refocused Blogger Edition

I'm having some difficulty deciding how many lies I've packed into that there header.... Certainly the opening word, as the weekend was more Packers-Broncos than Grant Thornton.  My last local ski buddy is a diehard Packers fan, so todays skiing may feel more like a Shiva call.  Perhaps not the most tasteful joke with the weekend news from Sydney and Providence, not to mention California.

It's strange days here in Utah.  I won't bore you with all the condo and car issues that hit me upon arrival, but the larger issue is the warm, dry weather.  When I arrived, the Canyons side of Park City had all of one trail open, expanded to three for last weekend.  We're skiing in temps up in the high 40's, not conducive to snowmaking or the preservation of what little snow exists.  The only reason I got the plane was that my nephew is expected to come through with a college buddy for what's become an annual visit.  Somehow I'm guessing that the former competitive mogul skier will be frustrated with skiing green groomers, but that's about all we have.  I expect we'll hit every ski shop in the Wasatch Front.

After my long absence, I expect about five pageviews for this post, but shall we?

The Times, They Are A-Changin' - As I understand the current state of play, we are combining a non-golfer and a notoriously self-interested egotist to redefine the Tour.  What could go wrong?  It's harder than you might think to home in on what is actually under consideration, but here's a Tiger-centric snippet that amuses with the change in tone:

“You’re chairing the Future Competitions Committee,” a reporter began. “l’d like to know, personally, what is your motivation to contribute heavily to the strength of the PGA Tour?”

It’s a question central to the present and future of men’s professional golf. Woods has enough money, prestige and time to do just about anything, of course — but he’s chosen to fill his days

with Zoom calls and strategy meetings in an attempt to reinvent a tour on which his own competitive days are numbered. Is Woods careless with his time? Nobody thinks that. But nobody knew how carefully he’d thought about his decision to moonlight as a golf bureaucrat. Not until Woods answered the question.

“Well, the PGA Tour gave me an opportunity to chase after a childhood dream,” he said. “I got a chance to hit my first ball in my first PGA Tour event when I was 16 years old. I know that’s what, 33 years ago, but I’ve been involved with the PGA Tour ever since then.

“A little kid from Cypress, California, growing up on a par-3 course got a chance to play against the best players in the world and make it to World No. 1. I got a chance to be involved in a lot of different things on our Tour. This is a different opportunity to make an impact on the Tour.

Woods’ monologue hit on a theme we haven’t heard much recently: That the PGA Tour isn’t a [winces] product in need of [winces again] optimization and [bangs head on desk] profit maximization. It asked us to remember that the PGA Tour is also something else entirely: A place where childhood dreams come true.

Gee, I had been reliably informed that it was Product v. Product.  So hard to keep up....

But, I hear you asking, what exactly might they do?  Well, depending upon Tiger to share his thoughts is fruitless, so how about an AI-generated summary of changes under consideration?  yeah, that was rhetorical:

Key Proposed Changes (For 2027 & Beyond)

Shorter, Focused Season: Moving from the current large schedule to roughly 20-25 events, featuring the best courses and biggest markets.

Post-Super Bowl Start: Delaying the season's main events until after the NFL Championship game to capture more viewership.

"Scarcity" & Simplicity: Creating more high-stakes, high-value events (like Signature Events) where top players are guaranteed to play, reducing the current elevated/regular event divide.

Bye Weeks: Introducing designated weeks off after majors for top players.

Strategic Event Placement: Considering moving or cutting certain events (like Florida tournaments) to fit in West Coast swings and avoid conflicts.

My favorite bit is that ChatGPT, or whatever AI model Google uses, hasn't learned to close quotation marks.... that sound you here is my mother the grammarian spinning in her grave.

The first thing that jumps out at your humble blogger is that a spot-Super Bowl start eliminates so many of the "best courses and biggest markets".  And, perhaps more importantly, some of those early-season, prime time TV opportunities.  Can they really jam Riviera, Pebble, Torrey and the Wasted in with a later start?  

The objective of a more streamlined Tour seems superficially worthy, though I feel compelled to remind folks that the impact on playing opportunities of a 20-25 event schedule can't be judged until they share their proposed field sizes for said events.  With the Tour seemingly controlled by a cabal featuring Patrick Cantlay, I naturally assume the worst.  Doesn't seem to be the best moment to be a Tour rabbit, eh?

Last week's Tour Confidential panel couldn't resist the siren song of the Striped One:

Tiger Woods spoke to the media for the first time in several months when he held his annual press conference at the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas (won by Hideki Matsuyama). Tiger touched on a variety of topics; which was most interesting to you?

