Posted on 04/19/2020 7:06:59 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Do you like golf? Not so much? Too bad. Because that’s what you’ve got.
The PGA Tour made it known this week that it intends to return to normal operating service shortly.
“I’m not going to say that I have 110-per-cent certainty, but we are very confident that we will be able to play [the] second week in June,” Tour official Andy Pazder told reporters on Thursday.
You know what I’m 110-per-cent certain of? That inflation is going to be somewhere around 110 per cent before this is all over. I’m not sure that imaginary number applies anywhere else.
Sports has been turned upside down by the pandemic more profoundly than a simple cessation of business. It is now entering a period where it must radically reconsider how pro sports are exhibited, and whether that’s even possible.
Golf is the early winner because it has several structural disadvantages. At least, things that used to be so.
You can’t make a living selling seats at a golf tournament. No one wants to sit in the baking sun for 12 hours (the amount of time competitors are on the course on a given Thursday or Friday). People do it, but no one really wants to.
If you can get one (you can’t), a four-day pass to the Masters costs US$325. A four-hour pass to the Super Bowl costs more than 10 times that.
Instead, golf makes its money from television. But because you will make room in your life for a British Open, but have never heard of nor will ever watch the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Miss., there isn’t a whole lot of that.
This is why top golfers make so much less than their basketball- or soccer-playing counterparts.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
The PGA tour doesn't allow it. The European tour does..
Why don’t they tell you that the vaccines are ALREADY contaminated with the XMRV retrovirus that was picked up from growing it in mouse cells. Thats the retrovirus that is linked to being the causative agent for all sorts of human illness from autism, CFS, prostate cancer, lymphomas, fibromyalgia, and auto-immune diseases.
Dr. Fauci knows it. Dr. Mikovits documented it in her books “PLAGUE” and PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION”.
Why did they place her under a gag order?
He's wrong here, perhaps depending on his meaning of "top golfers". I saw an article a few years back in one of the golf magazines comparing the earnings of "top golfers" to the earnings of "top players" in all other sports. The golfers made more than the others. WAY more. In that year the highest paid non-golf athlete was paid around $15 million dollars. Tiger Woods made $110 million dollars that year, and so on down the line of perhaps 15 golfers and 15 other athletes.
Also, minor league baseball players are professional athletes as well, but they make practically nothing. They play with the hope of making the major leagues.
This ignores that over time more and more people know they’re immune. Large numbers already are. We really need antibody tests in huge numbers. If 1/3 has already had it then 1/3 should be able to start filling stadiums. It’s not going to take long before the predicted numbers just aren’t possible and people can risk what they want. Either stay home or don’t but there’ll be ZERO justification for the State to *require* it as the immune numbers rise.
This is why a phased approach is the right thing. We’re still lacking data so there needs to be caution - but I think we need a higher priority now on antibody tests. It’s the last major data point that should have a massive impact on decisions but we don’t know what it is, 20%, 50%, 80%?
I think I had it in January, first time I really considered the hospital due to a cough - it was really bad....but I just don’t know, like many others.
M&A (Marketing and advertising) professionals are also working from home. Those ads use stock videos which are available to all M&A professionals. All the slick audio/video design/editing/processing that used to require a large studio 10-15 years ago can now be done on a laptop.
I think they’ll be starting up sports again, in front of live audiences, in 5 years or so - or after a vaccine is deployed if that happens sooner.
NEVER allow yourself to be vaccinated by the Government!
I suspect many more are ignorant and unlettered that read/ read Shakespeare, I know this to be true because they critique our movies and literature!
True. If all pro sports had to rely on gate revenues only, neither players nor owners would be rich.
The top fifty or so players on the money list do very, very well. They probably double their on-course earnings off the course with endorsements, appearance fees and such. Win a major and it's practically a license to print money. But even the 'working stiffs' further down the money list are still pulling in over $1M annually, just on the course.
I was watching a documentary about Arnold Palmer last week. When he joined the tour in the mid-fifties, the money was paid only to the Top 30 finishers in a tournament, and last place might only be $20. Contrast that with today where making the cut means thousands of dollars.
The 2019 PGA Tour Money List:
Woods is a perfect example. He was won — not played in, but won — 29 tournaments sponsored by companies with which he had business relationships, including Buick, American Express, AT&T and Accenture, as well as Deutsche Bank, the European Tour stop in Dubai and the Arnold Palmer Invitational, which is run by his former management company, IMG.
OK, so Tiger gets — or in all of these cases, used to get — $5 million to $8 million a year from those companies as an endorsement partner and then plays in their tournament. Is that not an appearance fee? Not according to the PGA. He is an employee of the corporation separate from the tour in this case as it doesn’t apply as he is allowed to sell his name by the PGA contract.
