RELATED: Jack Nicklaus worries about what a revamped PGA Tour might look like<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s time for [prizemoney] to come back to the way it was,\u201d is a heck of a quote coming from the Ripper GC captain.<\/p>\n
In fairness to Smith, his comments were in response to a question about LIV Golf\u2019s expected scale back following the 2026 season, but some fellow pros who turned down LIV\u2019s golden ticket must have done a spit take. The Aussie, along with the likes of Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm, turned on the proverbial faucet. They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their own glasses, and now that they\u2019re full, Smith wants to turn it off again. That\u2019s not going to sit well with some, especially those who played better golf than the 2022 Open champ over the past several years but still ended up with far less in their bank accounts.<\/p>\n
While the messenger may not be ideal, the message is one that the PGA Tour (and whatever remains of LIV Golf leadership) are already taking seriously. Golf is bigger than ever, but that means more competition for eyeballs and wallets. <\/p>\n
Just take Barstool Sports\u2019 made-for-YouTube Internet Invitational, for instance. This week, Barstool announced a winner\u2019s purse of $US4 million, a 300 percent increase from 2025 for the amateur influencer event. That\u2019s larger than many opposite-field PGA Tour events and LPGA tournaments. That level of financial proliferation simply doesn\u2019t seem sustainable in a world ravaged by inflation, high interest rates, collapsing alternative currencies (see: Bitcoin) and war.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been an awesome four to five years for us golfers,\u201d Smith said, but at the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, even he is willing to admit the good times don\u2019t last forever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[IMAGE: Kate McShane] There\u2019s an argument to be made that the amount of money in professional golf, despite…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14774,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1160,825,44,81,1360,144,826,6239,503,6240],"class_list":["post-14773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","tag-cam-smith","tag-cameron-smith","tag-golf","tag-liv-golf","tag-money","tag-pga-tour","tag-pif","tag-prizemoney","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14773\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}