CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA | Last Friday morning as the dew still sparkled on the grass, an army of workers swarmed across Quail Hollow Club, building the community that will be home to the Presidents Cup in two months.
The buildout is immense, the biggest ever for the Presidents Cup and 20 percent larger than what the PGA Tour does for the Players Championship.
There will be hospitality or spectator structures on 16 of the 18 holes, including a double-decker facility seating 2,500 that will encircle the first tee where players will pop out of a tunnel into a small stadium complete with large video boards.
There will be a dock built into a lake, offering more spectator viewing areas near Quail Hollow’s famous Green Mile, holes 16-18, and approximately 40,000 tickets have been sold for each day, making it the most lucrative Presidents Cup in history.
But…
The disruption created by LIV Golf, which holds its third event this week at Trump Bedminster in New Jersey – where the former president is slated to play in the pro-am and hang around doing what he does – has changed this Presidents Cup and the next Ryder Cup.
By luring players away with the promise of easier workweeks and giant paydays, LIV Golf has done more than build its own roster of players. It has bruised two of the game’s highest-profile events.
“I think they all regard their back pocket to a higher degree than anything else. But ... the Ryder Cup is a bigger entity and will always be a bigger entity than any individual, and it’s important that we remember that.”
Eddie Pepperell
The new group will insist that wasn’t its intention, but it’s what has happened, and the Presidents Cup and Ryder Cup are suffering for it. The PGA Tour has said its players can’t come back once they go to LIV. The DP World Tour, which funds much of its operation off the Ryder Cup, removed Henrik Stenson from his captaincy last week after he took the Saudi-backed opportunity after initially committing to the Ryder Cup.
The tours are justified in what they are doing and, at least at the moment, there seems to be no move to resolve an increasingly divisive situation.
It prompted Eddie Pepperell, a two-time winner on the DP World Tour, to offer a scathing rebuke of Stenson and his peers who have abandoned their home tour.
“I think they all regard their back pocket to a higher degree than anything else,” Pepperell said. “It’s fine, but say it…
“But the Ryder Cup will move beyond it. The Ryder Cup is bigger than any, with all due respect to Henrik or (Ian) Poulter or whoever it is, the Ryder Cup is a bigger entity and will always be a bigger entity than any individual, and it’s important that we remember that.”
Consider the U.S. Presidents Cup team to be captained by Davis Love III. Though most of them may not have automatically qualified, Love will be without Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and, should he have been interested in being a vice captain, Phil Mickelson.
The same goes for Zach Johnson’s Ryder Cup team in Rome next year.
Then again, no one is crying for the American captains. The top 10 in Presidents Cup points (the top six automatically qualify) at the moment are Scottie Scheffler, Sam Burns, Xander Schauffele, Patrick Cantlay, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, Collin Morikawa, Max Homa, Will Zalatoris and Billy Horschel, with Cameron Young closing fast on the outside.
Not all of the LIV guys were likely to be asked to be at Quail Hollow anyway.
The International team has lost Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Louis Oosthuizen, Charl Schwartzel and Hideto Tanihara from an already thin roster. The bigger question is whether Hideki Matsuyama and Cameron Smith will jump to LIV, with both rumored to be considering nine-figure offers. Losing them could be devastating to the Presidents Cup as well as another body blow to the tour.
Of course, the LIV players get to play team events in all of their tournaments, a concept the organizers seem far more enchanted with than anyone else. Those are sideshows. The Ryder Cup and Presidents Cups are the real things.
What this does to the Ryder Cup is potentially game-changing. The European side has prided itself on its model, which has molded a mindset and installed a line of succession for captains who bought into the successful formula.
Now those would-be captains have been bought out.
Stenson. Lee Westwood. Ian Poulter. Graeme McDowell. Sergio Garcia.
They’re out, and if the hardline stance taken by remaining DP World Tour members is accurate, there is no path back for the defectors. They knew what was at stake, and they chose the money.
In his statement last week, Stenson suggested there was a way for him to do both, despite it being explicitly written into his captaincy contract that he could not. He was the only one who thought otherwise.
The Ryder Cup is the most electric event in golf, and it’s essential to the financial well-being of the DP World Tour and the PGA of America, which runs the biennial event here. It brings in tens of millions of dollars for both organizations and helps fund their businesses year over year.
Keith Pelley, CEO of the DP World Tour, told sportbusiness.com in 2019 that his tour is no longer completely reliant on the Ryder Cup to fund its operation because it now shares sponsorship rights with the PGA of America. Nevertheless, the Ryder Cup is critical, and any downturn in the event would have far-reaching effects.
When the Presidents Cup is played in late September, it will be an enormous celebration of the game and the PGA Tour. Presidents are expected to be in attendance, and the corporate support has exceeded anything the tour has created previously.
The sounds of trucks hauling materials and workers hammering structures into place last week will be replaced by the noisy joy that accompanies such events.
It will be something special but not all it might have been.
Top: The Presidents Cup that U.S. captain Davis Love III will help stage at Quail Hollow still will be big ... just tarnished.
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