Every player, captain, and assistant captain at this week’s Presidents Cup collected a $250,000 check before a single putt dropped. Add up both rosters and that’s $8.5 million handed out for an event that still bills itself as an exhibition played for pride, not pay. Nobody bothered updating the pitch.
The money itself isn’t new. What changed is where it goes. Before 2022, every player, captain, and assistant captain gave $150,000 to a charity of their choice — real money, but money that left their own bank account on the way out. Since 2022, the PGA Tour just pays it to them directly instead. Same $250,000 figure per person, same total, just redirected. Across three editions since the switch, that’s $25.5 million in personal stipends, according to Front Office Sports. None of it depends on the score. Win, lose, four-putt the 18th. The check clears either way.
Here’s the part that actually gets me: the marketing never caught up. The Presidents Cup still sells itself the way the Ryder Cup does, all flags and speeches about legacy, like the players are out there purely for country and pride. Meanwhile the paying customers at Medinah this week apparently read the room better than the PGA Tour’s own PR department. Wyndham Clark called the atmosphere “kind of dead out there” and said nobody even clapped when teammate Collin Morikawa hit a shot good enough to draw a real ovation at any other tour event. Captain Brandt Snedeker admitted the buzz from the opening tee “just kind of dissipated as the day went on.” Both Chicago MLB teams clinched playoff spots that same day, and a decent chunk of the local audience apparently decided that was the better show in town.
I don’t actually have a problem with the money. A guy who can shoot 68 for a living gets to negotiate whatever the market will bear, and if the Tour decided a personal stipend was the price of getting its best players to show up for a trophy with no purse attached, that’s a deal both sides agreed to. Nobody’s forced into it. My actual gripe, with sports leagues as much as anywhere else, is when the stated reason for something and the real reason for something quietly stop matching and nobody says so out loud. “This is about pride” was the pitch when the money went to charity. It’s still the pitch now that the money goes straight into player accounts. Only one version of that pitch is honest anymore.
The empty seats and the silence on great shots kind of prove the point on their own. If this were genuinely about legacy and country, Medinah shows up regardless of what else is on TV. Instead, a chunk of the crowd would rather track a Cubs magic number on their phone than watch someone who just banked a quarter million dollars two-putt for par. You can’t manufacture stakes with a press release, whatever the compensation structure underneath it looks like.
My two cents: pay the players if that’s what it takes to get them there. Just stop selling it as noble unpaid patriotism when it’s really a payday with a flag stapled to it.
Photo: “DZ6 2437 Perfect swing perfect day – teeing off into blue skies” by PattayaPatrol via Openverse/Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.