CBS’ longtime partnership with the Masters (rightly so) earns plaudits as golf’s most prominent television handshake deal, but it certainly isn’t only one.
NBC’s partnership with the Ryder Cup has spanned three decades, and on Monday afternoon, the network and the PGA of America announced it would continue into a fourth, announcing an extension of media rights that will continue through the 2033 Ryder Cup at the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
The expansion of the partnership — which included a related deal with USA Sports, the current owners/operators of the Golf Channel — extends the PGA of America’s long-standing partnership with NBC, the network that played a significant role in building the Ryder Cup from one of golf’s proudest showcases to a commercial and economic behemoth capable of holding two of golf’s largest governing bodies, the PGA of America and the DP World Tour.
Few golf fans know that the Ryder Cup owes a debt of gratitude to golf’s friends at Major League Baseball and its network partners at NBC for injecting a jolt of energy and financial sustainability into the event. After all, it used to be MLB Commissioner Bart Giamatti which opened the door for the Ryder Cup on NBC by going off the network in the winter of 1988 – and it was NBC that seized the new window of opportunity by signing a shrewd deal with the Ryder Cup in 1990, paving the way for the famous War ashore to capture the hearts and minds of golf fans nationwide, dramatically expanding the Cup’s economic impact in the process.
like GOLF.com profiled first in 2023, a junior in Dick Ebersol’s NBC Sports department was the first network executive to see the Ryder Cup’s potential as a television venture. His name was Jon Miller, and he sensed an opportunity in NBC’s golf coverage. At the time, the network had many PGA Tour telecasts, but no major championships. While the Ryder Cup wasn’t a “major” in the traditional sense, it provided many of the components that made for compelling golf (and sports) television: two bitter rivals, an annoying group of powerless Americans and a vaunted collection of European villains who had won three consecutive editions of the Cup.
CUP also there was something compelling about NBC: the lack of traditional television partners capable of NBC’s broad cultural influence. The potential partnership was beneficial on both sides of the negotiating table: a new television property for Ebersol’s (suddenly beleaguered) sports department and a new television partner for the PGA of America.
Ebersol liked Miller’s idea, and it wasn’t long before the contract was in ink. When the American side won in dramatic fashion the following fall on Kiawah Island, the Cup was a sporting sensation and the NBC deal went from ink to stone.
While NBC’s domain over the Cup may not be considered as ironclad or as large as CBS’s with the Masters (which will enter a the seventh decade in 2026), the network and the PGA of America have maintained a close relationship in the decades since that first Ryder Cup. While the rights to the Ryder Cup can go anywhere — especially as a single event with huge commercial potential — it’s a testament to the strength of the relationship and the goodwill left over from that first jump in 1990 that NBC remains the partner of choice.
For NBC, the announcement provides an interesting window into the latest form of the network’s golf partnerships, which have come under increased scrutiny as the Peacock continues to add truckloads of sports programming. NBC’s growth strategy in the broadcast era appears to rest on the strength of sports TV rights, which have proven to be one of the few stable vectors of attention in an increasingly fractured media economy — and the explosion of new rights for NBC (including, ironically, the return of Major League Baseball) has led some to question the golf network’s long-term viability.
The PGA of America deal will give NBC the rights to the Cup through 2033, extending one year beyond NBC’s existing deal with the USGA, which will provide coverage of the US Open through 2032, and three years beyond the network’s existing deal with the PGA Tour, which ends in 2030.
