The PGA Tour plans to announce that the Waste Management Phoenix Open, RBC Heritage, Wells Fargo Championship and Travelers Championship will be “elevated” events in 2023 with a $20 million prize purse, multiple reports said Tuesday.
Nine other tournaments were previously announced as permanently elevated, with purses between $15 and $25 million: the Sentry Tournament of Champions, The Players Championship, the Genesis Invitational, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, the Memorial, WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play and all three FedEx Cup playoff events.
The Tour will rotate the other four elevated events on a yearly basis, so Phoenix, the Heritage, the Wells Fargo and the Travelers won’t be as lucrative in the 2024 season.
The move is part of the tour’s larger strategy to counter LIV Golf’s efforts to lure away the best players in the world with record purses. The plan was hatched following a players meeting led by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy during the summer that covered how to stave off more LIV defections.
The best players on the PGA Tour have agreed to play the tour’s 13 elevated events and the four majors each year in order to bring them together at the same events more frequently.
The Phoenix Open is a popular tournament among Tour players that coincides with Super Bowl Sunday. It’s known for its raucous crowds, especially at the par-3 16th “stadium hole,” and the likes of Scottie Scheffler, Rickie Fowler and Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama have won it in recent years.
Two of next year’s elevated events — the RBC Heritage in Hilton Head, S.C., and the Travelers in Connecticut — take place one week after the Masters and U.S. Open, respectively, meaning the top golfers won’t take a week off after those majors.
“Hilton Head and Travelers after majors? I’m not keen on playing after a major, but I’ve seen people do it and I’ve seen people do well, so there’s no reason why you can’t,” Jon Rahm of Spain said Tuesday ahead of the CJ Cup in South Carolina.
–Field Level Media