Rory McIlroy’s ‘NFL’ answer provides glimpse into golf’s tightrope walk

Brian Rolapp’s resume might run several pages long, but really it runs three letters.

N-F-L.

Three letters have plenty of meaning in golf, but in football they might be even more consuming. The new PGA Tour CEO’s journey into the top seat at golf’s largest professional tour ran almost exclusively through the NFL, the most profitable sports entity in the world. His agenda as the league’s leader on media rights and innovation transformed his career from an NFL intern to commissioner Roger Goodell’s right-hand man, and the NFL’s business from a few billion dollars to a few hundred billion dollars. It does not take an expert in the inner machinations of the PGA Tour to understand the appeal behind his candidacy for Tour leader: To bring a new three-letter word, NFL, to golf.

The logic is sound, if not absolute. Rolapp should want to implement some of the lessons that have made the NFL a smashing success over the last two decades. (He did, after all, help to make the NFL veryrich.) By every indication, he plans to do so. He teased “significant change” in his opening press conference as CEO.

But what kind of change is on the menu? And how much of the NFL is a good thing? As the calendar flips to the fall of 2025, that’s golf’s most important question.

“I say it in America all the time: Golf doesn’t need to be the NFL,” one of the pros Rolapp will be responsible for persuading, Rory McIlroy, said Wednesday. “It doesn’t need to be these other sports. Golf is golf, and that’s fine.”

McIlroy was speaking from the kind of endeavor that Rolapp might appreciate: A paid golf ambassadorship in India, where he is playing in this week’s DP World Tour Event. McIlroy is just the latest pro to participate in an event in the world’s most populous country — an untapped market for golf that could produce the kind of “global growth” often trumpeted by its executives.

He was speaking aboutsomething mostly unrelated to Rolapp’s change agenda in pro golf: The harshness that seems to permeate fan behavior in other sports, but has remained largely removed from golf.

And yet there was something intriguing about the timing of McIlroy’s comments. He enters India after his nearest exposure to the NFL-ification of pro golf — a hotly contested Ryder Cup at Bethpage in which McIlroy and his wife were the frequent targets of crowd ridicule far beyond the typical behavior of a golf tournament. Even in the moment, McIlroy seemed perturbed by the behavior at Bethpage — and by what it represented for his sport more broadly.

Now, with the Tour’s embrace of the NFL’s ideals in progress, McIlroy seemed careful not to let his enthusiasm for golf’s growth come at the expense of its individuality.

“I think [golf] can definitely grow,” he said. “But you also want to keep traditions and the values that make golf, golf.”

Of course, there’s been no indication that Rolapp (or anyone at the PGA Tour, for that matter) has an appetite for a Ryder Cup-style crowd every week on the PGA Tour. And McIlroy has made clear his stance as an agent for positive change in golf: dedicating no shortage of his waking hours in the early-2020s to efforts aimed at maintaining the Tour’s stronghold in the wake of LIV’s incursion.

But might there have been a bit of politicking in McIlroy’s answer? Perhaps.

“You don’t want your sport to be unwelcoming to newcomers. I absolutely get that,” McIlroy said. “But you also don’t want newcomers coming into the game and ruining centuries of traditions and values of what this game represents or what it up holds, as well.”

In many ways, McIlroy’s comments embodied the tightrope Rolapp and the rest of pro golf must now walk: Innovating without overstepping, revering the past but not clutching too tightly to it.

This is the world the Tour signed up for when it ushered in the era of player equity from a group of outside investors. It’s also the mountain Rolapp knew he would have to climb at the Tour before landing the lead job.

“I think there has to be a balance,” he said. “I certainly think that golf can grow but it can grow in a way where the people that are coming into the game still respect and acknowledge that this is a little bit different than other sports.”

Golf may be different, but it’s far from the only sport to face the modernization debate. Basketball detonated its regular season to create an “in-season tournament.” Football created a brand-new kickoff from thin air. Baseball introduced a pitch clock and a ghost runner and a bigger base and a replay review.

Some of those changes were accepted or even appreciated. Many were detested. It will be Rolapp’s job to find the balance.

The goal is to multiply the size and popularity of the pro game, ensuring a considerable financial windfall for all at the time of the Tour’s next TV rights deal at the end of the decade. That’s an image most in the golf world — particularly those cashing checks on the PGA Tour — can appreciate.

But in golf, nothing is as simple as three letters. Not even close.

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