Dylan Dethier: I was most intrigued by Woods’ involvement in the future vision for the PGA

Tour; I wrote about that here but what’s fascinating to me is the pairing of Woods — the ultimate insider, and at this point one of the Tour’s longest-tenured figures in any position — and Rolapp — the ultimate outsider with admittedly very little golf-specific knowledge — as the shapers of the Tour’s future.

Josh Berhow: I don’t think anyone anticipated this particular presser getting so into the rumored schedule changes, but I thought Tiger speaking about it added some legitimacy to it. The health update was both unsurprising and disappointing. I don’t think Tiger can come back and contend regularly these days, but it would be fun to see him healthy and play a few times a year. The watch is on for the Masters.

James Colgan: I was most interested by Tiger’s comment about YouTube. He indicated he felt the infinite video library of swings on the internet was helping to turbocharge golf’s youth movement. Every so often, you’ll hear Woods say something that reflects he thinks about golf on a wholly different plane from most mere mortals. One example was when he started talking about the “cut” and “draw” spin necessary on chip shots at Augusta National. This was another.

I have a simple question.  Tiger has allegedly been so involved for quite some time, including in the negotiations with His Excellency.  Can anyone point to anything positive that has happened due to Tiger's involvement.

We know he's used his involvement to beg off the Ryder Cup captaincy, setting in motion the chain of events that led to the Keegan Bradley Hail Mary.  How'd that work out for everyone?

As the chair of the Future Competitions Committee, Tiger also indicated the Tour is looking at creating a shortened schedule (and avoiding the NFL) that could begin in 2027, although he was light on details. There’s been much talk about the potential for a new Tour schedule in the future, but what’s the biggest hurdle from making it all happen?

Dethier: Ironically one of the things the Tour wants to change is the same thing preventing it from making that change. There are so many [buzzword alert] stakeholders, so many separate deals with so many different tournaments that it’s challenging to get everything just right for everyone without crossing a dozen can’t-cross lines. Put another way: the Tour is a big boat, and it’s tough to turn a big boat around.

Berhow: Wow, love the boat analogy, Dylan. Good work. But the answer is there’s a lot in the way of making something like this happen. I’d love a schedule that takes the best 70-some players and puts them in the same 20 or so events a year (including majors) and all of a sudden we have some simplicity, continuity, distinction and burgeoning rivalries. But what about the middle class? How many members are there? How does the Korn Ferry Tour factor in? What about the smaller events? It’s frustrating we still don’t have a great way to do this, but I am also happy I’m not the person in charge of this. Because it can’t be easy.

Colgan: Every so often, the history of a major professional sports league comes down to the brute force capacity of its leadership. For baseball, this happened with the pitch clock. For basketball, with the first and second “aprons.” For football, with the 2011 lockout. I think brute force is the biggest hurdle facing the PGA Tour, and we’ll know if Woods and PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp have the gumption for it soon enough.

You see the problem in those first two answers, as Josh Berhow has succumbed to the appeal of 70-player fields.   But, Josh, why be a piker?  If you want Scottie v. Rory every week, why not just go to 20 player fields?  As I always ask, where is the limiting factor?  

We need to ask a simple question of everyone involved.  If 70-players fields are elite athletic competitions, why do the majors have 156-player fields (obviously excluding the one)?   Are we comfortable devolving the PGA Tour into a closed-shop of exhibition matches?

Wither LIV - Does it feel like the elite Tour players are continuing to use the risk of defections to LIV to create a more LIV-like PGA Tour, notwithstanding that LIV itself is floundering mightily?  

Shall we drop in to an interview with new LIV majordomo Scott O'Neill?  Again, rhetorical:

Scott, I’ve heard you refer to yourself a few times as a “change agent.” What did you think needed to be changed about LIV Golf when you took the job?

Yeah, I would say any four-year-old business in a very mature industry needs to be nimble, hard-charging, relentless. Needs to be on the journey of evolution, if you will. What the group went

through here to build and break through in golf — I don’t know if we’ll ever see it in our lifetimes again, and I think it’s somewhat spectacular.

What I’m coming here to do is to take that foundation and build the business. There are a whole host of paths that may lead us on. One is clearly on the golf side — on the golfer side. When you start to see faces like Tom McKibben, Josele Ballester and David Puig and Caleb Surratt — when you start to see an emerging next generation of talent, it should give us confidence that this is going in the right direction.

