In Ryder Cup pay controversy, debate misses 1 simple thing

FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — Even by Long Island standards, the latest figures show the cost of real estate around this Ryder Cup is skyrocketing.

The list price for four square-inches across Patrick Cantlay’s forehead? $300,000.

Of course, there is no way of knowing whether or not Cantlay’s $300,000 Ryder Cup pay bump from 2023 to 2025 is the reason he chose to arrive at Bethpage this week wearing a Team USA embroidered hat. The man himself has denied any involvement in igniting the conversation around player pay with his now infamous decision to go capless in Rome two years ago, insisting his decision was far more about fabric than substance.

“For the millionth time, the hat didn’t fit,” he said on Tuesday morning at Bethpage Black.

Still, Cantlay arrived at Bethpage with a hat and with the knowledge that his performance at this week’s Cup would now be worth $500,000, a jump of $300,000 over his paycheck from his hatless performance in 2023. Those things might not be related, but European Ryder Cup fans have already seized on the idea regardless.

The PGA of America will give American Ryder Cup players more money in two ways in 2025. First, $300,000 will be earmarked for charity for each of Team USA’s 12 players ($100,000 more than was earmarked in ’23). Second, each player will receive a new $200,000 “player stipend” that can be spent anywhere. The DP World Tour, responsible for the European Ryder Cup team, will not change its payment practices in 2025. The Tour will not give a dime to its players for their performance, and will instead cash the majority of the Cup’s tournament income into their own coffers — a revenue-generator that financial records show is vital to the continued existence of the tour.

Given these facts, it is not particularly challenging to craft a narrative around player pay and the Ryder Cup; countless golf commentators and fans have already attempted to do so during preview days at Bethpage. In their telling, American players represent the worst instincts of golf’s era of greed, and their flagrant money-grab flies in the face of the Ryder Cup’s long-held ideals of sportsmanship and goodwill. The European players, meanwhile, represent golf’s true purists, and their willingness to forego a paycheck shows not only the depth of their commitment to the Cup, but also the depth of their commitment relative totheir American counterparts, who clearly love golf and the Ryder Cup so much less as to deign asking for payment.

In another accounting of the same story, one shared by Xander Schauffele’s father Stefan at the ’23 Ryder Cup, the roles are flipped. The Americans are heroes of the modern sports era, fighting to be paid what they have rightfully earned against the greedy, shadowy corporations unwilling to share it. The Europeans, in this same telling, are not wrong for refusing pay, just naive to the ways of the world in a manner that allows for their continued exploitation.

The truth is that both sides are wrong. These arguments are not only lazy, they miss the point altogether. The boogeyman here isn’t Cantlay, the Americans or the Europeans. The boogeyman isn’t money or empowerment or equity. The solution to Ryder Cup player pay is staring us in the face, and it’s not all that hard to understand: Consistency.

If we can agree with that the Ryder Cup is a truly special event, then we can also agree that the responsibility for achieving that goal rests equally with all parties. Nobody — not the players, the caddies, the agents, the sponsors, the hospitality-goers, the fans, the governing bodies, the TV partners or anybody else — is allowed to sit out the furthest pursuit of the Ryder Cup’s ideals. The social contract is binding.

At Bethpage Black, it is hard to find the evidence of a greater good being served beyond the margins of an Excel spreadsheet. The get-in price for tickets to this year’s event, held at one of the few great golf courses in America that has shown any commitment to affordability and accessibility, was an astronomical $750, more than ten times the cost of an in-state tee time. On the corporate level, $10,000 per ticket hospitality offerings are a popular seller.

Even those who survived the get-in price should prepare to spend and spend some more. Food and soft drink is included with a ticket purchase, but alcohol is not. Beer costs at least $15 and up to $19. Inside the merchandise tent, a simple Ryder Cup t-shirt costs $82 — $82!!! — while some sweatshirts are priced at more than $150. Parking, located a 20-minute shuttle ride away from the property at Jones Beach, costs $55 per day. Hell, even those watching from home have justified concerns: NBC returns to broadcast the event after intense scrutiny in Rome over an onslaught of commercial interruptions.

Think about how outrageous these prices sound in the context of the Masters, where dirt-cheap tickets, free parking and $1.50 pimento cheese sandwiches have become a distinct piece of tournament lore, and where a below-market TV deal is signed every year in pursuit of limited commercials and stunning visuals. Augusta National still makes and charges plenty during Masters week, especially in its fabled merchandise center, but there are noticeably fewer instances of suspected player protest, and noticeably fewer gripes from the peanut gallery. Maybe the azaleas and green jackets have a tranquilizing effect, or maybe it’s just that everybody has agreed to play by the same set of rules.

The Masters is a convenient example for a golf writer supportive of pursuing goodness over profit. It is also an outlier — a tournament freed from the laws of economics and the hard financial realities of a biennial match play event. Still, it is not hard to look around the remainder of the golf world and see the examples of moneymaking enterprises with an earnest interest in doing the right thing (free children’s tickets to the Open Championship, for example, or commercial cutdowns at the U.S. Open).

The point of it all isn’t that anybody is wrong for cashing a check. The point isn’t even that cashing a check is bad. The point is that it seems awfully unfair that the standards are so inconsistent for the people who cash the checks so publicly.

Of courseit’s nice to theorize about a world where golf’s highly paid stars put down their wallets and give back to the game of golf. But any conversation around money and golf should start with a conversation around consistency.

In golf, as in real estate, location is everything. And so long as the Ryder Cup’s engines of commerce and competition run on divergent tracks, the real estate between the ropes will only grow pricier.

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