What Brooks Koepka’s coup reveals about the PGA Tour’s new leader

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – One assumption is that Brian RolappThe PGA Tour’s new CEO will be at the SoFi Center up the street from here Tuesday night when Tiger Woods’ DATE team faces Steve Cohen’s others New York team in the second week of the second season of the made-for-TV golf league. He was available last week for the season opener. Does it matter that this is indoor golf, at night, a game played out of day for centuries? There isn’t. Rolapp has his eye on the real prize: In the first week, about 700,000 live viewers tuned in on ESPN and its broadcast cousins. Decent. Maybe the second week will be better.

On Wednesday night, Rolapp will likely be at The Breakers, the gilded five-star hotel across the intercoastal waterway from here, for a Happy birthday to Tiger Woods for 300. If he knows anything about Woods, he knows that this kind of event is torture for him, but Woods will be there, a smile on his face, raising money for his philanthropy, the TGR Foundation. If it’s important to Woods, it’s important to Rolapp. Woods is a member of the PGA Tour’s policy board, the Tour’s Enterprise Board (the for-profit arm) and chairman of the Tour’s Future Competition Committee. In addressing these issues and more – Genesis Invitational, Hero’s World Challenge – Rolapp and Woods will be Zoom’s greatest friends. Does it matter if he couldn’t tell Chris Como off Matt Killen, to quote two of Woods’ instructors from recent years? There isn’t.

A long preamble to a tea leaf read about what’s going on here, at this whole way back tour thingwith Brian Rolapp’s name and likeness on it. When Rolapp was named the PGA Tour’s new CEO shortly after last year’s US Open, the refrain from people who knew him from the NFL was this: Smart, good business sense, not a golf guy. It turns out that last part, originally intended as a dis, is actually an asset (depending on your perspective on Monday’s news). Brian Rolapp’s most important job is getting people to watch PGA Tour events, in person and, most importantly, on any screen they choose. If having Brooks Koepka back in the fold will help Rolapp in that cause, then he’ll do whatever he can to get him back in the fold. There’s no reason for him to worry about how Koepka took LIV Golf’s money when he could, how he hurt the PGA Tour by leaving, how upset the next few players will be from this easy comeback. He wants the eyeballs that Koepka will bring. Full stop.

In his attempt to return Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm (both US Open winners) and Cameron Smith (winner of the ’22 Players Championship and Open Championship), the same logic will apply.

Whatever happened, happened. We want them back.

Monday’s news is the opening. Rolapp said in August that his goal is not “incremental change. It’s meaningful change.” This is, in fact, the antithesis of how Augusta National and the Master works, where the leaders there despise the word CHANGES and take all their direction from the word IMPROVEMENT. Golf does not have a tradition of “significant change”. Rolapp may not know and probably doesn’t care.

When the LIV-Tour fight first broke out in the summer of ’22, Jay Monahan, PGA Tour commissioner, said, “I’m not naive; if this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete.” This seemed profoundly true at the time. Rolapp is here to tell you: dollar bills are NO the only weapons in the LIV-PGA Tour battle. The PGA Tour offers something that LIV Golf does not and that is the freedom to make your own schedule. Koepka’s back door started with that.

As Rolapp tries to find a way back to the PGA Tour for Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith, the same logic will apply. DeChambeau has thrived under LIV and has some bad memories of the PGA Tour. With Smith, it’s hard to know what he cares about. Rahm may be open to the “play where you want” argument. But he would have to part with mountains of Saudi cash to do so.

It’s hard to imagine the Saudis walking away from LIV Golf. Leaving is not in their cultural business composition. They are very rich, very smart and very ambitious. But Rolapp will do everything he can here to weaken LIV Golf. Working with Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and a few other key figures, it will surely pave a narrow path back to the PGA Tour for Talor Gooch, Tyrrell Hatton and Joaquin Niemann and the very few other LIV players who have won on the PGA Tour.

As for Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed, all major event winners, I think Rolapp has less interest in them or he would have expanded the terms on Monday’s news. Mickelson is 55, and he has expressed such disdain for the PGA Tour that it’s hard to imagine him returning. Woods never liked Sergio Garcia, so it’s unlikely he pushed Rolapp to facilitate his return. Patrick Reed’s rules controversies made him a PGA Tour outsider. As for Dustin Johnson, who knows with him? He can play the Masters forever. His father-in-law is Wayne Gretzky. He has all the life skills he needs.

Rolapp can’t kill LIV Golf, as the NFL helped kill the USFL in 1986. But he can weaken it. It could reduce its star power and the appeal of international series to emerging golf talent. If he can weaken it enough, then LIV Golf and the PGA Tour may be in a position for some sort of meeting of the minds, where the two leagues co-exist.

Meanwhile, the PGA Tour CEO is shouting his own unspoken message: I don’t care what happened. I want to fix what’s broken now.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com