In late 1994, the No. 2-ranked player in the world, Greg Norman, dropped a bombshell on the golf world. In partnership with Fox, Norman announced that beginning in 1995 there would be a new tour on the block. The eight-event schedule, boasting a total purse of $25 million plus a $50,000 travel stipend and a $1 million bonus to the player of the year, was Norman’s attempt to globalize the game; he called it the World Golf Tour (WGT). At least that was the claim.

Criticism of the WGT was almost instant for several reasons, namely that Norman was trying to steal the top-30 players in the world (plus another 10 who would be offered sponsor’s exemptions) and his proposed event schedules were going to be in direct conflict with the PGA Tour. The other major criticism was that Norman was greedy because of the large purses he was claiming, as well as the shared TV revenue the players on the WGT would get. Remember, the largest first-place prize for a tournament in 1994 was $540,000 at the Tour Championship. The WGT, as it was going to be set up, would guarantee any player a minimum of $290,000 per year based on the last place earnings of $30,000 guaranteed (first-place prize for all eight events would be $600,000), plus the travel expenses and the TV revenue sharing. In 1994, that was a nice prospect. In a November 17th, 1994 article for the Washington Post, Thomas Boswell, wrote the following:

The WGT’s For-Stars-Only format would strip bare the fields of established events such as the Kemper Open and detract from major events such as the U.S. Open. It’s no accident the WGT plans events for the weeks before the four majors.

Potentially, the World Golf Tour — if it ever really comes into existence — could throw golf into an ugly Balkanized era of tennis-like chaos. Think of the strikes in baseball and hockey; then think of golf, ripped by litigation and bad blood between rival groups of players. Think of the Federal Trade Commission, jumping all over the PGA Tour on restraint of trade issues. Thanks, Greg. You’re a buddy.

The news of the WGT didn’t settle well with many players either. In another article for the Los Angeles Times from 1997, Ron Sirak quoted Norman: “’Everybody I’ve spoken to — Nick Price, Fred Couples, Jose Maria Olazabal — all the responses have been extremely positive,” Norman said. Within days, however, it was clear than no one was rushing to jump on the Norman bandwagon. Finchem had made it clear that anyone playing on the World Tour would be walking away from the PGA Tour. It will likely always remain unclear what Norman’s exact intentions were, but was it clear is that his attempt was poorly timed and Tim Finchem wasn’t having it. The tour never kicked off thanks to various legal battles and threats from the PGA Tour to suspend any player who teed it up in a WGT event. By 1997, Finchem had announced the birth of the World Golf Championship series sporting a $4 million prize pool, a full $1 million more than Norman promised with his WGT.

The question is, 23 years removed from Norman’s attempt at globalizing golf, where do we stand? Have the WGC events made men’s golf a more global game? We have two major golf tours competing week after week for eyeballs and rapidly increasing prize pools. The 2017 U.S. Open boasted a $12 million pot with more than $2 million going to brandishing bomber Brooks Koepka (his winnings alone were more than the entire prize pool for the 1994 Masters) after he made Erin Hills look like a municipal par-3. The European Tour has bolstered its prize money, revitalized tournaments like the Irish Open, Spanish Open and Italian Open, and yet the total Race to Dubai prize purse is only half of the first place bonus for the winner of the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup. It’s also $2.5 million less than it was in 2009, when the Race to Dubai replaced Order of Merit.

Rumblings of the need for a World Golf Tour have been circulating for a few years. Recently, it was brought up on the No Laying Up podcast in an interview with Rory McIlroy. Soly asked Rory a series of questions and they came to the topic of new storylines in the game. The following exchange happened:

Rory: You’ve got storylines from everywhere, ‘This young Spanish kid’, ‘This young Japanese kid’, you’re always going to have the strength in America because of just the numbers that play here and the system and it’s always going to be great, but it’s such a global game now. You know, even the PGA Tour now expanding to Asia, going to these places, you know it’s … World Tour. It’s happening one day I think.

Soly: Well, you walked right into that one. What do you think of the possibilities of that? How would that look? Are you in support of it?

