The Players Championship: High Stakes On and Off the Course for PGA Tour

While most sports fans wait for March Madness to arrive, this week marks what is effectively the PGA Tour’s Super Bowl.

After Akshay Bhatia won the Arnold Palmer Invitational on Sunday, the page officially turned to The Players Championship, the tour’s flagship event at TPC Sawgrass with a $25 million purse and $4.5 million winner’s check.

Played annually in Ponte Vedra, Fla., where the PGA Tour is headquartered, this is the first Players Championship since Brian Rolapp, the former NFL power broker, became CEO of the tour last summer. The tournament is March 12-15.

While this is the PGA Tour’s largest regular-season prize pool, there are even greater financial stakes for players and stakeholders as significant changes regarding the tour’s future are expected to come to light in the coming days.

Rolapp—previously the NFL’s chief media and business officer, and a potential successor to commissioner Roger Goodell—will address the media Wednesday at the PGA Tour’s 187,000-square-foot “Global Home” that opened last year.

Some of the changes to the tour schedule and structure being discussed include: 

• Pushing the annual start of the season back from early January to as late as after the Super Bowl in February.
• An emphasis on scarcity, with fewer overall events, including the elimination of the January Hawaiian swing.
• More tournaments in major markets and a plan to own the summer sports calendar.
• The qualifications of the Players Championship as a potential fifth major in golf—in addition to the traditional Grand Slam of the Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open, and Open Championship.
• More LIV Golf players coming back to the PGA Tour under the Returning Member Program.

The planned schedule changes have been led by Tiger Woods, who is chairman of the Future Competition Committee that Rolapp created in August.

While Woods would prefer for the calendar shifts to all take place in 2027, he said last month it may take several years to completely implement. 
Rolapp, 53, has taken an aggressive leadership approach during his first year in charge since taking over operations from commissioner Jay Monahan, who is still working for the PGA Tour until his contract expires at the end of this year.