Premier Golf League — We’ve Seen This Movie Before, Haven’t We?

We’ve seen this movie before, yes we have and in each sequel, we have the same ending.

The plot is pretty simple:   Let’s compete with the PGA Tour, in fact, let’s steal all the good players from the PGA Tour and establish a New World Order in golf.

You may or may not recall that back in 1994, the world’s No. 1 player — charismatic Greg Norman, teamed up with Aussie billionaire Rupert Murdoch and proposed a World Tour of sorts.

That came to a swift and ugly end.  The PGA Tour squashed Norman and Murdoch like dung beetles.  In fact, the tour actually swiped Norman’s idea and established those lucrative, no-cut, limited field events that came to be known as WGC events.  Thanks Greg.

Back in 2018, there emerged a new threat to the PGA Tour castle.  It was supposed to be the World Golf Series.  It was proposed by a British-based World Golf Group.  The group wanted to stage 15-to-20 annual events, world-wide, each was supposed to offer a purse of close to $20 million.  Now that’s a lotta loot.

At least that group had a front-man — a guy named Richard Marsh who was identified as its Chief Commercial Officer.

Once again, that upstart idea never came close to fruition.

So now we have a new decade and a new wannabe — The Premier Golf League.

No one has stepped forward to identify themselves as the boss of this wannabe league that would steal players from both the PGA Tour and European Tour.

This Premier Golf League released some gobbledygook that laid out some sort of plan — looked like this:

Guarantee that “the world’s best players” compete in 18 events for $10 million purses, with additional individual and team bonus monies.

Feature 54-hole, individual stroke-play championships in all but the season-ending match-play event, with a team component to the entire schedule.

Establish a “superior model for sponsors” and TV networks.

Be a new company, owned and operated by the World Golf Group, with the support of an existing shareholder base with assets of more than $20 billion, a base that includes the Raine Group LLC, a sports, media and entertainment investment group.

Well what do you know — there’s that World Golf Group again, same name we saw back in 2018.

The proposal/manifesto/gobbledygook — whatever you want to call it, basically takes the PGA Tour and European Tour and reduces them to Korn-Ferry Tour status  — they would simply be “feeder tours” for this new tour.

There’s only one problem.  When it comes to golf, you don’t mess with the 10,000-pound gorilla that is the PGA Tour.

Word from informed sources is that The Sheriff Of Nottingham (aka PGA Tour Commish Jay Monahan) dashed off an email to all of the PGA Tour players giving them a heads-up of sorts.  In Monahan’s email he identified the Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia as the money provider for the upstart tour.

The Sheriff has a lot of weapons at his disposal to snuff out any threat.

Everything revolves around the Official World Golf Rankings — especially player contracts for endorsements and other lucrative money-making opportunities.  The OWGR are controlled by the existing tours in the world — the PGA Tour, European Tour and Australasian Tour.

Any upstart tour would need big names — especially the biggest — Tiger Woods.  When push comes to shove, Woods is, at the end of the day, a company man and he’d support whatever the PGA Tour deems best for the PGA Tour.

So here we go again, a new proposed tour with no face to identify with.

Yeah, another sequel to the original movie written and directed by Greg Norman.

We know how that one ended.

We’re not buying what this Premier Golf League is selling.