Rory: I think it has to happen. You know, as time goes on, just to have all these tours competing against each other. Having to change dates and this and that, it’s counterproductive. I think everyone has to come together and say, ‘Alright, this is what we have to do’….I mean, jeez, I don’t know what the solution is.

Right, the problem is that we don’t really know what the solution would be or what it might look like, or at least nothing has been proposed. But part of the reason we don’t know the solution is because we don’t know the problem. So, what’s the actual problem?

Is the problem that there are too many options for players? That’s going to be a hard sell. Is the problem that it’s too hard for players to schedule the “best” events because so many great events conflict with others or fall in the sixth or seventh week of a playing stretch? Again, that’s a hard sell. Maybe the problem is that there are two really strong tours that the fans don’t get to see the top-30 or top-50 players more than eight times in a season? Or a little further, that the top-30 or top-50 or top-100 don’t get to compete against the other 29, 49, or 99 guys as often as they’d like. If that’s the problem, and it’s the only problem I can see that might need attention, then I think there is another solution, or multiple parts to a solution that could make a whole.

Rory goes on to say that he thinks the PGA Tour will eventually have to buy the European Tour. That’s an option, but before we do that, let’s take a look at the schedules of the PGA and European Tour by the numbers, because when you place the schedules next to one another, you realize that, yes, the PGA Tour trumps the European Tour in many ways, but I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing.

PGA Tour 2016-17 Schedule: By the Numbers

• Tournaments: 51
• Total purse of all tournaments: $358,800,000.00
• Total purse without Majors: $315,550,000.00
• Total purse without WGC Events and Majors: $276,800,000
• FedEx Cup Prize Pool: $25,000,000
• Weekends with dual events (events opposite WGC or Major): 4

European Tour 2017 Schedule: By the Numbers

• Tournaments: 48
• Total purse of all tournaments: $188,000,000.00*
• Total purse without Majors: $145,000,000.00
• Total purse without WGC Events and Majors: $105,000,000.00
• Race to Dubai Prize Pool: $5,800,000.00
• Weekends with dual events (one of those is the Australian Open/Alfred Dunhill): 3

*Currency converted to USD for easy comparison

It’s not surprising to see the prize pool for the PGA Tour nearly triple the European Tour without the dual events. But does that mean the tours should be combined? I understand where someone like Rory feels that it’s bound to happen or that it needs to happen, but such a solution as a World Tour will come at the expense of established tours. It’s like building a pyramid. If you create a new layer on top, all you’re doing is making it more difficult to grind out and make a living at the lower level because the money will rise to the top and the climb to the top is a little bit higher. The developmental tours, such as the Web.com Tour, PGA Tour Latin America, Sunshine Tour, Challenge Tour, and Japan Golf Tour will all suffer. The players on those tours already struggle to make a living if they aren’t rattling off top-10s week after week, and stacking another layer on top of that will only make it more difficult for those tours to survive. Let’s take a look at those developmental tours by the numbers.

Japan Golf Tour (2017)

• Tournaments: 27
• Total Purse of All Tournaments (converted from Japanese Yen): $76,000,000
• Total Purse of All Tournaments NOT Including the Majors: $32,300,000

Web.com Tour (2017)

• Tournaments: 26
• Total Purse of All Tournaments (not including Q-School): $17,800,000
• Winner’s Share: ~$100,000-120,000

PGA Tour Australasia Schedule By The Numbers (2017)

• Tournaments: 18
• Total Purse of All Tournaments: $16,800,000
• Total Purse of All Tournaments NOT Including the World Cup of Golf: $8,800,000

Mackenzie Tour (2017)

• Tournaments: 13
• Total Purse of All Tournaments: $2,245,000
• Winner’s Share: ~$31,000

PGA Tour Latin America (2017)

• Tournaments: 20
• Total Purse of All Tournaments: $3,365,000
• Winner’s Share: ~$31,000

The combined prize pool for all of those developmental tours above (factoring in the majors on Japan Golf Tour) is less than the prize pool available on the European Tour without counting the majors ($116,000,000 for all of them).

I’m not saying there aren’t some broken cogs in the current model, but a World Tour would only exacerbate those issues. And what’s to be gained? That 40 percent of the players who try and play a global schedule get a few extra weeks off here and there? That they can earn more money over fewer events? In a world where golf is growing in fewer countries than it’s declining, it’s a slippery slope.

