New PGA Tour CEO looks to a future of 'significant change' that may not include LIV Golf

Yahoo

a day ago

ATLANTA — Brian Rolapp, newly minted PGA Tour CEO, comes to the golf world after more than two decades in the NFL, and to borrow a term from his old gig, he's throwing downfield on first down.
'You just have to constantly innovate,' Rolapp said Wednesday morning in his introductory press conference at the Tour Championship. 'I think if there's anything I learned at the NFL, it's that … honoring tradition but not being bound by it. I think that level of innovation is what we're going to do here.'
Rolapp has only been on the job for 18 days, but still touched on a range of topics: competitive balance, golf's postseason, the PGA Tour-LIV divide, the golf ball rollback and more. He didn't go into particular detail on any one aspect, but he's clearly focused on a philosophy that change is necessary, and change is coming.
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'I said when I took the job that I would take it with a clean sheet of paper, and that is still true,' he said. 'My fan letter on day one, I said, we're going to honor tradition, but we will not be overly bound by it. Now we're going to start turning that blank sheet of paper into action with an idea to aggressively build on the foundation that we have.'
That aggressive plan of action does not appear, in the near future, to include LIV Golf, which claims many of the world's best and best-known players, including Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. The breakaway tour split off from the PGA Tour in 2022, but a year later, in June 2023, the Saudi Public Investment Fund and the Tour, then led by Jay Monahan, announced a 'framework agreement' that would provide a pathway for the two tours to reunite.
Since then, however, all momentum for a reunification has stalled, with nothing in the way of updates or progress coming from either camp. Rolapp and new LIV Golf CEO Scott O'Neil are longtime friends, but Rolapp's public statements on Wednesday seemed to suggest that the Tour has far higher priorities than a reunion, regardless of who's in charge at LIV.
'My primary focus is going to be on strengthening the Tour, and 'blank sheet of paper' means blank sheet of paper,' he said. 'Whatever [strengthens the Tour], I'll pursue aggressively. That's how I view it.'
Later, he delved slightly deeper: 'I'm going to focus on what I can control. I would offer to you that the best collection of golfers in the world are on the PGA Tour. I think there's a bunch of metrics that demonstrate that, from rankings to viewership to whatever you want to pick. I'm going to lean into that and strengthen that.'
The Tour, frankly, has more pressing issues than LIV Golf, like maintaining momentum and capturing eyeballs in a highly competitive media (and social) environment.
'Anybody who's in the sports business, their general competition is for the mind share of sports fans and for their time and to do that in a complicated world that is increasingly disrupted by technology, where you have a million things to do with your time, a million alternatives,' Rolapp said, in response to a question from Yahoo Sports. 'That is one reason why sports continues to be so valuable. There's very few things left in this country that can aggregate millions and millions of people doing one thing in a communal experience.'
On a broader scale, Rolapp announced as one of his first acts as CEO the creation of a Future Competition Committee, designed to create, in his words, 'the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners.' No small feat, that, but he's managed to lock in Tiger Woods as chairman, plus players including Patrick Cantlay and Adam Scott, and outside voices including Theo Epstein.
The Tour's future in Rolapp's eyes will be based on three key principles: parity, scarcity and simplicity. In other words, level the competitive field, bring the best players together more often, and have them play in a format that's easy to understand and logical from the beginning of the season to the finale.
It's a tall order, a significant challenge, and Rolapp has obstacles ahead both externally and internally. But he's made his priorities clear: if he has his way, the PGA Tour as it exists today will not be the same PGA Tour in a year, two years or five years.
'The goal is not incremental change,' Rolapp said. 'The goal is significant change.'