The man most responsible for the success of the PGA Tour might not be in charge any longer, but he’s definitely in the know—and happy to dish
About 15 years ago, as I was writing a book on how the PGA Tour became the billion-dollar business it is today, Deane Beman—who served as Tour commissioner from 1974–94 and was the central figure in my book—used to meet with me every Tuesday morning at 8 o’clock sharp, the same time as his old “catch up” meetings at headquarters when he was in charge. One time, scheduled to be on the west coast for a Tour event and not wishing to wake at 5 a.m. after a long flight, I begged to push the start time of our call back, but Deane would have none of it. “I did that for 14 years when I started the year out there as commissioner, and you can’t do it for one day?” he barked. Then he chuckled and gave me to 6 a.m.
We don’t talk weekly anymore but he’s still one of my favorite sounding boards and he expands my thinking every time we convene to solve the problems of the golf world. When I suggested we were overdue to get together, he picked lunch at high noon at TPC Sawgrass—on a Monday.
That’s the day he tends to practice at “the House that Deane Built.” Beman, 86, jokes that he plays just once a day. His handicap fluctuates from 8.5 to 10.5, but he only plays at TPC Sawgrass, home of The Players Championship, if a friend wants to experience Pete Dye’s famed Stadium Course. Most of his golf is played at Pablo Creek, a Tom Fazio private club in Jacksonville, not far from his home on Commissioners Drive but closed on Mondays.

“When I moved there, a friend asked me how I liked it?” Beman recalled. “I said, ‘I’m two minutes from Pablo, three minutes from Mayo, and eight minutes from Costco.’”
We grabbed a table in the TPC main dining room and given that I was coming off being at the Presidents Cup in Montreal, we began discussing how to make the biennial team competition, which was created in one of his final acts in office and has been dominated by the U.S., better. I offered that the TV ratings would get a big boost if the event shifted out of the fall to not go up against football. I pitched a move to February, where there is a window after the Super Bowl and before the Daytona 500 and less competition in a crowded sports landscape. It makes all the more sense given that the Tour now has a for-profit division with private equity investors pouring in billions of dollars.
Beman listened to me pontificate, considered my arguments, and then class was in session on the business of the PGA Tour. Who needs MasterClass when you can have lunch with Deane?
“The answer is it could be more profitable, but at what expense?” he asked. “The expense of a partner that has supported the Tour for 40–50 years? The Tour isn’t all about dollars. It might seem it today, but it better not be all about dollars. That wasn’t my philosophy. The best business deals are the ones where everybody wins. If you’re trying to improve something, how much are you hurting something else? Hopefully they always will consider that and not just what’s in their own personal best interest. That’s why the job is not easy, right?”
I pressed on, asking his views on the bigger concern of the Tour: How money from the Saudi Public Investment Fund had infiltrated men’s professional golf and created a divide that had left fans frustrated and elevated the importance of the majors—the four times a year that the best players gather to compete—to even greater heights.
We talked about LIV Golf’s failure to get a TV deal with a major network. (Shown on the CW Network in its first two seasons, its ratings were negligible.) One of Beman’s many strokes of genius during his tenure was his solution to overcome golf’s low TV ratings and high production costs. By marrying the Tour, television, and charity, he convinced corporate sponsors to pay the freight for TV and transformed golf from the most expensive sport to produce to the most profitable. That model spurred the expansion of televised golf from, typically, the last six holes on the back nine to full-day, 18-hole coverage plus its own channel to boot, which fueled the game’s greatest period of growth. “We’re not selling, we’re enrolling,” Beman famously said.

I asked Beman if he was concerned that the Tour’s TV ratings had dropped as much as 20 percent this year, which led to a long dissertation on why too much is made of ratings.
“Why has Travelers for all these years been willing to put up [what used to be] $3–4 million all the way up to some $20–$25 million a year? They do that because they get substantially more value than that $25 million. If they took that same $25 million and bought TV time, they’d never get the same value. The reason Travelers buys golf, which has a very small rating, is the other value that they get is worth a helluva lot more than the TV time,” Beman explained. “All the preview stories and tournament coverage mention the name as does all the TV. They don’t say that Jordan Spieth is leading the tournament in Hartford. They say the Travelers. The company gets its name in places where they don’t even sell advertising. When you add it up, the value dwarfs TV, and that’s why they buy it. And if they’re an international company like FedEx, you can double the value.
“That’s how the whole system worked. We didn’t depend on Jack Nicklaus. I don’t think he ever played in Hartford. If he did, it was once. It never depended on the best players to all show up because they wouldn’t, they didn’t, and they never have.”
He looked me square in the eyes and said, “If you still don’t get this, you’re as dumb as Greg Norman.”
I chuckled as he leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table as if he was about to share a secret. “Greg Norman,” he continued, “is the smartest, dumbest son of a bitch or the dumbest, smartest son of a bitch. He’s one or the other. He still thinks everything that goes on is because of his star power. The success of golf was never based on him. We had to build a model that would give us television and make it more successful without depending on him or Jack to show up because you couldn’t count on him. We never required players to sign up except for on the Friday before the tournament when everything was already sold.”
Time has proven Beman deserving of a place on the Mount Rushmore of sports commissioners. Both his successor, Tim Finchem, and the current man calling the shots, Jay Monahan, essentially kept running Beman’s playbook—until the recent threat from the renegade LIV league—as a non-profit, the way he set it up when he took over as commissioner in 1974. I asked how he felt about the Tour shifting to a for-profit, with the players as shareholders and Strategic Sports Group (SSG) already ponying up $1.5 billion with the potential of more to come.