As it stands now in men’s golf, the European Tour is strong enough to not be considered a developmental tour. They are even experimenting with format, which seems such an obvious thing to do I can’t imagine why it isn’t happening more often. The prize pools are large enough and the course rotation is exotic enough that many players solely play the European Tour. The PGA Tour isn’t necessarily the only option to earn a superstar-living in the game. The more logical solution seems to be to simply expand the WGC series. These events are always a joy to watch and produce great drama (unless D.J. wins by four shots). Instead of playing four (as they did in 2017), expand to seven or eight. With eight WGC events plus the four majors, that’s 12 events one could consider “global” events. They already play one WGC in China and one in Mexico. Give us two more in Europe and another in Australia at Royal Melbourne and we’re set. In fact, why can’t the Australian Open be converted to a WGC?

The PGA Tour could swap three or four of their smaller tournaments like TPC Deere Run, Montreux, and Puerto Rico, and the European Tour would only have to cut two or three and they could run dual events. Or, instead of scrapping any, just play dual events. I get it, that’s a lot of work for tournament and tour officials, but creating a new tour is going to be no small feat either.

***

While we’re at it, is there any reason why the PGA Championship can’t be played in Europe every three years? I know, I know, it’s run by the PGA of America, but come on, let’s not get hung up on titles. In 2017, the PGA Championship drew a 3.6 Nielsen rating for the final round, the lowest since the final round of the PGA Championship since 2008. It’s not a dead event — it’s still a major — but it doesn’t always feel like one.

Think about the possibility of having the PGA Championship in Europe. It could basically be played on the same rotation as the Open Championship. The PGA has been swapping venues with the U.S. Open for decades. Why can’t we have a PGA Championship at the home of golf? Troon? Or even better, let’s have one at in South Korea. Korean golf has been on the rise for a couple of decades now. Imagine you’re a 10-year-old kid from South Korea and Si Woo Kim is playing in the first PGA Championship ever held outside the United States at Nine Bridges on Jeju Island. You’re that kid and you get to witness Si Woo Kim become not only the first player to win a PGA Championship outside the U.S., but the first Korean player to win a major championship. Korean children would grow up wanting to win the PGA Championship, not The Masters. The PGA Championship needs a spark, take it overseas.

The other piece to this puzzle, and likely the root of the issue with many of the European players, is membership. The current requirements for membership to the PGA Tour are as follows: must play a minimum of 15 events on the PGA Tour (majors and WGC events count toward that number) and if you play less than 25 events on the PGA Tour then you must add an event you have never played to the schedule next year.

The European Tour, on the other hand, only requires you to play in five events to be eligible for the Race to Dubai. The requirements for the PGA Tour are more rigid than the European Tour, which isn’t surprising. But this has caused some problems for a few players in terms of the Ryder Cup eligibility, namely Paul Casey. Casey hasn’t played a Ryder Cup since 2008 despite likely being eligible for at least two of the last three because he wasn’t a member of the European Tour. In Rory’s conversation with the guys from No Laying Up, he hinted that membership and schedule were the biggest concerns. Paul Casey talked about similar things on a podcast with Alan Shipnuck back in the summer. A World Tour might help the membership squabble, but so would adding a few more WGC events and hosting them around the world, you know, actually making them “World” Golf Championships.

Golf is already a global game. As it stands now, we have two great tours that provide amazing playing opportunities for players, a developmental system that provides multiple tours on multiple continents. I’m normally one to say “out with the old and in with the new” as quick as anybody. It’s all too easy to get hung up on tradition and handicap your problem solving, but before we run wild with the idea of this shiny new World Tour concept, let’s make sure we’re not trying to solve vanity problems at the expense of the developmental tours.

I agree with what Thomas Boswell wrote 23 years ago and think it still applies today, “Potentially, the World Golf Tour — if it ever really comes into existence — could throw golf into an ugly Balkanized era of tennis-like chaos.” Rory mentioned that he thought golf could mimic the tennis model, maybe for the top-10 in the world, but we want players to become more recognized, not play in obscurity.