Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and co. to find out their equity stake in PGA Tour Enterprises tomorrow - Reports
On Wednesday, April 24, top PGA Tour players, such as Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler among others, will be informed of how much their equity stake in PGA Tour Enterprises is worth. After refusing to leave for greener pastures with LIV Golf, this is a sort of reward for them.
Three months after this equity program was officially announced, everyone is about to find out how much value the tour itself has placed on their willingness to stick it out on tour.
Everyone who is eligible, which is 193 potential recipients, will get an email notifying them of the value that the program has marked for them. It could be quite lucrative or not at all.
All recipients will also get an email from Jay Monahan, who is also the CEO of PGA Tour Enterprises, showing their work and how they came to these numbers. Monahan and his company are planning to keep this confidential.
When this was announced alongside the Strategic Sports Group investment into the Tour, Jason Gore, chief player officer, said via Golf.com:
“It’s really about making sure that our players know the PGA Tour is the best place to compete and showing them how much the Tour appreciates them being loyal."
There's a formula the Tour will use and four different groups of golfers who will be rewarded. For instance, Tiger Woods and Robert Macintyre wouldn't be in the same group. From there, the money will be doled out based on career points, which favor longtime stalwarts such as Woods, Scheffler and McIlroy.
There will be an extra $75 million doled out to lesser-known entities. These golfers are vital to the tour's success, as they ensure full fields in smaller tournaments and even win sometimes by themselves. These are considered "up and coming" golfers, and there's equity involved for them, too.
There has been a lot of talk surrounding the potential merger and how it impacts players coming back to the PGA Tour. One of the biggest criticisms is that those who stayed loyal and didn't take the huge contract offered to them deserve some credit.
This is, for all intents and purposes, that credit. The tour is rewarding those who stayed. Perhaps it won't be as much money as they could have gotten with their theoretical LIV deals, but it is something.
LIV Golf members not included in PGA Enterprises equity
Plenty of LIV Golf members would otherwise have been very influential in building the PGA Tour. Since a big part of this program is career-based, it's correct to say that Phil Mickelson's career was big for the Tour's growth.
It's much more brief, but so was Jon Rahm's. Mickelson would have a ton of career points, but defecting to LIV Golf negates that. Even though he and others, such as Sergio Garcia for example, were longtime members and made the tour what it is today, they left. Therefore, there is no reward for them. Their reward was the LIV contract.