ATLANTA (AP) — Greg Norman braced for another fight with the PGA Tour and was equipped with what he often referred to as the tour’s “playbook” from the first time he tried to start a rival league.
This version might have a similar ending.
Norman’s first attempt to assemble an exclusive field to play for big money around the world never got off the ground. The PGA Tour wielded its political influence, Arnold Palmer stood behind the heritage of the tour and that was that.
And then the PGA Tour stole his idea.
What emerged were the World Golf Championships, the richest events (back when a $5 million purse meant something) with no cut and a limited field. Former PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem publicly thanked Norman for his “determination and suggestions of 1994” when the first WGC was played.
In that respect, this is starting to feel like a repeat.
Reports over the weekend — the most thorough from No Laying Up, which has engaged top players on its podcast for years — pointed to a plan to create up to 15 tournaments offering some of the richest purses for a limited field of elite players.
Those were the most pertinent details that emerged from a players-only meeting last week. Norman must feel as though he has seen all this before.
But this was less about trying to quash Saudi-funded LIV Golf and more about taking the PGA Tour in a modern direction that emphasizes its biggest names. And what makes this different from 1994 is how the movement unfolded.
No Laying Up reported 23 players in attendance at the invitation-only meeting. That included — it starts with, really — Tiger Woods, who flew to Delaware from Florida for the meeting.
“We need to get the top guys together more often than we do,” Rory McIlroy said the next morning, the closest any player came to a public revelation. “I’m talking about all in the same tournaments, all in the same weeks.”
For now, the plan is somewhere between a vision and reality. The players have been in touch with Commissioner Jay Monahan, and he could provide a better sense of where it all stands when he speaks Wednesday ahead of the Tour Championship.
But the value of that meeting went far deeper than details.
By all accounts, the players left inspired, unified and unusually quiet. Xander Schauffele smiled when he referred to the silence as a “code,” which is not to suggest he was joking.
Said one player, speaking on condition of anonymity to honor such a code, “When was the last time all the top players got together in the same room? That has never happened before.”
