The PGA Tour’s belt-tightening has hit PGA Tour Champions. Golfweek has learned that the player pension has been cut by 20 percent.
The PGA Tour’s belt-tightening has hit the PGA Tour Champions. Golfweek has learned that the player pension has been cut by 20 percent, a dip from $10 million last year to $8 million.
“It’s disheartening,” said longtime Tour pro Peter Jacobsen, who does TV commentary for the 50-and-over circuit, including last week at Furyk & Friends. “The PGA Tour clearly has a lot of money right now and they’re spending a lot of money keeping players from going to LIV, and we’ve kind of slowly become LIV. I think we are giving way too much money to way too few players on the PGA Tour and the players on the Champions Tour live by the decisions made by the PGA Tour.”
A PGA Tour spokesman confirmed that the pension has been reduced. Sources tell Golfweek that it is more a reflection of the Tour’s tightening of the belt — volunteer early retirement offers have been extended to hundreds of full-time staff — and not a reflection of the senior circuit’s finances taking a hit. Tom Pernice Jr., a six-time winner on the Champions Tour, said that the Tour has shifted its focus from operating almost exclusively as a non-profit to one concentrating on the new for-profit entity the Tour established in 2024 and ensuring that private equity partner Strategic Sports Group (SSG), which invested $1.5 billion to become a minority investor and potentially as much as $3 billion, is happy.
“The venture capitalists are doing what they like to do. They get rid of the waste, make it look more profitable. The (Tour) is working to get SSG their 11 percent return on their money,” Pernice said. “So anytime that you go for a profit and you have venture capitalists, things change. You ask any business guy, they're going to tell you that.”
Brian Rolapp was hired in June as the Tour’s first CEO and assumed the job in July. He spent three hours at Furyk & Friends, last week’s Champions Tour stop at Timuquana Golf Club, which is located about 40 minutes from the Tour’s Global Headquarters. It marked his first visit to a Champions Tour event.
Current players, as one might expect when it comes to their money, have strong opinions about the cut to their pension.
“This guy's coming in, he's like Keyser Soze, you know, from 'The Usual Suspects',” Billy Andrade said, referring to the feared and elusive crime lord in the popular 1990s movie. “He's just slashing stuff and, you know, everyone's taking a pay cut except the PGA Tour players.”
He continued: “This is the same pension that 25 years ago was $10 million. So, it’s like, wait a second, our pension should be like $20 million to $25 million, not $10 (million) going to $8 (million).
“But we don't have control of that big board and they're going to do whatever this new guy wants to do, I guess. It should be up higher in my opinion, but nobody's going to listen to us or me.”
Others, such as Furyk, who operates the event bearing his name, called for patience until Rolapp rolls out his full strategy and the 50-and-over players have a better understanding of how they fit into the plan. Change of any sort, he acknowledged, has a tendency to make people nervous.
Some would argue that playing for $70 million in prize money is a pretty good retirement program, as it is for players given a second lease on life at age 50. The player pension dates to 1985, when the players of that era needed a pension, and began with $250,000. The amount has always been approved on a year-to-year basis. It was canceled in 2020 during COVID-19, understandably so, though some of the pension money was played for during two events the Tour created under the banner of the Charles Schwab Series and held in Missouri at Big Cedar Lodge with purses of $3 million each.
Champions Tour players earn a retirement credit for finishing in the top 48 at an event. A player also must play a minimum of 12 tournaments during a season to qualify for the program. For many years, the Champions Tour was subsidized by the PGA Tour, but it has been working towards becoming self-sufficient. Cutting $2 million from the pension will please the bean counters and help efforts to get into the black. The senior tour flies the PGA Tour banner typically in non-Tour markets and still attracts many Fortune 500 companies that either can’t afford the PGA Tour or are unwilling to pay the higher price tag for it, but still want to be associated with the Tour brand. The Champions Tour consists of 28 events this season.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: PGA Tour Champions player pension pool cut by 20 percent
Category: General Sports
