You will surely be aware that Rory McIlroy won the DP World Tour Championship on Sunday and thereby made himself the leading money-winner on the DP World [European] Tour for the sixth time in his career. That tally takes him alongside the late Seve Ballesteros, who won what was then called the Order of Merit on six occasions. It’s now called the Race to Dubai, but McIlroy was happy to acknowledge the past when discussing the legacy of the great Spaniard, who won five major championships compared to the four Rory has at present.
“I just think about what Seve meant to the game, to this Tour, to the European Ryder Cup team,” he said. “We sit in the locker room at the Ryder Cup and the place is just filled with Seve quotes on every wall you look at. We had a changing room last year in Italy with the last shirt he ever wore when he played the Ryder Cup, at Oak Hill in ’95.”
Infamously, about 15 years ago McIlroy derided the Ryder Cup as an ”exhibition”. After he played in his first one, at Celtic Manor in 2010, he laughed at himself and admitted it was “the best exhibition in the world”. Last week in Dubai, he said: “The two purest forms of competition in our game right now are the Ryder Cup and the Olympics, and it’s partly because of the purity of no money being involved. I personally would pay for the privilege of playing in the Ryder Cup.”
That, of course, is not a universal view. It looks increasingly likely that the American Ryder Cup players will be paid a fee for teeing up in New York next September. At present they get $200,000 each to donate to their chosen charities and junior programmes. (The European players get nothing.) The word is that will instead become a fee of $400,000. A former PGA Tour player, Hunter Mahan, said he agreed the players should be paid, adding: “It doesn’t need to be lot. I mean, it’s not millions of dollars or anything,” This is where professional golf has go to – a place where $400,000 isn’t really much different from four dollars. A place where Scottie Scheffler has earned over $60 million this year.
Coincidentally, there was a piece in the Sunday Times this past weekend by David Walsh that ran under the headline ‘Saudis have failed to buy golf – why would rugby’s breakaway fare any better?’ I won’t go all LIV on you but in his story Walsh quoted the chairman of World Rugby warning of “financial sustainability being at crisis point” in his sport. It was thus ironic to read Ron Green [no relation] in this week’s Global Golf Post saying: “Professional golf finds itself in a crisis of sorts because of money – the abundance of it.”
It is widely felt that tickets for next year’s Ryder Cup were set as high as $750 (they sold out in hours) partly because the PGA of America anticipates having to increase payments to its players. Green ended his article: “Just imagine the sound and the fury if a richly compensated American team were to lose on Long Island.” Indeed, just imagine.
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
