A Small Victory

Ratings be damned, this week’s Irish Open at Royal County Down is one of the few bright spots of the 2024 golf calendar. Across tours, this week offers a perfect snapshot of both where pro golf has lost its way and how much promise lies on the other side if leadership can come together to forge a better path forward.

Men’s professional golf is broken right now. The current configuration of the pro game funnels talent to the PGA Tour, a stagnant and dysfunctional organization hosting insignificant-feeling tournaments with declining ratings, or to LIV Golf, where semi-closed-off, cash-infused exhibition tournaments have failed to resonate with the vast majority of golf fans.

On the PGA Tour, Wyndham Clark, Sahith Theegala, Max Homa, and 141 other golfers are set to tee it up at the Procore Championship in Napa, now on its fourth title sponsor since 2015. Meanwhile, at LIV, Jon Rahm, Bryson DeChambeau, and dozen of other top golfers will compete at Bolingbrook Golf Club, one of the top 500 golf courses in the state of Illinois. However, the best golf of the week is being played on the DP World Tour, where Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry headline the Irish Open at Royal County Down, one of the best golf courses in the world.

By at least one objective metric, the Irish Open is not the top event this week. More Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) points will be awarded at the Procore Championship than the Irish Open.

The OWGR field ratings for this week's events (Official World Golf Ranking)

The disparity isn’t due to a miscalculation or corruption or whatever other accusations people like to lob at the OWGR. It’s because even weak PGA Tour events generally have stronger fields than those on the DP World Tour. The quests for OWGR points and large cash purses have siphoned talent away from Europe and onto the PGA Tour. The Procore Championship outrating the Irish Open at Royal County Down is a sobering reflection of the hit the DP World Tour’s stature has taken. It should also serve as a reference point for how much value is being destroyed by a fractured game. If Jon Rahm and Sahith Theegala were in positions to join Rory McIlroy at Royal County Down this week, the event would receive an immediate boost.

It’s no secret that pro golf desperately needs to figure out how to untangle its wires. As golf’s leadership convenes to map the sport’s future, I hope this week’s Irish Open serves as a roadmap for the sport’s potential when golf presents the best version of itself: pure competition on grand, historic stages. I hope the powers that be prioritize restoring the prestige of national opens at historic venues. As part of that exercise, they should also scrutinize the OWGR’s influence and consider the benefits of abolishing a system that invariably funnels talent to a concentrated tour while dissuading ambitious golfers from competing in lower-profile tournaments.

Right now, the best golfers in the world are being pulled in a multitude of directions – many by their own choice – while huge piles of money change hands at the expense of fan interest. But for the next four days, we have a rare opportunity to savor something special: some of the game’s finest talents competing on one of the most breathtaking properties in the world.

And that is something to celebrate – a small, rare win amidst a sea of lucrative losses.

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