ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. — On Monday, the PGA Tour Policy Board approved a series of changes proposed in late October by the Player Advisory Council that reshapes critical portions of the tour’s infrastructure. The changes included a reduction of the number of fully exempt players on tour, chipping away at the fringes of tour access, from Monday qualifiers to Korn Ferry promotion spots. With fewer cards, the size of tournament fields would decrease as well, in the hopes of making them better run for players and fans alike.
On Tuesday, the reaction among the players at the tour’s final official event of 2024, the RSM Classic, was muted. That can be attributed in part to the fact that the changes have been known for a few weeks, and there was never much drama about them being approved. In other words, this is to some extent old news. There have, however, been negative public reactions among tour members, chiefly among them Lucas Glover, who called the elite players a “cool kids club” and questioned the idea that the changes were chiefly about “certainty of schedule” and pace of playing, saying, “they think we’re stupid.” Similarly, Matt Fitzpatrick said on the social-media platform X that Glover was right, and that “nothing ever gets done about pace of play.”
At Sea Island G.C., though, a sense of acceptance prevailed, tinged with inevitability. Brian Harman is a member of the Player Advisory Committee, and while he spoke of the benefits of the change, he spared a thought for players whose believe their future on the PGA Tour just got less certain.
“If you’re one of the guys that you feel like you’re going to be affected by it, you’re very upset by it and I understand that. I would feel the exact same way,” Harman said. “I’m not numb to the fact that we’re cutting opportunities, right? It’s not something that sits well with me and it doesn’t sit well with anyone that was in any of those discussions. But all these decisions that get made, they’re all not good or all bad. We’re looking at every single kind of pro and con to every piece that moves around, and trying to figure out the most equitable, fairest way to have a great product at the same time providing enough playing opportunities for everyone.”
“How did I know this question was going to come up?” Ben Griffin joked when asked about his thoughts on the membership changes. “As a player, you know, I don’t necessarily have the authority without being on the PAC or the board to vote on these decisions. For me, my goal is just to play as well as possible … to me in my position, it’s not worth being for or against any sort of changes. They are what they are, and my goal is just to play as good of golf as possible. The system’s going to be whatever the policy board and the PAC and, you know, all those guys think is best for the fans and for the tour and for the product.”
Griffin’s desire to focus on elements he can control was shared by Steven Fisk, making his tour debut this week after qualifying through the Korn Ferry Tour. To Fisk, the tour is still a meritocracy, even if it’s going to be harder to keep your card with only the top 100 players off the FedEx Cup list retaining back for 2026 rather than the top 125.
“The changes are what they are,” he said. “Even though a lot of people might say that my position is slightly disadvantaged with some of the changes, I can look at it from a different perspective and see why some of those changes are being made. Certainly, everything that’s been laid out makes sense. It may not be necessarily what’s best for someone coming out of my category, but I still have so many opportunities coming next year that if I play good golf, everything takes care of itself.”
Chris Kirk, who won this tournament in 2013 for the second of his six career tour titles, got a laugh while putting his own influence in perspective.
“I understand the reasoning, for sure,” he said. “I don’t really know if I like it or not, and I don’t really know if that matters.”
In the end, Kirk’s position is that he trusts the tour.
“I’ll answer this and any other question kind of the same way that I always do when it comes to tour policy stuff,” he said. “I feel like, as a whole, the PGA Tour has done an amazing job of running this organization from the time that I first made it out here. I believe that the people starting with [PGA Tour Commissioner] Jay [Monahan} and the other people that are running the tour are much better at running an organization like this than I could ever think that I would be. So, knowing that, I tend to really just fall back into I’m just going to not really worry about that a whole lot and I’m going to focus on what my job is.”
‘For me, my goal is just to play as well as possible … to me in my position, it’s not worth being for or against any sort of changes.’
Ben Griffin
Davis Thompson, in just his third year on tour, was similarly undecided, speaking positively of the smaller fields, but remaining indecisive about fewer tour cards.
“Seems like with the field size thing, the guys that tee off late usually never finish because of daylight, so I would like to think that would be a positive thing,” he said. “Going from 125 to 100, I don’t know yet. It seems like there are a lot of really good players on the PGA Tour that finish from 100 to 125. It just makes it harder, but that’s just the challenge of being out here. You’re playing against the best of the best and
sometimes you’ve just got to do it.”
From player to player, the general sense seemed to be that regardless of their personal feelings about the changes, the challenge remained the same—play well, keep your card—and because they have little-to-no control over the process, the healthiest reaction is simply to accept it as reality and try to succeed within that reality.
The most novel reaction came from Ludvig Aberg, the tournament’s defending champion making his first start since undergoing knee surgery in early September.
“This is actually news to me,” he said. “I’m sorry, I did not know that.”
This seemed surprising, to put it mildly, given how big a topic it has been in tour circles, but Aberg took time to follow up after his press conference to make it clear that he truly didn’t know and wasn’t simply trying to avoid the question. In a way, his response wasn’t so different from his peers—he had arrived at acceptance, too, just by the more direct route of never knowing in the first place.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
