Brooks Koepka’s ouster marks the PGA Tour’s new leader

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

Come Wednesday night, Rolapp will likely be at The Breakers, a luxurious five-star hotel across the inland waterway from here, for Tiger Woods’ 300th birthday party. If he knows anything about Woods, he knows that this type of event is a travesty for him, but Woods will be there, a smile on his face, raising money for his Tphilanthropy. If it matters to Woods, it matters to Rolapp. Woods is a member of the PGA Tour’s policy board, the Tour’s Enterprise Board (the for-profit arm) and chairman of the Tour’s Future of Competition Committee. In dealing with these issues and more – the Genesis Invitational, the Hero World Challenge – Rolapp and Woods will be Zoom’s best friends. Does it matter that he couldn’t tell Chris Como from Matt Killen, to quote two of Woods’ coaches in recent years? It doesn’t.

It’s a long tea-leaf read about what’s going on here, in this whole back-and-forth trip thing, with Brian Rolapp’s name and likeness all over the place. When Rolapp was named the PGA Tour’s new CEO, shortly after last year’s US Open, people who knew him from the NFL were this: Smart, business minded, not golf. It turns out that the last part, originally meant to be dis, is actually an asset (depending on your view of the Monday news). Brian Rolapp’s most important mission is to get people to watch PGA Tour events, in person, and, more importantly, on any screen they choose. If bringing Brooks Koepka back into the fold is going to help Rolapp this time, then he’ll do whatever he can to get him back into the fold. There is no reason for him to worry about how Koepka took LIV Golf’s money while he could, how he hurt the PGA Tour by leaving, how the rank and file players will be upset by this easy comeback. He wants the balls to be delivered by Koepka. Full stop.

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

Whatever happens. We want them to come back.

Monday’s news is the opening salvo. Rolapp said in August that his goal is not “incremental change. This is, in fact, to oppose how Augusta National and the Masters operate, where the leaders there despise the name.” change and remove all their guidance from the word the better. Golf does not have a tradition of “significant change.” Rolapp may not know and may not care.

When the LIV-Tour battle first heated up in the summer of ’22, Jay Monahan, commissioner of the PGA Tour, said, “I have no idea; if this is an arms race and if the only arms here are the cost of dollars, the PGA Tour can’t compete.” That felt so profoundly true at the time. Rolapp is here to tell you: Dollar bills are here not the only weapon in the LIV-PGA Tour battle. The PGA Tour offers something that LIV Golf does not and that is the freedom to make your own schedule. The door to Koepka’s comeback started with that.

As Rolapp tries to find his way back to the PGA Tour with Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith, the same concept will apply. DeChambeau thrived under LIV and has bad memories of the PGA Tour. With Smith, it’s hard to know what he cares about. Rahm may be open to a play-wherever-you-want argument. But he would have to leave a lot of Saudi money to do it.

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

As for Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed, all major event winners, I think Rolapp has little interest in them even if he expanded the goals in Monday’s news. Mickelson is 55 years old and has expressed disdain for the PGA Tour and it’s hard to imagine him coming back. Woods has never liked Sergio Garcia so it is unlikely that he will push Rolapp to make it easier for him to come back. Patrick Reed’s rules violation kept him out of the PGA Tour. About Dustin Johnson, who knows too? He can play in the Masters forever. His father-in-law is Wayne Gretzky. He has all the jet skis he needs.

Rolapp can’t kill LIV Golf, like the NFL helped kill the USFL in 1986. But he can weaken it. It could reduce its star power and the appeal of an international series of budding golf talents. If he can weaken them enough, then LIV Golf and the PGA Tour may be able to come to some kind of common sense, where the two leagues live.

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

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