PGA Tour's New CEO Hints at Desire to Shake Up the Sport

The new head of PGA Tour thinks the time is right for the sport to take a heavy swing.

Speaking with reporters Wednesday at a press conference in Atlanta, PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp announced the formation of a committee that would examine the organization’s competitive model, while identifying ways to engage fans more often while finding ways for more top players to compete together. Tiger Woods was named to chair the new group.

“The goal is not incremental change,” Rolapp said. “The goal is significant change.”

Popular on Variety

While the sport and its various tournaments are likely to continue in their current form for the foreseeable future, the choices the committee makes could have implications for NBCUniversal and Versant, the company slated to be spun off from it; Paramount Skydance; and Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN, all of which hold media-rights deals to show PGA Tour events. All have deals with PGA Tour that last through 2030. Versant, which operates Golf Channel, may be more sensitive than the others.

“I think your media partners are such an important component to the sport. We’re fortunate to have good ones who are vested in the sport, who care about it. But like any sport, PGA Tour is no different, the vast majority of people who experience it do through media, through television and increasingly streaming,” Rolapp said. “Getting that part of the equation right as far as reach and distribution, as far as production value, as far as having the right partners to do that right, balancing it all with commercialization, which I know has been a hot topic in this sport as it is in all sports, I think is extremely important.”

PGA Tour’s business is strong, but “there’s much more we need to do, much more we need to change for the benefit of fans, players and our partners,” Rolapp said. The new committee will “design the best professional golf competitive model in the world for the benefit of PGA Tour fans, players and their partners. It is aimed at a holistic relook of how we compete on the Tour. That is inclusive of regular season, postseason and off-season.”

Rolapp is known for his acumen in analyzing and shaping media rights. He was previously the NFL’s chief media and business officer, and exerted a great deal of influence over where the league’s games are seen. During his tenure, the NFL experimented with new venues like Netflix and YouTube even while maintaining traditional ties to CBS, Fox, NBC and Disney’s ESPN. Under his aegis, the football league set up an opt-out clause for its current long-term deals with the big traditional media companies and Amazon that allows for a redrawing of terms after the 2029 season. The deal would allow the NFL, presumably, to wring even more revenue out of media outlets in an era when sports is the biggest driver of economics, given its ability to generate the large, simultaneous viewing that advertisers continue to crave.

The executive said he wanted to focus on getting “the Tour’s top players to compete together more often in events that feel special for fans and feel special for the players,” while making sure that competition remained “easy to follow.” He also suggested he was interested in creating a bigger feeling of “scarcity” around PGA Tour events.

“There’s very few things left in this country that can aggregate millions and millions of people doing one thing in a communal experience,” said Rolapp. “I think that’s the perspective you bring is you need to sort of compete for people’s attention and time, and you need to bring them something worthy of that time that is actually being pulled in numerous directions.”

The new CEO downplayed the potential for PGA Tour to merge with LIV Tour, a transaction to which the organizations agreed in June of 2023. “I think I’m going to focus on what I can control,” Rolapp said. “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.”

Click here to read article