If we believe Phil Mickelson's recent tirade against the PGA Tour at the Saudi International 2022 provided us the expression "obnoxious greed" to use for the next year or two, we've missed at least one age-old argument Mickelson was attempting to convey.
(Photo by Oisin Keniry/Getty Images)
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Mickelson tried to make some points in his attempted takedown of the PGA Tour that honestly didn’t hold that much water and in some ways seemed tone deaf. But when he talked about media rights, that was something as familiar to the PGA Tour discussion as, well, the PGA Tour itself.
“It’s not public knowledge, all that goes on,” Mickelson said in a pre-tournament press conference in Saudi Arabia. “But the players don’t have access to their own media. If the tour wanted to end any threat (from Saudi or anywhere else), they could just hand back the media rights to the players. But they would rather throw $25 million here and $40 million there than give back the roughly $20 billion in digital assets they control. Or give up access to the $50-plus million they make every year on their own media channel.
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“There are many issues, but that is one of the biggest,” he continued. “For me personally, it’s not enough that they are sitting on hundreds of millions of digital moments. They also have access to my shots, access I do not have. They also charge companies to use shots I have hit. And when I did ‘The Match’ — there have been five of them — the tour forced me to pay them $1 million each time. For my own media rights. That type of greed is, to me, beyond obnoxious.”
Mickelson’s point is that images of Mickelson, or any player playing in a tour event, are controlled by the PGA Tour. If you want to use a photo of a PGA Tour player for commercial purposes, well, the PGA Tour controls that image, not the player. So the tour has to be paid for use of the image. That might seem normal, since other sports have similar regulations. But in a day when college athletes are making hundreds of thousands of dollars since the U.S. Supreme Court announced it is the athletes that control their name, image and likeness, should PGA Tour players have the right to control their NIL rights, or is that something the tour must control to operate successfully?
Splitting off from the PGA The touring division was starting to make a lot of money for the PGA of America through increasing television rights to events. Arnold Palmer had a lot to do with that growing popularity of professional golf on television. The PGA of America was taking the money and basically putting it into its general fund to support the entire organization and its programs. The problem was the touring players were wondering why they weren’t getting that money, since it was the touring players who were generating the revenue. You knew that wasn’t going to end well. The television revenue issues, along with other issues, eventually forced an agreement that the touring players could break out on their own, maintaining some ties to the PGA of America. In 1968, the Tournament Players Division became its own organization, later changing its name to the PGA Tour.
And it was all forced because of a battle over media rights. No, the battle wasn’t quite the same thing that Mickelson is talking about now. In the 1960s, it was about all the touring pros getting a share of the money. In 2022, an era of Tik Tok and Twitter and Facebook and other social media outlets, players like Mickelson feel they should have the rights to whatever they do in a tournament.
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The players in the 1960s felt so strongly about controlling the television money that they threatened several different times not to play a tournament without that money going to them. What some current players are threatening, without coming right out and saying as much, is they will play on the LIV Tour that is backed by money from the Saudi Arabian government and offers (according to reports) massive amounts of guaranteed money to players.
The idea that no player has yet signed on to the new league might be a plus for the PGA Tour. But the idea that players are making waves – particularly Mickelson – over changing some of the tour’s management rules and restrictions does have the tour’s attention. As Mickelson said, changes in purses and bonus money in the last several months show the PGA Tour is paying attention. Is the PGA Tour any more obnoxiously greedy than its own players taking millions in appearance money to play in the Saudi International? Probably not. But when it comes to a battle of media rights, the PGA Tour and its players may well be on different sides, something that was true 60 years ago as well. Larry Bohannan is The Desert Sun golf writer.
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Source: Desertsun.com