But I came here to complete, not compete — and, philosophically, that’s quite a shift and a change. How do we partner with the institutions that are becoming [our] very good friends at the majors? The USGA and the R&A are our agronomy partners; I’d imagine that was unthinkable four years ago. To think that those two organizations would open up pathways for us and recognize LIV? It’s wonderful.

I’d say getting on broadcast television was another one. Getting on one of the big four networks and launching on Fox; adding a handful of household names as marketing partners like HSBC and Salesforce and Qualcomm; and having endemics like Ping and Callaway raise their hand and say, “Oh yeah, some of the best players in the world are there.”

That’s the kind of stuff that we talked about achieving early on, and we’ve had a fair amount of success.

I'm still laughing at that "on the golf side".  What other side is there?

But my BS detector is in the red zone.  Yeah, they have a deal with Fox, but FS2 ain't exactly the mothership....

But I hope you have room to laugh some more:

Something I’ve always been a little perplexed by is that LIV doesn’t often publicly state its goals. It is very hard to know what LIV thinks about LIV’s performance to date. I’ve noticed you changed that a bit. You announced $500 million in new sponsorships earlier this year, and have been a little bit more transparent about bigger goals, like the OWGR. But before I get into the details, I wanted to ask you a simple question: If your time at LIV is a success, what will it look like?

I would say that we are the dominant global golf league and are recognized as such outside the U.S. I think that would be successful.

Well, they do own the Riyadh market, so they've got that going for them.

Going back to his first answer, it's more than passing strange that he would focus on the emerging talent, given LIV's ability to turn those careers stillborn.  There is no mechanism for those players to get into the majors, except perhaps by maintaining Euro Tour membership.  I don't understand those youngsters' decisions, because LIV can't provide a path to the next career step.

But again, the BS detector flashes red:

What are some of the general sports principles that you’re applying to LIV?

LIV is different from other tours. First of all, it’s a league, not a tour. But one thing I’ve noticed is that we have extraordinary talent who we’ve asked to make a commitment, and they have. Bryson [DeChambeau] has led the way on social media, but so has Phil Mickelson, who’s 55 years old. Our players are shaking hands, taking selfies, signing autographs when the cameras aren’t on them — that matters. They’re showing up for extra media sessions. They’re engaging in a broadcast. They’re my business partners. You know, these guys are out hustling for sponsorship deals.

Focusing on the product and the player is one thing that’s universal across sports. Sometimes everybody gets distracted by the everything else. But we have the product right, and we have a commitment from the players that matter most in the world.

Oh, it's a league that no one cares about, as distinct from a Tour that no one watches.  Got it.

But these guys still seem to be in a Product v. Product battle, and I'm guessing that is the more realistic take.

So, are they doing anything that will change the direction forward?  There might be this:

Is LIV Golf on the verge of making its biggest signing since Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton joined

the league?

Si Woo Kim is in "late-stage negotiations" to sign with LIV Golf, Tom Hobbs of Flushing It Golf reported Wednesday morning.

Kim joining LIV Golf would be another big gap to fill for the International team in the Presidents Cup. Kim is a four-time PGA Tour winner, including the 2017 Players Championship, and has played in the last three Presidents Cups. He's ranked 47th in the Official World Golf Ranking and finished inside the top 50 of the FedEx Cup standings following the 2025 season.

Clearly that changes everything....But, the news isn't all good:

For the past few months, speculation has swirled that Brooks Koepka is looking for a LIV Golf exit ramp. The assumption was that Koepka might move on when his contract expires at the end of the 2026 season, but new reports now suggest the five-time major winner has already made his last appearance on the Saudi-backed tour.

Sources told Sports Business Journal’s Josh Carpenter that Koepka may not play on the LIV tour in 2026, forfeiting nearly $20 million but remaining eligible to play on the DP World Tour and in the year’s majors thanks to his 2023 PGA Championship win. Furthermore, it has been suggested that Koepka may use this gap year to serve out a 12-month PGA Tour suspension, potentially rendering him eligible to return to the sport’s (still) premier golf league in August 2026.

Actually, Brooksie's unhappiness goes back far longer than the referenced few months.  In fact, he's been a malcontent since his arrival on the Tour League.

Additionally, this other South Korean has shot down rumors of his defection:

Sungjae Im has a two-word response to reports linking him to LIV Golf.

PGA Tour star Sungjae Im has firmly dismissed speculation linking him to a move to LIV Golf, responding with a two-word message: "Fake news".

