Even if you don’t know a birdie from a bogey, you should care how the PGA Tour regards the Valero Texas Open, which was played for the 101st time last week and stands as a leading charitable event on the 47-tournament annual schedule.
The tournament, which has been staged at TPC San Antonio’s Oaks Course since 2010, was won for the second time in four years by Canadian Corey Connors in a thrilling, down-to-the-wire contest decided on the back nine last Sunday.
The Texas Open, founded in 1922 at Brackenridge Golf Club, ranks as the longest-running event played in the same city on the PGA Tour. The list of golf legends who have won the tournament over the decades is a long one. By 2022, Valero had raised a record $209 million for charity over its 20 years of sponsorship. This year’s event will add at least another $22 million.
Given the tournament’s history and charitable impact, the event should rank as one of San Antonio’s best and most enduring sports stories.
None of that, so far, has been enough to convince PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan to elevate the Valero Texas Open to the tour’s newly established list of “designated events.” Those tournaments include $20 million purses this year and in 2024 will feature no-cut fields of the top 50 players and a smaller number of players who qualify in other ways.
Next season’s designated events will include the four majors, the Players, three FedEx Cup playoff events and eight other tournaments. Four shoo-ins as designated events are the Sentry Tournament of Champions, Genesis Invitational, the Arnold Palmer Invitational and the Memorial.
The Valero Texas Open, which drew only two top-ranked players to this year’s field, has not been mentioned as a potential designated event, despite its long tradition and formidable charitable fundraising. If it were, Valero would probably have to double the purse size.
Valero officials did not return calls or respond to emails seeking comment.
Despite the lack of big names, the event did not lack for drama. Many in the field were looking for their first win and an automatic 11th-hour invitation to the Masters, the year’s first major. Three players — Sam Stevens, Sam Ryder and Patrick Rodgers — seeking their first win on tour contended Sunday, only to be outplayed by Connors. Five-time winner and fan favorite Rickie Fowler didn’t contend, but he closed with 6-under-par 66 for a top 10 finish as he, too, sought a win and a return to the Masters.
Monahan, in consultation with some of the tour’s most recognizable names, including Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, has been forced to make hurried and sweeping changes to the tour in response to Saudi Arabia’s infusion of $2 billion from its Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) to finance the newly created LIV Golf tour. Read about professional golf’s ugly feud here.
LIV Golf’s seemingly bottomless pit of money has lured away a significant number of PGA Tour winners, both long-established players like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, to rising stars like Cameron Smith and San Antonio’s Abraham Ancer. One measure of the impact LIV Golf has had in disrupting the PGA Tour’s long-established monopoly: 18 LIV golfers are teeing it up at this year’s Masters as either past winners or because they are among the Top 50 world players. Monahan’s changes to the tour structure are meant to stop the bleeding.
Critics of Saudi Arabia — and there are many — accuse the country’s ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, of “sportswashing,” using the country’s oil riches to fund lucrative professional sports events that distract the public from the country’s miserable human rights record and its treatment of women. Men’s and women’s golf, Formula One racing and now, even soccer, all are awash in Saudi money.
Bin Salman has ruthlessly held members of his own royal family hostage in his rise to solidify power, and in 2018, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that bin Salman ordered the assassination and dismemberment of regime critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Turkey, contradicting the Saudi government’s claims that the highly organized killing and corpse disposal were unauthorized.
Some PGA Tour pros like Mickelson and Johnson reportedly were paid $100 million or more from the PIF to jump on the LIV Golf bandwagon, despite bin Salman’s shady reputation. And those were signing bonuses. Johnson has made millions more in winnings since LIV Golf’s limited tournament schedule opened last year.
In response, Monahan and the PGA Tour have revised the tour schedule to allow its top players to play fewer events for enhanced purses, but in the process, those tournaments not on the designated event list face the challenge of maintaining fan bases and sponsors while featuring fields that lack star power.
Coincidentally, the Oaks Course was designed by a former No. 1 golfer in the world, Greg Norman, who serves as the founding CEO of LIV Golf and has become a thorn in Monahan’s side. LIV Golf sued the PGA Tour after Monahan suspended the players who signed with LIV, leading the PGA Tour to countersue.
The bottom line is that the Valero Texas Open attracted only two of the Top 25 players in the Official World Golf Ranking, only one week after most of those top-ranked players competed in the final year of the World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play at Austin Country Club, which this year was a designated event. WGC events have been phased out by the PGA Tour since the pandemic, so the tournament’s end created a rare open date on the schedule two weeks before the Masters.
Professional golf’s season is measured by the four major tournaments: the Masters, the PGA Championship in May, the U.S. Open in June and the British Open in July. The Valero Texas Open is staged one week before the Masters, with many top pros instead heading to Augusta, Georgia, for practice rounds.
In an ideal world, the Valero Texas Open would have been moved back one week and become a designated event two weeks before the Masters. Instead, the Cadence Bank Houston Open is expected to win the spot. Texas, with four tour events, is likely to get one designated event in the future, although that could change each season.
With the PGA Tour’s hurried efforts to neutralize LIV Golf, there will be unintended consequences, regardless of how the litigation is eventually settled. One likely outcome is the Valero Texas Open and other nondesignated tournaments risk being relegated to second-class status on the tour. With only a handful of tour events plus the four majors on the designated list at this juncture, that leaves the majority of tour stops, including San Antonio, outside looking in.
The PGA Tour, perhaps more than any other professional sports organization, uses every event on its calendar to promote its community charity work. Network coverage, for example, always includes a Sunday on-air interview with the CEO of the event sponsor to talk about the charitable impact of the tournament. It seems only fair, then, that the tour’s leading charitable event be granted designated status if charity really is such an important component of the PGA Tour’s mission.
Such recognition of the Valero Texas Open would give the PGA Tour one more way of differentiating itself from the Saudis and their upstart LIV Golf tour, even if the event happens to be played on a course designed by the PGA Tour’s leading nemesis.