Beman wondered how they came up with the Tour’s $12 billion valuation. Likewise, I wondered if he was concerned about charity being diminished now that the Tour has a for-profit component and outside investors.
“I don’t think the charitable focus will be diminished at all,” he predicted.
But when I informed him that tournaments have been asked by the Tour to kick in more money beginning in 2025—which could impact their ability to maintain and/or increase charitable giving while lining the Tour’s coffers—Beman interjected to say that I was making an assumption that SSG invested to make a profit.
“I don’t know how it’s going to work,” he said. “I don’t know if anyone does. I know the outside investors don’t know how they’re going to get a return because I’ve asked one of them. I was in New York and the leader of the SSG deal said to me he did it because he thought ‘it was the right thing to do.’”
Beman surprised me when I asked if he thought the Tour would make a deal with the Saudi fund.
“I hope they do,” he said. “Without really understanding anything, the best possible deal to be made would be for the Tour to retain its ability to appropriately discipline the players. It can’t avoid that.
“If one of the Saudis’ conditions for making a deal is they can dictate the terms in which a player can come back and play the Tour, then they’ll never make a deal because the Tour cannot cede their authority over their regulations to someone with money. They can’t do that.
“The Tour probably has to let the LIV situation be. They can’t negotiate what happens to LIV because of the antitrust regulations. So, the Saudis can do with it what they like. Then the Tour can allow the Saudis to purchase a like amount to what these investors have done. I’d let the Saudis have the Tournament of Champions [the season’s kickoff event currently held at Kapalua Resort in Hawaii] and let them bring it to Saudi Arabia. That would give the Saudis one of things they want; a big event in their country.”

Did he think LIV’s team concept would be adopted by the Tour as part of any agreement? He waved his hand as if brushing aside a fly.
“Greg Norman sold the Saudis on this concept of team because they looked at soccer teams and what they’re worth,” Beman said. “But nobody gives a damn.”
He is convinced the Saudis are facing a real conundrum: They would be embarrassed to walk away from backing LIV, but at what point do they cut their losses and turn off the spigot?
“I don’t see a business plan that can make them sustainable. So they buy Scottie Scheffler or Rory McIlroy, so what? They have a business model that doesn’t work and is going to require putting up a couple billion a year. The best rumors tell me they’ve spent between $6 billion and $7 billion already. Can they ignore a return? Yeah, they can. But does that mean they are going to keep spending it? Are they going to keep throwing money at something that isn’t successful enough to support it? Who knows? I certainly don’t.
“The solution has to be the Saudis realizing they have been sold a bill of goods. Greg Norman told the players and the Saudis that the Tour’s conflicting-event provision was bullshit. That’s why there was a lawsuit. The conflicting-event provision is not bullshit; it is what it is [a requirement that players request and receive permission from the Tour to compete in events that are scheduled to occur at the same time as a PGA Tour event]. The lawsuit is no longer there. They never had a chance because the players entered into an agreement with someone who forced them to play in every tournament rather than they don’t have to play in any of ours, they just can’t play against them.
“Norman sold them on the fact that if he gets the stars in the field he’ll get television, but he didn’t understand how television worked and why Travelers bought it. His model never made sense; it never worked in the first place. They probably want another year or two to run out on some contracts before they have to acknowledge they have blown all this money. Sooner or later, the Saudis will realize that they have been duped.”
Beman said he isn’t privy to how Monahan is negotiating the Tour’s position but declared that he still has confidence in the current commissioner to steer the Tour into the future. With approval from the Department of Justice looming over any agreement, Beman mused, “My guess is they are slow-playing each other.”
Some 90 minutes into his MasterClass, the bill was paid and class was dismissed.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “Which means I’ve got to go practice.”
Deane Beman went outside, slipped on a Ben Hogan-style cap, loaded his golf bag onto a cart and headed to the back of the range to stay sharp at the game he still loves.