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

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A guess is that Brian Rolapp, the newish PGA Tour CEO, will be at the SoFi Center up the road from here Tuesday night, when Tiger Woods’s TGL team takes on Steve Cohen’s other New York team in the second week of the second season of the made-for-TV golf league. He was on hand last week, for the season opener. Does it matter that this is indoor, nighttime golf, a game that has been played outdoors by day for centuries? It does not. Rolapp has his eye on the real prize: In the first week, about 700,000 live viewers watched on ESPN and its broadcast cousins. Decent. Maybe the second week will be better. 

Come Wednesday night, Rolapp will likely be at The Breakers, the gilded five-star hotel across the intracoastal waterway from here, for a Tiger Woods birthday bash for 300. If he knows anything about Woods, he knows 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 policy board, the Tour’s Enterprise Board (the for-profit arm) and the chairman of the Tour’s Future Competition Committee. In addressing these matters and more — the Genesis Invitational, the Hero World Challenge — Rolapp and Woods will be the greatest Zoom buddies. Does it matter if he could not tell Chris Como from Matt Killen, to cite two of Woods’s instructors from recent years? It does not.

A longish preamble to a tea-leaf read of what’s going on here, in this whole path-back-to-the-Tour thing, with Brian Rolapp’s name and likeness all over it. When Rolapp was named the PGA Tour’s new CEO, shortly after last year’s U.S. Open, the refrain among people who knew him from the NFL was this: Smart, good business sense, not a golf guy. Turns out that last part, originally meant as a dis, is actually an asset (depending on your view of Monday’s news). Brian Rolapp’s most significant task is to get people to watch PGA Tour events, in person and, much more significantly, on any screen of their choosing. If getting Brooks Koepka back in the fold is going to help Rolapp in this cause, then he’s going to do anything he can to get him back in the fold. There’s no reason for him to worry about how Koepka took the LIV Golf money when he could, how he hurt the PGA Tour by leaving, how annoyed rank-and-file players will be by this easy path back. He wants the eyeballs that Koepka will bring. Full stop.

In his effort to bring back Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm (both U.S. Open winners) and Cameron Smith (winner of both the ’22 Players Championship and Open Championship), the same logic will apply.

Whatever happened, happened. We want ’em back.

Monday’s news is the opening salvo. Rolapp said in August that his goal is not “incremental change. It’s significant change.” This is, really, the antithesis of how Augusta National and the Masters works, where the leaders there despise the word change and take all their direction from the word improvement. Golf doesn’t have a tradition of “significant change.” Rolapp might not know and surely does not care.

When the LIV-Tour war first heated up in the summer of ‘22, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said, “I am not naive; if this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete.” That sounded deeply true at the time. Rolapp is here to tell you: Dollar bills are not the only weapons in the LIV-PGA Tour battle. The PGA Tour offers something LIV Golf does not and that is the freedom to make your own schedule. The door to Koepka’s return began with that.

As Rolapp tries to find a path back to the PGA Tour for Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith, the same logic will apply. DeChambeau has flourished under LIV and has some bad PGA Tour memories. With Smith, it’s hard to know what he cares about. Rahm could be open to the play-where-you-want argument. But he’d have to leave a mountain pile of Saudi money to do it.

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

As for Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed, all winners of major events, I’m guessing Rolapp has less interest in them or he would have expanded the terms in Monday’s news. Mickelson is 55 and he has expressed such disdain for the PGA Tour it’s hard to imagine him coming back. Woods has never been fond of Sergio Garcia so it’s not likely he pushed Rolapp to make it easy for him to return. Patrick Reed’s rules debacles made him a PGA Tour outsider. As for Dustin Johnson, whoever knows with him? He can play in the Masters forever. His father-in-law is Wayne Gretzky. He has all the jet skis he needs.

Rolapp cannot kill LIV Golf, as the NFL helped kill off the USFL in 1986. But he can weaken it. He can diminish its star power and the appeal of the international series for emerging golf talent. If he can weaken it enough, then LIV Golf and the PGA Tour might be able to some kind of meeting of the minds, where the two leagues co-exist.

In the meantime, the CEO of the PGA Tour is screaming his unspoken message: I don’t care about what happened. I want to fix what’s broken now.

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