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As LIV Golf continues to shake up the men’s professional game, the PGA Tour is turning to the man who revitalized MLB to change golf’s future.
Longtime MLB executive Theo Epstein, who was largely responsible for the creation of the pitch clock, will highlight the newly formed Future Competition Committee, new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp announced Wednesday ahead of this week’s Tour Championship in Atlanta.
Epstein, now a senior advisor at Fenway Sports Group, has been intertwined with the PGA Tour since the Strategic Sports Group, which FSG is part of, invested $1.5 billion into the Tour last year. But this move will mark his strongest involvement yet, as Rolapp seeks to bring in learnings from other professional leagues.
“It’s one reason why I asked Theo Epstein to participate in this,” Rolapp said. “He clearly has a track record in other sports including baseball and has wrestled with these same competitive issues, and I think we can learn from his experience.”
Epstein will be joined on the new committee by FSG principal John Henry, PGA Tour board chairman Joe Gorder, and six players: Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Camilo Villegas, Maverick McNealy, and Keith Mitchell. “It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour,” Rolapp said. “That is inclusive of regular season, postseason, and offseason.”
One of the biggest issues facing the PGA Tour’s current competition model is bringing together the best players more often. Next season, the PGA Tour will add a ninth $20 million signature event, but top LIV Golf and PGA Tour golfers only face each other four times a year at the major championships. Slow pace of play and TV viewer complaints of heavy commercial loads are also likely areas of improvement for the PGA Tour.
Rolapp said the new committee has not yet met, but he would like to start implementing changes “as soon as we can.”
NFL Learnings
As former chief media and business officer at the NFL, Rolapp said he “didn’t cheer for teams, I cheered for television ratings.”
That mindset carries over to the PGA Tour (subbing players for teams), and Rolapp believes competitive parity will be key. “Everybody wants to go into an event not knowing who’s going to win,” he said. “At my old job, I think we obsessed about these things. Other than the NFL, I think golf is the closest thing that I’ve seen that competitive parity. In my old world, we could pick five teams we think are going to win the Super Bowl, and I think we’d probably both be wrong. I think golf has similar characteristics, so I think that’s a strength we’re going to lean in to.”
Rolapp was announced as PGA Tour CEO in June, but his first official day as PGA Tour CEO was Aug. 4.
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