The Royal Bank of Canada, for example, has a bunch of players under contract —Luke Donald, Jim Furyk, Matt Kuchar and Ernie Els among them — and sponsors two stops on the PGA Tour which they play. Are those appearance fees?
And in addition to these direct financial relationships with players, there are other ways to get around the appearance fee ban. It is not illegal for a sponsor to offer a player $100,000 to do a 30-minute walk-through at a cocktail party the Tuesday before the tournament. And gee, if he is scheduled to stay and play the event, well that’s just a lucky coincidence.
It’s been going on for years. In 2012 Zurich, which ponies up the purse for the New Orleans stop, paid Graeme McDowell, Keegan Bradley and Camilo Villegas to play in a hickory-shaft club exhibition before the tournament. They then played the real event. In 2005, both the PGA Tour and IMG were put in an embarrassing position when Golf World obtained a copy of a letter from IMG to tournament directors that essentially offered a price list for it to provide players for Monday outings the week of their tournament.
That year, four IMG clients — Vijay Singh, Sergio Garcia, Retief Goosen and Padraig Harrington — were paid by Ford to play in a Monday outing the week of the Ford Championship at Doral. All stayed to play the tournament. The letter obtained by Golf World contained a suggested price list for specific players — Els, Singh, Goosen and Sergio Garcia were in the top tier at a going rate of $100,000 to $200,000 per outing — and suggested those players would then stay and play in the PGA Tour event. Suggested!
A representative from IMG called the disclosure of the letter “a vulgar breach of trust” and denied that IMG was pitching the idea to every tournament, saying it was for a specific client. “The purpose is not to circumvent PGA tour regulations,” The rep said. “It is a matter of what corporate America wants.”
Of course there are appearance fees on the PGA Tour call it so or not. And this isn’t all of the gimmicks. Ask some corporate hack how much money he lost in side bets when he played with the pro on Monday. And the IRS is still trying to figure it out, too, for American players.
This is why it’s still legal on the foreign tours and everyone is in the pool. It’s a frequent practice at several European Tour events and stars can often receive six figures (or more) to simply tee it up. ... And it just happens that a lot of top players are going to be playing there that particular week.
Tiger Woods twice turned down appearance fees of around $3 million to play in the Saudi International, according to an ESPN report. And they openly called it an appearance fee. Saudi ain’t the US.
Another indication of the money is that players are required to play 15 PGA Tour events per season to retain membership, but the regular-season schedule has 37 weeks and 29 events to choose from each year to build a schedule. But most of them have won a tournament somewhere to keep their card exemption and don’t play all of them. Here’s a list of the last few years of tournaments:
http://www.espn.com/golf/statistics/_/year/2019
And the number 40 on the list for 2018/19, the last full year, Andrew Putnam with 23 events, won almost $2.5 million from the tournaments alone.
Like I said, it depends on your interpretation of money. Sorry for the length, but this is well documented and no one cares.
rwood
I had to giggle at your 2019 tour list you provided. The save-harmless was at the bottom of the graph:
“The total official money a player has earned year-to-date.”
We know millions of dollars are tossed around on Monday from side bets alone. The PGA has even set up a number or amount of bets they can catch. The side bets in the Woods Mickelson match a couple of years ago was monitored. The side-bet challenges made by Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson added another dimension to The Match, but apparently they were only allowed to do so many.
Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard, citing sources, said the PGA Tour limited the number of challenges between Mickelson and Woods.
Tour policy prohibits players from gambling at the site of a Tour co-sponsored event, but a Tour spokesperson told Golf Channel that Woods and Mickelson did not violate any rules since the side bets went to charity.
Big brother is out there but how much was bet before they got to the course is not covered under the rule as it is not on site. And isn’t charity a tax write off?
These guys play monopoly with real buildings. They’ve got to protect it somehow.
rwood
Five years? You really spread the Covid doom, don’t you?
Yes, only a VACCINE will save us!
Starting to see a common thread running here...
I have always practiced social distancing (hard in subway) and avoided touching my face. For the past 20 years I have also strengthened my immune system with supplements.
At any moment I could be killed by any number of means. I still go out.
Yawn....
Mega dittos. Most of my last 40 years was working in NYC and around the NY metro area - never took the vaccine, never got a severe flu case.
I think when it comes to flu and corona-like viruses, there is no substitutes to good health and a good immune system.
The immune system was not designed to protect you from all the things the system knows about. It is designed to protect the body from all biological strangers. Yes, it will develop particular antibodies based on previous attacks, but those antibodies came from the immune system fighting off something new - which is what it was designed to do.
I am not uncertain that some vaccines inhibit the development of some natural immunity. Why? A sister of mine together with her daughter have gotten the flu vaccine religiously every year, and every year they both get a sever URI illness.
Athletes = Unessential workers.
It was a better world when professional athletes had to get jobs in the off-season.
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