In the PGA Tour's New Era of More Cash, Is Winning Rewarded Enough?

A PGA Tour victory earns 18 percent of the total purse. But as the tour looks to further reward excellence, Alex Miceli asks if it's time to boost that percentage.

HONOLULU — While Sony is celebrating its 25th anniversary as the sponsor of the Sony Open, the Hawaiian Open goes back to 1965 when Gay Brewer won the first event at Waialae.

At the time, the total purse was $60,300 and Brewer won $9,000 for his playoff win over Bob Goalby.

The win, his eighth on tour, earned him just 15 percent of the total purse.

Two short years later, Dudley Wysong won $20,000 for his playoff win over Billy Casper.

That win was worth 20 percent from a total purse of $100,000.

This Hawaiian purse history lesson has a point—it has gone up and gone down, so why not bring the percentage for winners back up to 20 percent or even higher?

Currently, a PGA Tour winner takes home 18 percent of the total purse, but after watching Collin Morikawa implode on Sunday at the Tournament of Champions and Jon Rahm slide in for the victory, you could see and hear in Morikawa’s face and voice how hard it is to win and how gutted he was to finish second and be paid $1.5 million for failing.

Last week’s nail biter was the first of the Tour's new elevated-event program, which raised the purse at the TOC from $8.2 million in 2022 to $15 million and was a direct response to LIV Golf’s largesse with purses of $25 million except for its Miami team championship that paid out $50 million.

“Potentially you could have weighted the win and not put purses up,” Adam Scott said on Tuesday at the Sony Open. “You could give them 40%. Leave the purse the same size but give the winner 40% of the total purse and cut everybody else and reward excellence in a week.”

Adam Scott, a winner of more than $60 million on the PGA Tour, said that excellence can be rewarded with bigger first-place checks instead of simply bigger purses :: Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports

Quick math: 40% of $8.2 million would be $3.28 million, more than what Rahm earned in the new system.

Every player talks about how winning is so hard, and that seems to be borne out every week on every tour around the world.

The first 15 events on the PGA Tour in the 2021-22 season saw only one-third of the 54-hole leaders go on to win. One-in-three is not a scientific calculation, but a fair measuring stick for how hard it is to win.

Considering the Tour’s desire to better compensate excellence, why not raise the winner’s percentage of the purse to 20 or 25 percent?

“Winning is winning, it is very different,” Jordan Spieth said when posed the question. "Second and fourth feels pretty similar, third and sixth feels very similar. Winning feels very different."

Spieth was comfortable with a slight raise in the winner's percentage of the purse, if aligned with the world ranking system that recently was aligned with the strokes-gained system.

It is a system that has come under fire by last week's winner, Rahm, who is mired in the fifth spot in the ranking as even after winning last week, he didn’t move up a single spot.

Yet, it’s a system that may have merit if given a chance.

“I don't think it's correct,” Scott said of Rahm not moving up in the world ranking after a win. “Well, I don't think winning last week is getting awarded potentially enough. I shouldn't say that because I don't actually know who was all in the field, but the weight at the top of the points I don't think is enough.”

Whether the rankings are or are not the best barometer has been discussed ad nauseam since they debuted in 1986 as the Sony Rankings.

No matter how you get there, awarding winning is paramount and while the Tour refuses to even report how much a player earns each week or maintain a public money list, money is what required to put gas in your car and food on the table.

I’ve never seen a bill paid with FedEx Cup points.

Winnings matter and how much money you make matters.

But some don’t want to disproportionally balance the scales to far toward winning.

“I think there should be as much emphasis on winning as possible, and there is no bigger spread than between first and second,” Spieth said, then added a "but."

“But I think that if you start to separate it so much I think it—I just wonder as we go forward here—I don't remember ever contending, even my rookie year in an event, and thinking about the difference in the money in first and second ever coming down the stretch.”