A Ryder Cup Ripoff

The PGA of America revealed ticket prices this week for next year’s Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black on Long Island. Practice day tickets (which, what even is a Ryder Cup practice day as a viewing experience?) are $255.27 the first two days. A third practice day ticket is $423.64, but that comes with access to watch the Junior Ryder Cup, opening ceremonies, and some celebrity match deal. Then it’s $749.51 for each of the three actual match days.

As Ewan Murray noted in his enjoyably sardonic write-up, tickets in Rome for the last Ryder Cup were around £200 (or $261.31). These tickets do come with free food and non-alcoholic drinks. The reaction, as you might expect, has been severe. Here are a few of my own immediate ones:

1. Let’s start with the fact that these ticket prices are obscene. There is no sufficient reply to that. They are obscene, bad, and gross. You will get the guy who took an Econ class once and has a Twitter account arguing with you about how this is the way it works, or a PGA of America bureaucrat rationalizing how it’s not that bad with the food included. They are serving you the same bullshit just with different toppings. The prices are obscene and any “well, actually…” should be dismissed, scorned, and laughed at. Stop this nonsense. The prices are bad enough. Trying to explain them with a straight face high on your own supply is way worse. Just slap us in the face and be done with it. Don’t try to then tell us why we should feel good about it

2. They will sell. This does not make it any more right or less objectionable.

3. The prices betray the nature of the host course, a public-access championship course at Bethpage that comes in well under $100 for residents to play during the week. Fewer of those people are probably paying this exorbitant cost to see this “Super Bowl” event played at their home cherished course.

4. The Ryder Cup has not been particularly competitive for more than a decade. Even worse, it’s been predictable. It has subsisted on micro-moments of passion, a past ideal, and the stakes created by its history. Now you run the risk of removing some of that passion and energy for an exclusionist crowd. So you’re pushing what has been a relatively non-competitive sporting event for high prices and perhaps a sedated wine-and-cheese crowd that made the U.S. Open at LACC a bit of a downer last summer.

5. Even if it’s not a sedated crowd, you’re not exactly sending them in happy after taking this pound of flesh. These are people who should be the most enthusiastic, fired-up crowd. But the PGA is essentially giving them a quick elbow to the ribs on their way in to earn it. You’re antagonizing the people who do come, which seems like bad business. They’re irked about it, and perhaps worse, entitled to do whatever now that they’ve paid.

6. The broadcast has been larded up with ads to cover rights fees and capitalize on the high-interest event. It was nearly unwatchable in Rome. And now we’re neutering the cross-section of people who can create a true Ryder Cup crowd. Unwatchable and un-attendable in pursuit of the instant bottom line.

7. There is a “born-on-third-thinking-they-hit-a-triple” element here with the PGA of America, the ones responsible for setting these prices. The modern popularity of the Ryder Cup owes more to the European side, its characters (like Seve Ballesteros), commitment, and elevation of the competition. The PGA, which doesn’t even supply the players for the American side, is going to over-extreme lengths to cash in on all that.

8. The prices are de facto bad. This is harder to prove but it is something I suspect. The race to charge whatever they want is about the immediate short-term return they can get on this event, a big one in the NYC area. But I think there is longer-term damage done to the actual Ryder Cup with the continued brand creep, sponsor activations, and emphasis on the big business of it all. More money is made in the short term, but something in the event is hollowed out and corroded for the longer term. Perhaps I am arguing that two birds in the bush are worth more than one in the hand. But I think you’re really cutting into the Ryder Cup’s appeal and whatever magic elixir it’s made work the last three decades with each of these moves. The Masters saw this from the beginning with Clifford Roberts.

9. But this is pro golf right now: an instant focus on the money in front of your nose with less long-term thinking about building, or curating, some better product. An adult in the room here arguing for the latter would be helpful, which begs more important questions about leadership at the PGA right now on the eve of one of the biggest, if not the biggest, event in its history.

10. They have been rightfully pilloried. The partners, from corporate to media rights to other sponsors, who have all shelled out their own enormous sums to be a part of this party, should turn up the heat on what message this sends to them and how it diminishes the event.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.