Do you see the irony in that rumor?  Sungjae is the guy that didn't even have a home in the States for a long time, because he played every single week.  Doesn't make him an ideal fit for LIV, given that the rationale was mostly about wanting to play less.

Udder Stuff - The sun is up in Utah and I'm eyeing the exit.  How about we use this week's Tour Confidential for some quick call-and-response blogging.  yet again, rhetorical:

As we count down the final days of 2025, let’s take a quick moment to reflect on the year that was. Who were the most important golf figures of 2025?

Jack Hirsh: Important? I think it’s got to be new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp and new LPGA

commissioner Craig Kessler. Both have taken over legacy properties badly in need of fresh ideas and new perspective. Already we’re hearing talks of massive changes for the PGA Tour schedule as soon as 2027. Whether you like them or not, the Tour is clearly looking for something that will put its LIV Golf problem to bed. With Kessler and the LPGA, a new TV deal seems like it could be the spark to get the Tour to ride this new wave of interest in women’s sports around the world. There are certainly more important names in the golf world right now, but none will have more pressure to achieve their goals in 2026 than these two.

Zephyr Melton: Jack laid it out well, but I’ll go ahead and give Tiger Woods his obligatory mention. The popularity of the sport still ebbs and flows with Tiger — as evidenced by the heaps of coverage when he so much as posts a swing video. His competitive career may be behind him, but his influence on the game remains unmatched.

Josh Sens: Good answers above. To them, I’d add Rory McIlroy for providing the most compelling entertainment of the year at both the Masters and the Ryder Cup. And Tommy Fleetwood for best feel-good story. But that’s more about rooting interest than importance. Beyond those guys, some non-traditional golf figures come to mind, especially at a time when the game is stretching increasingly beyond its old boundaries. Caitlin Clark getting into golf. LeBron James going viral with every swing posted online. And though I’d rather get a root canal than watch a bunch of “influencers” knock it around, clearly people are interested, as we saw with the success of the Internet Invitational. Welcome to the future, for better or worse.

Zephyr Melton, take a bow.  What exactly did Tiger do in 2025?  His biggest contribution would seem to be playing Call of Duty during Ryder Cup week.  Tell me again, Zephyr, why he wasn't at Bethpage, if he's the straw that stirs the drink.

But I love Josh's answer.  I'm perfectly happy thinking of Tommy Fleetwood as the most significant golf figure of the year.  Not for the Tour Championship win which, while satisfying, involved beating only 29 other players.  No, what I liked most was his reaction to the disappointments at Hartford and elsewhere, where he was a consummate professional.  When asked why he talked to the press after crushing deafest, he said some delightfully simple, to wit, "It's my job."

Which makes him the anti-Rory, who in the aftermath of the career Slam turned into a self-interested jerk.  There's simply no other way to describe his summer hissy fit.   

And who — not mentioned above — might we be talking about in this space a year from now as a key figure of 2026?

Hirsh: I think it will be someone like Jon Rahm. His prominence in the game has seemed to diminish since his move to LIV, but he’s still played pretty well and I think will start making more of an impact in majors. He still hasn’t won one since the 2023 Masters.

Melton: How bout Brooks Koepka? Speaking of LIV, he’s long been rumored to want out of his LIV deal in order to get back to the PGA Tour. Could 2026 be the year we see a LIV star defect back to the Tour? If it is, BK is likely the first domino to fall.

Sens: Bryson. His impact shows no sign of slowing.

Yeah, not much to work with there.  Koepka will be of note for sure if he's the first to leave LIV, but it's not like he's been much of a player since Oak Hill.

 I didn't follow this, but sounds heartbreaking for Camillo:

Five players earned Tour cards for 2026 via PGA Tour Q-School Sunday at TPC Sawgrass. Which outcome — the good or bad — stuck out to you the most?

Hirsh: Sad to see one of the Tour’s great people, Camilo Villegas, come up one shot short of a playoff to keep full playing status on the Tour. He’ll still be around as a former winner, but I wouldn’t be surprised if former winners hanging onto fringe status is exactly what shrinking the number of exempt players from 125 to 100 is targeting.

Melton: Alejandro Tosti is headed back to the Tour — and the content gods thank him.

Sens: Villegas’ final missed shorty on 18 was painful. But it was touching to see him stick around to celebrate with his friend and countryman Marcelo Rozo. Personally, I was rooting for Spencer Levin, who has been around the block and then some and just didn’t have his best stuff today.

That will have to do for today.  I think I still have company coming, so you might not hear from me again until I'm home next week.  Then again, even then there might not be much to muse upon.  Have a great week and I'll see you when I see you.