Outgoing commissioner Jay Monahan has used a form of this word — regenerate — twice in the last two years. It got lost amid topics like private equity investments and a pathway back for LIV Golf players, and even turning over the helm to a new CEO.
But it’s what the PGA Tour can’t afford to lose as it tries to create a bold, new model.
“We consistently as an organization regenerate talent and create stars,” Monahan said at The Players Championship in 2024, when negotiations with the Saudi backers of LIV Golf were still ongoing with far more hope for a deal than there is now.
And then in August at the Tour Championship, where Monahan held his last press conference while introducing Brian Rolapp as the CEO, he mentioned 11 first-time winners on the PGA Tour and paused ever so briefly for emphasis.
“Further proof that talent regeneration is alive and well on the PGA Tour,” he said.
That number is now up to 15 first-time PGA Tour winners this year. The latest was Michael Brennan, perhaps the most unlikely of them all.
The Wake Forest graduate was looking forward to the Korn Ferry Tour after winning three times on the PGA Tour Americas (the equivalent of Double-A baseball) this summer. The big leagues was another year away at best.
And then he received a sponsor exemption to the Bank of Utah Championship, unleashed his powerful swing and won in his PGA Tour debut as a pro to earn a two-year exemption.
Was a star born?
Talent is discovered more than it is created. It needs a little more time and a small dose of context. The stars are in hibernation at the moment. Brennan wasn’t holding off Scottie Scheffler and Xander Schauffele, but Rico Hoey and Pierceson Coody.
It was no less impressive, and Brennan will now have a bigger stage. He gets into at least one $20 million signature event next year — the RBC Heritage, replacing Sentry as the portal for winners — and he has a reasonable chance of finishing the year in the top 50 in the world (he’s at No. 43) to get into the Masters.
It’s all about opportunity, and that’s what the Futures Competition Committee should keep in mind as it figures out what 2027 will look like.
Rolapp announced this committee in August, and it formally met for the first time last week.
Tiger Woods is the chairman of a committee that includes five players — Adam Scott, Patrick Cantlay, Camilo Villegas, Maverick McNealy and Keith Mitchell — and three business advisors that include progressive thinker Theo Epstein.
Rolapp got attention when he said, “The goal is not incremental change. The goal is significant change.” He mentioned a clean sheet of paper, being “as aggressive as we can.”
The idea is to make every tournament meaningful, and 2026 — effectively a bridge year — will feature as many as 46 events. About 30 of those events are more like “opportunities.”
But that opportunity is what generates stars.
Will a new tour model include someone like Brennan? Yes, because he played Black Desert on a sponsor’s exemption. Those are still available.
And there remains a pathway from the Korn Ferry Tour that has produced the likes of Scheffler and Schauffele over the last decade, and players like David Duval and Justin Thomas before them. The best players always find their way. Some get there quicker.
Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth both narrowly missed out at the second stage of Q-school in 2012. Spieth received sponsor exemptions, earned a card and then a trophy, and played in the Presidents Cup a year later. Koepka started on the Challenge Tour in Europe and it took a little longer. But he now has five majors.
There are indications a new model will cater to the stars in a bid to get them playing against each other more often. That’s what makes meaningful competition. The other word Rolapp used was “scarcity,” when less means more.
It’s not hard to imagine a tour schedule of signature events, along with The Players Championship, four majors and the FedEx Cup playoffs. That effectively would create two tours, which is not too much different than what exists now.
However it looks — and there is a lot of work ahead for the committee — the key is to allow for enough movement from the “opportunities” to the “meaningful tournaments” to regenerate.
That might be the biggest difference between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, and the key issue that kept the Saudi-funded league from being recognized by the Official World Golf Ranking. LIV starts and ends its season with the same 54 players (except for an occasional alternate).
Chris Gotterup got his opportunity in Myrtle Beach, and then he cashed in by taking down Rory McIlroy a year later in the Scottish Open. There are just as many stories about players making good on their opportunity and not lasting very long against tougher competition.
Still to be determined are how Brennan and other recent newcomers — Jake Knapp, Ryan Gerard, Andrew Novak — will fare against a steady diet of golf’s best players.
Rolapp is still relatively new to golf after his long tenure at the NFL. But while he is remembered for talking about parity, scarcity and simplicity, he also brought up the most important word in golf — meritocracy.
“Whatever we do, wherever we end up on a competitive model, let’s just make sure that I can earn my way into it,” he said. “And if I earn my way into it, I deserve to be there.”
For now, Michael Brennan knows the feeling.
The post Golf’s ability to create stars is imperative no matter what new PGA Tour looks like appeared first on AccessWdun.
