The fact that Taylor wouldn’t have been in the field for a tournament he nearly won is the perfect illustration of why lower-level Tour pros may not like the new qualification standards. They’ve been uneasy about it in recent weeks, though members of golf’s upper class have the floor to speak out in press conferences. It’s all about access.
Life on the PGA Tour is a good life, period. That’s one of the main things Dahmen said back in early 2020. But there’s a saying that everyone in pro golf agrees upon, and it goes, Eat what you kill. It’s pretty self-explanatory: You get what you earn. But the PGA Tour always offered plenty to go around. Wednesday’s news complicated the food chain. It added restrictions to the hunting season. Eat what you’re allowed to kill.
The new system feels very rational. Monahan and those around him have rethought the Tour from the top down, rewarding its best performers and then worrying about the rest. They’ve worked out how it could make financial sense, a pressure that its competition at LIV Golf doesn’t yet feel. Business leaders would praise the system for its logic, and it’s business leaders who dominate the PGA Tour’s policy board. But there are people and traditions and norms on the other end of those decisions. The Tour’s new efficiencies can still impact the lives of more than a hundred Tour members. Those players are allowed to be disappointed, especially given they’ve had the same seat at the table for years.
Rory McIlroy was particularly judicuous two weeks ago, when I asked him who should play in special events with $20 million purses: “The best players should be playing in them, because ultimately the PGA Tour needs to be built around the best players because that’s what will maximize the value of the product.”
There goes that word again. Product. We’ve been using it a lot the last 12 months. What does it mean? How many people contribute to the product? We’ve never put a specific number to it, though we’ve gotten closer in recent years. We can agree that Collin Morikawa influences the product. But what about the influence of the many, many pros who are, on average, just one single stroke per round worse than he is?
What we know now is that clarifying the product meant clarifying the hierarchy. When Joel mentioned the PG-B Tour, we laughed. But now the PG-B Tour is official Tour policy. This week’s announcement was a blunt public declaration that there were two circuits playing as one. The haves and the have-nots? Not quite; the pros on Dahmen’s level are still doing just fine. They’re just one step further from the top level of the professional game, a level they already thought they’d reached. As Dahmen tweeted Wednesday evening, “It’s a good time to #playbetter.”
