Professional golfers aren’t cavalier about maximizing their earnings. Many of them choose to live in states without income taxes. Even in an era of million-dollar winner’s checks, most of them will gleefully sell the space on their hats, sleeves, collars and bags to whichever company wants to slap a logo on them.
But the first three major champions of 2018 all did something that most of their peers would never even consider. They chose competitive freedom over guaranteed money.
Patrick Reed,
Brooks Koepka
and
Francesco Molinari
are all playing without equipment sponsors this year, as is
Kevin Na,
another recent PGA Tour winner. They all play whichever combination of clubs they prefer, rather than only using those from a single manufacturer that pays them.
There is still one more major to play—the PGA Championship begins on Thursday at Bellerive in St. Louis—but already 2018 has become golf’s year of the free agent. The flight to freedom comes at a time when the value of an equipment sponsorship is falling for all but the biggest stars—making it more crucial for pros to earn money on the course.
“If I feel like I have the best 14 clubs in my golf bag for my game as well as the best golf ball, who knows how many shots I could save?” said Masters champion Patrick Reed. “In the long run, I’m going to earn more on the golf course than I am off the golf course from a manufacturer.”
Reed won his green jacket with a Ping driver, an old fairway wood from
—which doesn’t even make clubs anymore—and a mix of other clubs from Titleist and Callaway. Koepka won the U.S. Open with clubs from TaylorMade, Nike, Mizuno and Titleist. Molinari played mostly TaylorMade clubs at the British Open, though he wasn’t paid to do so.
For them, the math makes sense. Only a handful of marquee players command over $1 million a year on equipment deals. But 102 players made over $1 million in PGA Tour prize money last season. The first-place check at the PGA Championship alone this week is for $1.89 million.
The differences between clubs from each company would seem marginal to most people. How a player performs with, say, two different 5-irons may have as much to do with their swings as the clubs’ designs. But if the actual difference in distance and accuracy is tiny, so too is what separates players on the leaderboard.
“Almost every guy out there is a tinkerer,” said
Benjamin Walter,
the manager for another equipment free agent, 2013 PGA champion
Jason Dufner.
“The difference between winning and top-10 is relatively small. If these guys think they can gain an edge, they’re going to go that route.”
The math has also changed. Purse money continues to hit record highs each year, extending a boom that dates to the debut of Tiger Woods and survived his absence in recent years. At the same time, the market for equipment deals has cooled.
Agents and officials from the manufacturers say that a handful of star players—think Tiger Woods,
Rory McIlroy
and
Dustin Johnson
—still earn several million dollars annually on such deals. But the offers for most other players have dropped substantially. A midlevel Tour player who made $500,000 a decade ago might make $250,000 now.
“The market has changed dramatically,” said
Dan Ladd,
senior vice president of sales and marketing for Cobra Puma. The company, which used to sponsor several PGA Tour players, now sponsors only two:
Rickie Fowler
and
Bryson DeChambeau.
Likewise, a spokesman for TaylorMade said it has reduced the number of players it endorses but declined to share specifics.
“It’s a challenge for these athletes,” Ladd said. “The ones that do it are phenomenal but there seems to be fewer today that can truly cut through and be an ambassador that moves the needle for a brand.”
Of all the equipment companies, though, the one that had the biggest impact on the market is the one that got out of it two years ago: Nike. Its exit not only impacted the more than 40 players it had on staff. It softened the market for everyone else. And it left players with more years remaining on their Nike deals—McIlroy, Koepka and Molinari among them—in an unusual spot.
According to people with knowledge of the agreements, Nike continues to pay players the full value to wear its apparel. But if they sign another equipment deal, Nike’s financial obligation to them is significantly reduced. That diminishes the incentive for them to commit to one manufacturer.
For players who have recently signed apparel-only deals with Nike, that income can embolden them to remain equipment free agents. That was the case with Reed when he split with Callaway and signed with Nike. “It freed me up to give me that kind of opportunity that if I wanted to take the risk, to mix up the golf bag,” Reed said.
Most golfers don’t have apparel deals lucrative enough to make equipment free agency an easy choice. In a sport where players who miss the weekend cut earn no prize money, even smaller equipment deals offer a degree of security.
Na, who previously had a club deal with Titleist, mixed in a Callaway driver and a TaylorMade 3-wood. It looked smart when he won last month for the first time since 2011, but he wrestled with the decision. “You’re giving up a lot of upfront money,” he said. “I thought about it for a while.”
As in other sports, being a free agent in golf can get tiresome. McIlroy was excited about his newfound freedom when Nike stopped making clubs two years ago. But by winter, as he sorted through his options during an off-season testing session, he felt overwhelmed. He signed with TaylorMade last year.
“There’s too much out there,” McIlroy said. “I literally had 25 boxes of golf clubs in front of me. Where do you go from there?”
Write to Brian Costa at [email protected]
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