Why a major sponsor is calling an LPGA TV decision ‘bulls*t’

NAPLES, Fla. – Terry Duffy, whose company sponsors the LPGA’s season-ending event and is responsible for its record prize fund, says if other businesses are considering a similar move, no, he won’t. he said nothing.

He would tell them.

CEO of CME Group said he had done it before.

“They asked me when Mike Wan was still the commissioner of the LPGA – and I talked to Mike yesterday; he’s a great fellow – he asked me, he had a sponsor who was thinking of dipping his toes in,” said Duffy. “And he said, are you going to talk to them? And I said, no, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to wait for them. And I brought them here and showed them what we had.

“And sometimes when you look at it and you see it and you feel a tangible feeling versus just someone saying, this is really good, your customer is going to love it, and you go, it’s like I’m getting a rise out of everyone else. . It’s not about that. I think this is one of those events that you have to experience.”

However, should anyone be interested in watching Saturday’s third round CME Group Tour Championship on live television, they can’t. Coverage will be shown only on tape delay from 4-7pm ET on the Golf Channel – and when the decision was brought up by a reporter, Duffy’s first thought was unsurprisingly four words long.

“These are bulls**t, aren’t they?”

Speaking to a small group on Wednesday, the day before the tournament began, Duffy then went on for about five minutes. He said he expressed his frustration to the LPGA commissioner, Mollie Marcoux Sameand hoped that she would “make it not so.” He also said he understood the long-established agreements (in 2020, The PGA Tour and LPGA agreed to allow the men’s tour to negotiate their domestic TV contracts together) and admitted that he is not “very used” to the move and – “I would hope that people would understand that if you are going to continue to build the sports of women, you should give them the same billing as men and stop – stop it — the stupidity of saying, well, we have to show a men’s tournament because they’re men.”

So what does the Saturday afternoon live TV schedule look like? From 1-4pm ET, Golf Channel will feature the PGA Tour’s RSM Classicwhile NBC, a Golf Channel partner, has a Premier League Soccer match from 12:30-2:30 p.m., followed by a post-match show and two women’s college basketball documentaries being shown as part of a preview for a Game 4 p.m. On Sunday, the tournament will get three hours of airtime, from 1-4pm on NBC. (Notably, Saturday’s game can be seen from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on ESPN+ and from 2 to 5 p.m. on nbcsports.com.)

For clarity, below is most of the back and forth between Duffy and a reporter, with the reporter’s questions in italics.

“The third round here is on tape delay.”

“These are bulls**t, aren’t they?” Duffy said.

“Could more have been done? Was time spent on this? Was there—could it have been…”

“I can do a lot of things and money can heal a lot, but it can’t cure diseases, it can’t cure some things,” Duffy said. “I saw the tape delay and I don’t like it. I agree with you. I think it’s inappropriate for a tournament of this magnitude to be delayed. I told Mollie I don’t like this. I’ll leave it up to her where this ultimately ends up, and I hope she can work with the folks at Golf Channel and others to make sure that’s not the case.

“What’s important to me, I don’t know anybody who watches golf for four days, to begin with, other than the Masters, maybe the US Open and the British. I don’t know anyone who watches the PGA four days in a row. And I don’t mean that sarcastically, there are only a few people who catch snippets of it or else watch it later. And the reason I’m not very trained is because of what I said before. I am in 200 countries around the world. The Golf Channel is worldwide. People can watch my event in their time zones too. So this is also useful for delays in some things. I’m not a fan of it because they can re-run it obviously as they do. But at the same time, I would hope that people would realize that if you’re going to continue to build women’s sports, you need to give them the same billing as men and stop— stop it — the stupidity of saying that, well, we have to show a men’s tournament because they’re men.

“And I know why they do it because of the relationship and agreement they have with men. And I understand. So I’m not trying to get them to break an agreement they have, and I’m not looking to put the Golf Channel in a bad spot. But there are many different ways for content to be distributed in the world we live in today. I had my dear friend Vince Vaughn here yesterday at my conference. And we talked about the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the proliferation of streaming and what’s happening with theaters versus streaming. There are many different ways to get content today. So I’m not suggesting we go the other way. But I don’t think the Golf Channel is the only game in town anymore. There are many ways for people to receive content. …

can you have…

“I didn’t try to influence the process,” Duffy said. “I did not seek to influence the process.”

Notably, Duffy has previously expressed displeasure at the tournament. As reported in a story written by Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols – whatever you can read in full here — The CME Group had asked LPGA players to attend a dinner, but none came, leading Duffy to question LPGA leadership.

“I am extremely disappointed with LPGA leadership,” Duffy said of the Nichols story. “They better find out because they’re going to lose people like me to things like this.”

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