PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — It’s Players Championship week, and you know what that means: The collective gaze of golf fans zooms in on the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass and zooms in further to its 4,000-square-foot 17th green.
On Sunday, the tournament will be decided in part based on whether the best golfers in the world can find that green in regulation.
But first: How about Rob Gronkowski?
That’s the question posed by gambling giant and PGA Tour gambling partner FanDuel, which pays Gronkowski a fancy number to serve as a frontman in its marketing schemes. The future Hall-of-Fame tight end was out at Sawgrass Tuesday with a fleet of producers capturing content. If he hits the green, FanDuel will offer its users a share of $300,000 in Bonus Bets across its platform. This was multi-level modern marketing at its finest. Educating the public about an upcoming event, drawing them in with a person of influence, promising something (or at least a chance for something) in exchange for their attention. But also … asking them to pony up, too.
You see it everywhere in sports these days. Gambling, gambling, gambling. It’s a massive industry — $166 billion was wagered on sports in America in 2025 — and it’s legal (to varying degrees) in more than 35 states. Betting can also be a controversial, inflammatory corner of the sports world. Just this week, two MLS players received lifetime bans for their roles in corrupting game action. Numerous pro and collegiate basketball players have been indicted by the federal government for their roles in rigging outcomes for money. Similar controversy landed at the MLB’s doorstep with a pair of Cleveland Guardians pitchers last fall.
Golf hasn’t had that type of front-page scandal. At least not yet. And the PGA Tour is keen to keep it that way. But they also remain keen to lean in wherever they can to the mutually beneficial partnerships between sports leagues and gaming operators.
A recent development in the Tour’s balancing act has come in just the last few weeks. On Monday, DraftKings announced it would offer same-game parlays on golf events for the first time ever. It has often been proven that these multi-leg bets offer odds more tilted against bettors than normal, but they have nonetheless exploded in popularity thanks to a boosted reward at a tinier cost. That’s been very good for sportsbooks and occasionally very good for individuals, but it nets out as good business for the Tour. The timing ahead of the Tour’s biggest event seems like no coincidence.
“The reason we got into [gaming] was for engagement,” said Scott Warfield, the Tour’s VP of gaming. “If we can get people watching longer through this legalized activity, what that does to quarter-hour ratings, what that does to media deals, interest coming to attend events … That’s the lens through which we sort of judge success.”
On the other side of the coin, just two weeks ago the Tour issued new guidelines to its players on how to report gambling-related harassment, both in person or online. If a caddie hears too much from an overserved spectator, the Tour can do something about it. If an unsuccessful gambler in North Dakota goes after Chris Gotterup on Venmo, for instance, DraftKings can suspend (or ban) their account. The new measures are a proactive move, to be sure, but also an open acknowledgement of the ecosystem the Tour now swims in. Hey, you’re bound to deal with this stuff, but we’ll do everything we can to defend against it.
The Tour, like other sports leagues, understands that revenue and engagement will climb the more it leans into gambling. Hence the hard work to get same-game golf parlays ready for the Players Championship — and hard work to ready its technology for more markets, too. Three years ago, the Tour reworked its 20-year-old ShotLink system to eliminate nearly all room for human error. What started as tournament-long gambling opportunities in 2018 has progressed to thousands of individual-hole opportunities. Arriving in the next few years, Warfield believes, are every-shot opportunities. And why? Because each full-field event offers roughly 30,000 shots. Like a casino offering an array of table games, the Tour is interested in options. As is, the Tour has seen 30 to 35% annual gains in the golf betting handle. It’s a very popular gambling sport, particularly in the summer.
Golf has its specific advantages. One of those: It operates at a slower pace than some of its peers. The NBA shot clock is 24 seconds and the NFL play clock is 40 seconds, but golfers take minutes to walk between each shot and 15 minutes to play each hole, allowing plenty of time for both operators and bettors to take advantage.
But golf’s customs also make it vulnerable. Spectators are expected to stay silent when players are over their golf ball — but what if they don’t?
At the Waste Management Phoenix Open in February, YouTuber Jack Doherty purposefully tried disturbing Mackenzie Hughes while he stood over a shot in a fairway bunker thanks to a $100 dare. (Not even through an approved sportsbook, it’s worth noting.) Doherty unapologetically told on himself in a number of ways — posting video from the incident online — and earned a lifetime ban from the Tour in return. Not every punter would be so bold as to say, Hey, look! I did it.
And so the Tour is trying to keep pace. The league is so interested in preventative measures that is has begun training volunteers to stand in the middle of a crowd (rather than inside the ropes) to better identify perpetrators and bad behavior.
“You have to understand that we’re not immune to it,” says Andy Levinson, SVP of Tournament Administration at the Tour. “We’re not immune to the potential for corruption, we’re not immune to bad actors, all that. That exists and that threat is always gonna be there. So the first and foremost thing is — everything we do in this space is integrity first.”
The Tour’s “Integrity Program,” as it is aptly named, spells out all kinds of regulations for not just players, but anyone who could naturally gain access to inside information. Their agents, caddies, coaches, even their wives, mothers and fathers. Board members, tournament volunteers, even Tour employees cutting video clips for social media are not allowed to bet on golf. The stipulations of the program are both specific — gambling on elite amateur events is off-limits, too — and also purposefully vague to cast a wide net against potential infractions.
Not every element of the Tour’s gambling ops mimic the work of other leagues, especially given the shifting landscape. As an organization, the Tour is letting the prediction market fracas develop, “and not be a first-mover,” Warfield said. (Tour pros can accept sponsorships from gambling companies but not prediction markets, according to the Player Handbook.) The Tour also does not produce injury reports like the kind that other leagues have made mandatory. “It’s really, really complicated to do,” Levinson said. “And in golf, you can be injured all year [and still play].”
Nonetheless, Levinson and Warfield take pride of the proactive role the Tour has taken in lobbying legislators in cities and states across the country to get their part of the gambling world right. It’s an inexact science to squeeze all they can from the business opportunity while also defending its product from bad actors. They’ve partnered with Genius Sports to monitor all betting markets and also reached a deal with IC360, the same company recently tasked with monitoring officials in the upcoming March Madness.
“Not a lot of folks have two different integrity monitoring partners,” Warfield pointed out.
“We’re watching,” Levinson said.
“We will know,” Warfield concluded.
