The Byron Nelson Has a New Sponsor That Should Sound Familiar to Diehard PGA Tour Fans

The CJ Cup was a fall event for six years and now the CJ Group is sponsoring the Tour's longtime Dallas stop.

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The PGA Tour's long-running tournament in Dallas, which had Byron Nelson's name as part of the event dating to 1968, announced a new title sponsor for the event beginning in 2024—a significant development given AT&T's desire to step away.

The CJ Group, which has been associated with the PGA Tour since 2017 when it was a part of a tournament in South Korea, is the new title and the event will be renamed the CJ Cup Byron Nelson.

AT&T will continue to sponsor the Pebble Beach Pro-Am but not the Byron Nelson :: Raymond Carlin III/USA TODAY Sports

Earlier this year, Golfweek reported that the PGA Tour turned down a sponsorship deal with Raytheon after AT&T had asked out of its sponsorship commitment. AT&T is a longtime title sponsor of the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, which in 2024 will become one of the eight Signature events.

The Pebble Beach event will be reformatted to a maximum of 80 players with no 36-hole cut and a $20 million purse.

The AT&T departure from the Byron Nelson was significant because Dallas is the company’s home base. And the news that Raytheon, according to Golfweek, was turned down due to selling arms to Saudi Arabia, made for an interesting subplot to a rather larger sponsorship hole.

Given LIV Golf’s backing by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia—and the subsequent "framework agreement" that is supposed to foster peace—the Tour’s decision to turn down sponsorship money understandably made headlines.

But the Tour clearly had been talking to CJ Group all along. The company sponsored three events in South Korea prior to the coronavirus pandemic forcing a move to the United States in 2020 and continued with three more events staged in the United States, including last year in South Carolina. Rory McIlroy won each of the last two CJ Cups.

The CJ Cup event was no longer part of the fall schedule, however, and so it makes sense that CJ Group might want to continue in some capacity, hence the move to the Byron Nelson, which is May 2-5. That’s a week earlier than usual, two weeks prior to the PGA Championship. It will be the third "swing" event allowing for qualification into the following week’s Wells Fargo Championship, a Signature event.

The Tour is still looking for a title sponsor to replace Honda in South Florida after the company decided to not renew its longtime deal following the 2023 event.