Geoff Ogilvy’s Right: The PGA Tour Needs a Competitive Spark Among Its Own Events

After 35 years covering professional golf—and having spent time in the trenches as a caddie myself—I’ve watched the Tour navigate boom cycles and existential crises with the kind of institutional resilience you’d expect from a 70-year-old enterprise. But lately, I’ve noticed something troubling: we’ve been so focused on the external threats to tour stability that we’ve overlooked an internal problem staring us right in the face. Geoff Ogilvy just articulated it better than most tour officials have managed to in years.

The Sugar Hit Has Worn Off

When Ogilvy appeared on GOLF’s “Subpar” podcast recently, he zeroed in on something I think will resonate with anyone who’s spent meaningful time around professional golf: we’ve lost the plot on what makes tournaments matter. The 2006 U.S. Open winner didn’t mince words:

“I would like to see the tournaments sort of compete against the other tournaments to be better. I’d like to see the American Express try to be better than Torrey and Torrey try to be better than Phoenix and L.A. try to be better than Phoenix.”

What strikes me about this observation is its fundamental simplicity. We’ve built a system where tournaments are hierarchically assigned their status—the “big ones” and the “small ones”—and then we’ve essentially paid players to show up. That’s not competition. That’s a distribution center.

Having caddied for Tom Lehman back in the ’90s, I remember a different Tour. We didn’t have guaranteed purses the way they exist today. Every tournament meant something because every tournament had to earn its significance through the quality of its organization, its field strength, and its reputation. Players fought to get into the good events. Tournament directors fought to attract the best players. It was organic competition, not structural mandate.

The Prestige Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Here’s where Ogilvy gets particularly insightful—and where I think the Tour brass should be paying close attention:

“I think we’ve chased this sugar hit with if you don’t have a field, you don’t have a tournament. And we’ve just bought fields effectively with money, and I don’t think money is as exciting as prestige and history.”

He’s absolutely right, and it matters more than you might think. In my 15 Masters coverages, I’ve watched the Augusta National operate under a completely different philosophy. They don’t need to guarantee appearance fees because players want to be there. The prestige does the work. The history does the work. The tournament’s excellence does the work.

Now, not every event can be Augusta, and I’m not suggesting that’s realistic. But the principle matters. When you have to write checks to fill out a field, you’ve already lost leverage over what makes your tournament special.

Competition Between Tournaments Could Raise All Boats

What I find genuinely intriguing about Ogilvy’s framework is that it’s not revolutionary—it’s actually a return to first principles. He’s suggesting that if tournaments had to compete for player participation based on their own merits, the entire ecosystem would improve. Better organization. Better courses. Better hospitality. Better television product. Better overall experience.

“If you had to put in that sort of effort to sort of be better than all the other tournaments, then they would all be competing against each other and then they would all fight to be special… I think you put a bit of competition in the tournaments and they all try to outdo each other, I think everybody’s going to win.”

The cynical reading would be that this creates winners and losers—that some tournaments would fall away. And yeah, that might happen. But having covered enough golf history to know how this works, I’d argue that’s actually healthy. The Tour has too many events competing for oxygen anyway. If some tournaments had to up their game or step aside, the stronger events would get better fields, better sponsor commitment, and better television windows. Players would benefit from playing in genuinely excellent tournaments rather than filling out a calendar.

The Media Rights Angle

Ogilvy even ventured into the broadcast realm, and while he acknowledges he’s “way out of my lane,” I think he’s onto something. If Amazon, Netflix, or CBS had to choose between tournaments based on the quality and consistency of the television product, suddenly every tournament director would be thinking about on-course action, pacing, storytelling, and presentation in ways many clearly aren’t today.

That competitive pressure could be enormously creative.

What This Means for Tour Leadership

The PGA Tour is clearly in a period of significant transition. The proposed schedule adjustments, the realignment of events, the ongoing conversation about what professional golf should look like post-merger chaos—it’s all happening. But Ogilvy’s argument suggests that the real opportunity isn’t in mandating structure from above. It’s in unleashing competition and letting excellence reward itself.

That requires a different kind of Tour leadership. Not micromanagement, but framework-setting. Creating the conditions where tournaments can compete, where prestige matters more than mandated status, and where player experience and fan experience are the ultimate arbiters of success.

In my experience, those are the conditions under which the best golf thrives. I suspect we’re about to find out whether the Tour is ready to embrace them.