Speaking to Golfweek<\/a>, the 61-year-old was one of several PGA Tour Champions players who are upset with the reduction of their pension pool.\u00a0<\/p>\nSports Illustrated\u2019s Free Golf Newsletters. dark. Sign Up Now. SI Golf Newsletters<\/p>\n
\u201c[Rolapp\u2019s] just slashing stuff and, you know, everyone\u2019s taking a pay cut except the PGA Tour players,\u201d Andrade said,\u00a0<\/p>\n
Golfweek reported that the senior tour\u2019s player pension has been cut by 20%, from\u00a0 $10 million in 2024 to $8 million this year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s disheartening,\u201d Peter Jacobsen said. \u201cThe PGA Tour clearly has a lot of money right now and they\u2019re spending a lot of money keeping players from going to LIV, and we\u2019ve kind of slowly become LIV. I think we are giving way too much money to way too few players on the PGA Tour and the players on the Champions Tour live by the decisions made by the PGA Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2024, the PGA Tour struck a deal with Strategic Sports Group (SSG)\u2014a group of prominent American sports owners, such as Steven Cohen and Arthur Blank\u2014to contribute nearly $3 billion to its new for-profit company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The pension slash is apparently not due to the senior tour\u2019s struggling finances, however.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe venture capitalists are doing what they like to do. They get rid of the waste, make it look more profitable. The [Tour] is working to get SSG their 11 percent return on their money,\u201d said Tom Pernice, a six-time winner on the PGA Tour Champions. \u201cSo anytime that you go for a profit and you have venture capitalists, things change. You ask any business guy, they’re going to tell you that.\u201d<\/p>\n
But some players would have liked to see an increase, rather than a decrease.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the same pension that 25 years ago was $10 million,\u201dAndrade said. \u201cSo, it\u2019s like, wait a second, our pension should be like $20 million to $25 million, not $10 [million] going to $8 [million]<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we don’t have control of that big board and they\u2019re going to do whatever this new guy wants to do, I guess. It should be up higher in my opinion, but nobody\u2019s going to listen to us or me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The player pension plan began in 1985 with $250,000. This year, the PGA Tour Champions, which essentially gives a second career to Tour stars after turning 50, awarded $70 million in prize money.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In recent years, questions have emerged regarding the future of the PGA Tour Champions. Sponsors have pulled back and attendance has shrunk. That could change, though, if Tiger Woods, after turning 50 in December, tees it up<\/a> on the circuit next season. <\/p>\nMore on Sports Illustrated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThis guy\u2019s coming in, he\u2019s like Keyser Soze, you know, from \u2018The Usual Suspects.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 That was how four-time…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216286,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-216285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}