Behind the scenes of the sponsorship of a PGA Tour Champions event

USA Today

19-04-2025

Behind the scenes of the sponsorship of a PGA Tour Champions event
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Strong winds hit the first day of the Galleri Classic golf tournament
Strong winds hit Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage on the first day of the Galleri Classic golf tournament
The Galleri Classic PGA Tour Champions event in Rancho Mirage has lost its title sponsor, Grail.
Tournament organizers are seeking a new multi-million dollar sponsor, highlighting the importance of corporate funding for golf tournaments.
Potential sponsors are looking for advertising and marketing opportunities, often aligning with local charities and high-profile events.
The ideal sponsor would utilize the tournament for corporate events and entertainment, similar to past sponsors like Nabisco.
Way back in the 1960s, a powerful California politician named Jess Unruh uttered a phrase that has echoed through time: Money is the mother's milk of politics.
With one slight alteration, the phrase could just as easily apply to the Coachella Valley today: Money is the mother's milk of golf tournaments.
The recent news that Grail was leaving as title sponsor of the PGA Tour Champions' Galleri Classic in Rancho Mirage couldn't be that surprising to anyone paying close attention. Grail has been the title sponsor for all three years of the senior tour event, and its message about its Galleri blood test for multiple kinds of cancer detection certainly rang true with many senior players and the older demographic of fans.
But as the company went public last summer and as other changes within the company took place, Grail holding on to the Galleri Classic seemed less and less likely.
And so the PGA Tour Champions and tournament organizers find themselves in a position that many tournaments face. How do you replace a big corporation with another big corporation to keep a golf tournament alive? The Coachella Valley seems like a natural fit for any golf sponsor, but history has shown us that isn't always true. Ask Humana, CareerBuilder, ANA and Chevron.
More: Desert's PGA Tour Champions event seeks new sponsor as Grail opts out of Galleri Classic
What kind of money are we talking about? Make no mistake, title sponsorships run into the millions of dollars, no matter what the tournament. Each event is different, with different purse demands, production demands and infrastructure demands, but it's millions of dollars whether it's the PGA Tour, the LPGA, PGA Tour Champions or DP World Tour.
That might seem like a lot of money to spend on golf, but it isn't as much money as you think when you chalk the dollars up to advertising and marketing. Looked at that way, the money starts to make more sense. Consider that American Express, the title sponsor of the PGA Tour event in La Quinta each January, reported a net income for fiscal year 2024 of $10.1 billion, or $14.01 per share of stock. The money American Express spends on The American Express golf tournament begins to look more and more like pocket change.
But American Express wants more than just the television exposure for its money. It wants to connect with local charities, and it wants its brand to be associated with top-level events, like the PGA Tour and concerts that week.
The sponsorship of a golf tournament can provide a company with many opportunities, and what a title sponsor wants drives the decision to spend the money. One goal of golf sponsorship is brand recognition. All-Nippon Airways, or ANA, had almost no presence in the United States before it took over as sponsor of the LPGA tournament in Rancho Mirage, renamed the ANA Inspiration. Before that, if you typed ANA into a search engine, you would get the American Nurses Association. Now, ANA has signage on the outfield walls of Dodger Stadium.
If you've been in the desert long enough, you might remember the amazing amount of money RJR Nabisco spent on the LPGA event, known then as the Nabisco Dinah Shore. The company would fly in top sales people, top customers and its corporate executives for a week of sunshine, pro-am play, a celebrity tennis tournament and party after party, including an entertainment show featuring Shore herself. The money spent that week went a long way to making customers, vendors and employees happy. In some ways the LPGA tournament that started Thursday was secondary to the corporate focus.
There is also the sponsor who is part of the community. Think about FedEx, which sponsors the tournament in Memphis, where its corporate headquarters are. The desert's LPGA event is now the Chevron Championship and moved to Houston, close to Chevron's oil business. The Royal Bank of Canada, or RBC, sponsors the PGA Tour's Canadian Open.
What kind of sponsor would be best for the desert's PGA Tour Champions event? The tournament and the tour are looking for a five-year commitment from a company that perhaps will use the two one-day pro-ams in the event much as Nabisco did with the LPGA event in the 1980s and 1990s. Certainly not to the same extent that Nabisco did, but it would be nice to have a company that could utilize the week for some recreation and entertainment for the company as well as perhaps some business being conducted.
Sponsorship of the desert's PGA Tour Champions event will cost far less than sponsorship of a PGA Tour event. But the money is only part of the issue as the event seeks the right sponsor. It's a lot like a jigsaw puzzle, finding the right pieces – money, sponsorship needs, golf course, calendar dates and television times – to fit together for the perfect picture. Desert golf fans can hope the pieces fall together in the coming weeks. At this point, any sponsor is better than no sponsor at all.
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at [phone] or at [e-mail]. Follow him on Facebook or on X at @larry_bohannan.