Pro golf's main money can use the NFL's viewing capacity, Xander Schauffele said.
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Who knew pro golf would prove the old adage true?
You really are I won't buy happiness.
Three years and many billions later, the money has brought the golf world a sense of disappointment. Its fans are frustrated and its stakeholders are holding on for dear life – even though its players are richer than ever.
Few people have seen more golf money in 2024 than Xander Schauffele. Schauffele, winner of two majors and $17.6 million in earnings this season, enters this week's BMW Championship second on the PGA Tour money list — and is threatening to add to his tally.
For the uninitiated, BMW is the second of three PGA Tour majors to pay a total of $100 million to players in August. As the greatest living golfer not named Scottie Scheffler, Schauffele arrives in Colorado as one of the betting favorites to win not only this week's tournament but also. The next one The week's PGA Tour crown jewel, the FedEx Cup, is his first prize of $25 million, which would more than double his earnings for the entire season.
By most objective measures, earning more than $40 million in a calendar year qualifies as pretty good, and Schauffele doesn't dispute that point. In fact, by PGA Tour standards, it would qualify as the most money earned in a single season. always. That's compared to a mid-tier starting quarterback in the NFL — pretty good for a sport with one-tenth of the NFL's annual TV revenue.
But during an unusual media availability Wednesday at BMW, Schauffele seemed confused by it all. He said golf money has exploded, but it still hasn't caught up with his fellow sportsmen.
“You're looking at top-10 quarterbacks,” Schauffele said. “Scottie [Scheffler] he's won seven times, I think that includes Olympic gold. And he has done remarkably better than everyone else.”
“If you look at how much the 10th player has made, the 10th ranked player in the world, it doesn't smell like how much Scottie has made. That shows how well Scottie has played in these big tournaments.”
(Schauffele is correct. With two more to go, Scheffler makes $29 million in 2024. Tenth on the Tour's single-season earnings list is Shane Lowry at just over $5.5 million.)
“You look at the No. 1 quarterback, you get $60 million and the No. 10 quarterback gets 52, and the No. 15 gets 39 or 40.”
Schauffele's point rings true, but he seemed to be pointing out a great deal of hypocrisy. Why is chasing cash in golf considered greedy when the NFL is giving away so much?
“When I look at other sports, when someone gets a $300 million contract, there's all these nice comments about how someone got their purse or worked hard to get this and they deserve it, things like that,” Schauffele said. “It's interesting to me. I think maybe golf is a gentleman's game and you shouldn't talk about money, but what the media wants to do is talk about money.”
Indeed, money is the third train of golf's culture wars. New battles spring up every day, but the great sense of emergence in every denial. Money chasing in LIV is bad. The PGA Tour's accounting for the extra money is terrible. Paying attention to golf is bad. The money takers are bad. Those who thought they were good were bad. Everything is bad. And everything gets worse.
What's strange about this sentiment, especially for those like Schauffele, is that he hasn't taken a dime from what is considered a dubious source of income. (Still.) The PGA Tour and PIF remain at loggerheads in their merger talks, and while the two sides have made an uneasy peace, that peace does not include Saudi money deposited into Schauffele's bank account. (Also: However.)
However, there are reasons for the bitter taste. The PIF is a high-profile financier of golf, but the main goal of its investment appears to be erasing a questionable past from the public record and reviving Saudi's image for wealthy Westerners. That's not a “good golf reason to improve.” And the PGA Tour said it was over the dispute – only to back down publicly from the Saudis and cut their deal.
Besides human rights concerns, there are other problems with the billions the Saudis and the PGA Tour have invested in the sport. In a game that should be defined by its spirit of integrity and sportsmanship, those involved have used money to show the depth of their selfishness and selfishness. And to those I didn't when the alarm goes off, the currency increases the public's sense of a rational market. It's one thing if Pat Mahomes makes $60 million in a historic season – he found it – but Scottie Scheffler? He played the right season at the right time.
The good news is that the checks keep making money either way, but maybe that's not the point.
“I think that players who make a lot of money don't think about money because it's not the most important thing,” said Schauffele on Wednesday.
“Winning $25 million would be great and really nice, but I don't think it's going to change my life, and I can tell you if I lose and I play bad, I'm going to feel bad about playing bad and not. being able to step up at the right time.”
In the end, the most important thing for Schauffele is probably refreshingly simple: Victory. Try as you might, you can't put a price on that.
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