Tiger & Rory's Underwhelming Pay Day

The Breakfast Ball Buffet

Author

Justin Golden
April 24, 2024

Good evening and welcome to the Breakfast Ball! We’re serving breakfast for dinner today, and here’s what we got on the menu:

  • Tiger and Rory’s pay day

  • Tiger’s TGL team

  • Is Rory rejoining the policy board?

  • This week’s preview & buffet bets

Tiger and Rory’s pay day

After all the rumors, false or not, over the last 2 years, we finally know how much the PGA TOUR will be paying out Tiger, Rory and others for their loyalty.

There were rumors that Tiger was offered close to a billion dollars to join LIV, and Rory in the 750-800 million range. That is an incomprehensible amount of money.

After two years of pure chaos, the dollar figure that each star will be receiving was released earlier today, and I can’t lie, I’m underwhelmed ↓

Yes, I’m well-aware that these guys have made more than enough money to begin with.

But for them to have stuck their necks out as much as they did, especially Rory, and only get 7-10% of what LIV offered them seems pretty nuts to me. Especially since they’re being paid out on an 8 year plan.

Tiger’s TGL team 🐅

Tiger filled his Jupiter Links GC team with Max Homa, Tom Kim, and Kevin Kisner.

The TGL itself is an interesting idea. We know team golf doesn’t work outside of the Ryder/President’s Cup — LIV has proved that. 51 weeks of the year it’s an individual sport, which is the way it should be.

But the TGL is a Monday night simulator league that’ll be played in a gigantic new stadium and broadcasted on ESPN, not a serious golf tour that wants world ranking points.

The exterior & interior plans for the TGL’s SoFi Center

The players are going to be mic’d up, and each week will be team vs. team matchups counting towards a season long standing system and an eventual playoffs.

It’ll be fun to watch our favorite golfers in this type of environment, for sure, but... whether or not the whole team thing will work in the simulator setting is yet to be seen.

With all that being said, Homa, Kiz and Tom are some of the funniest personalities on TOUR, so it should be fun watching them shoot the shit with Tiger on a weekly basis.

Is Rory rejoining the policy board?

So apparently Rory is rejoining the PGA TOUR’s policy board after leaving it at the end of 2023. This is quite the 180 after hearing Rory to LIV rumors last week.

At the end of ‘23, he said he wanted to put 100% of his focus into his golf game after 2 years of pure chaos. Less than 6 months later, the board specifically asked for Rory to rejoin, and it seems like he just might.

Fun fact here regarding his form while being on the board vs. not:

2022 & 2023 while on the board — 2nd best player in all metrics in that span, top-8 in 7/8 majors, 6 wins, 82% top-10 finish rate, and over $40 million earned.

2024 while NOT on the board — only 2 top-10’s in 9 starts, 1 win, and earning less money than Scottie Scheffler’s caddie.

Maybe rejoining the policy board will whip him back into shape!

This week’s PGA & LIV preview

Rejoice! No Scottie this week, meaning someone else will have a chance to win.

We’ve got the Zurich Classic and LIV Adelaide this week. The Zurich is a team-of-2’s event, with the notable teams being McIlroy/Lowry, Cantlay/Schauffele, Theegala/Zalatoris and Morikawa/Kitayama.

Adelaide is actually one of the best, if not the best event held on LIV all year. It’s kinda like their version of the WM Phoenix Open. They even made their own version of 16 at the WM ↓

The 12th hole at LIV Adelaide

Buffet Bets

While it’s exciting that someone not named Scottie Scheffler will win this week, there’s no free money on the board this week as he ain’t playing. Anyways, here are our buffet bets for the week:

Our PGA favorite favorite: Cantlay/Schauffele to win outright (+400) — they’re the heavy favorite for a reason. Their form is more promising than any other teams’, so might as well just go with it.

Our LIV favorite favorite: Cam Smith to win outright (+1000) — home game for Cam, and golf in Australia is just a litttttle different than anywhere else. He knows how to get it around there better than anyone else and showed some form at the Masters. Might just nuke this one.

Matchups PAR-lay: Theegala/Zalatoris to beat McIlroy/Lowry & Gooch to beat Hatton (+250) — Form considered, I don’t love the Irish duo to begin with right now, and Gooch is LIV’s best player for the actual LIV events.

Is Bryson changing clubs?

We all know that Bryson Dechambeau is no stranger to trying crazy shit.

One example is that he uses clubs that are all the same length (psycho activity). Another is him putting a new, unheard of brand’s 3D printed irons into the bag on the Wednesday of Masters week this year.

That title is click bait, but it’s worth taking a look at how he fared using kids clubs for a hole ↓

Only Bryson.

Meme of the day

Pretty self-explanatory 😂

Quick Bites 🥓