https://x.com/brendanporath/status/1733187959392780509?s=46&t=XGja5BtSraUljl_WWUrIUg
No idea, but once the PGA leadership caved I wouldn’t blame any golfer for taking the bag. $600M is life changing even to an already millionaire professional athlete.
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And the whole “giving up legacy” is kind of just maybe not a thing. Legacy in golf is 4 tournaments a year, and he’ll get to play in those.
Probably because the negotiations aren’t proceeding smoothly, and there are known competitors in the mix. It’s a shot across the bow to let the Tour know that if they aren’t willing to deal, it’s game back on.
Also, Patrick Cantlay apparently.
“If Cantlay had not tried to take over the [PGA Tour] policy board, then Jay [Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner] would have made a deal with the Saudis and the Public Investment Fund [PIF] would not have felt the need to re-open that limitless wallet to sign Rahm,” the leading industry executive told Telegraph Sport.
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this looks dire. tiger joining in on the cantlay/player side of this does not bode well for a merger
Why is he giving up legacy? He can still play the majors
But he won’t play in 32 Bob’s Big Boy Classics with 50 other ultra millionaires in between.
Ok gotta admit I’m years late on this but I don’t watch golf. So if they straight up paying this guy 600 million to join this golf thing, what is the motivation to golf well any given day?
typically these have been structured where performance in a tournament or event will “unlock” parts of their salary
Jay still in witness protection. Tour leadership a perfect metaphor for its members.
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Supposedly $900m.
I’m just basing it off his own quotes about prestigious PGA Tour events like the Memorial.
For half a billion bucks or more the Dismembered Body in a Suitcase Open is plenty prestigious.
That’s small potatoes. Majors are all that matter for legacy purposes.
Yes and no. Things like number of total tour victories are also a significant barometer of career success. Sam Snead, for instance, is remembered more for his 82 total wins than his 7 major wins.
LIV events can hardly be considered equivalent to PGA Tour events, so Rahm’s overall win record, and therefore legacy, will become diminished even if he collects a slew of LIV tourney wins.
Not that he likely cares.
At the same time, if many of the best players like Dustin, Brooks, Rahm and Cam Smith are no longer on the PGA Tour, the future PGA Tour victories won’t really the equivalent of PGA Tour victories in other eras. We really don’t know how golf greatness will be measured in the future. But if things like OWGR and the big PGA Tour events don’t have many of the best players in them they will have to be discounted. If he goes on LIV and dominates maybe the status of those events is raised
I haven’t read the quotes but there’s like a social obligation in professional golf to say nice words about what it means to win Jack’s or Arnie’s, or Hogan’s event if you win one of those regardless of what the player really feels
The reason the Euros are on the PGA Tour and not the Euro tour in the first place is the purse sizes, not legacy. Rahm probably cares less about Snead the he does about Seve, who won 50 euro tour events and only 9 on the PGA Tour.
Nobody ever gave a fuck about Tour wins, though.
Who has more, Adam Scott or Bubba Watson? You don’t even care enough to go look.
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I understood it’s more like 300 million up front. Some of the rest of the value is in equity ownership of a team and some of it is performance based
This is the list of all-time tour wins. Highly correlated to all-time great status/legacy. Of course total wins matter (as do majors obviously).
Or at least they have up to now. In the new golf landscape, maybe they don’t mean as much anymore when every field is diluted and the best are no longer competing against one another.
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