PGA Tour CEO — and successor to Jay Monahan as its commissioner, it was announced Tuesday — Brian Rolapp took the stage and announced sweeping changes to the structure, cadence, and go-forward planning of men’s professional golf.
And the resulting update has the RBC Canadian Open at a crossroads.
Starting in 2028, the PGA Tour will have two tracks, the working titles of which are the Championship Series and Challenger Series. The former will feature upwards of 24 events — inclusive of the majors, The Players, and international team competitions — and will run from February to August (10 of the 15 events have already been lined up) and will boast US$20-million purses, 120 players with cuts but no alternates, sponsor exemptions, or Monday qualifiers, and a reimagined post-season (with match play and a new-look Tour Championship hosted at a “rotation of prestigious courses”).
The Challenger Series will be played concurrently with the Championship Series and will have 144-player fields with the opportunity for those on that circuit to qualify up to the Championship rung (and with relegation a possibility as well) at the end of the year, or by winning multiple events or a major.
The changes were met with a fairly solid response online. We’re still 18 months away from the start of the 2028 season, so there is still much work to be done, said Rolapp and Tiger Woods — who made his first public appearance since his arrest on DUI charges on March 27 and is the chair of the PGA Tour’s Future Competition Committee.
“This work was never about any one player or person,” Woods said. “It was about bringing together different perspectives, having honest, hard conversations, and thinking boldly about what is best for the game that we all love.”
While it seems evident which events will, for sure, be sitting on which competition tracks, the Canadian Open could go either way.
For now, a spokesperson from RBC said there is “no update,” and a spokesperson from Golf Canada said there is “no comment at this time.”
Golf Canada CEO Laurence Applebaum told The Globe and Mail on Thursday his organization is “aligned” with the PGA Tour and its process moving forward, but acknowledged the Tour has “a lot of work ahead of itself.” Indeed, while Tuesday’s announcement was fulsome on overarching plans, it was light on specific details, including qualifications and any tournament-specific updates.
“What I have learned is that Canadians want to see the best in the world,” Applebaum told The Globe, “and they want to see Canadian players competing against them.”
If the RBC Canadian Open were to become part of the Championship Series, that would mean the bank would have to pony up nearly $50 million in sponsorship dollars, since it already is the title sponsor of the RBC Heritage, a Signature Event on the existing schedule. There’s no reason why it couldn’t find an entity to partner with (the Heritage is also ‘presented by’ Boeing) for the Canadian Open, which is the third-oldest tournament in men’s professional golf.
But going to the Championship Series would eliminate part of the soul of the event.
This year, 21 Canadians teed it up at TPC Toronto at Osprey Valley. If this were a Championship Series event, only four — Nick Taylor, Corey Conners, Taylor Pendrith, and Mackenzie Hughes — would have earned their way in via their positions on the FedExCup standings last year.
“It’s unique for us, being a national open. If you can’t play in it, that’s going to be a big bummer,” Nick Taylor said at the Canadian Open two weeks ago.
The Canadian contingent isn’t necessarily alone in this. Scottie Scheffler and Jordan Spieth, for example, have long supported their local Dallas Metroplex events, both of which are likely to drop down into the Challenger Series of events.
Rolapp confirmed Tuesday that golfers who earned the right to play the Championship Series would not be allowed to play tournaments that are on the Challenger Series — a scenario they “talked a lot about.”
“I think it’s important to zoom out and look at what we’re trying to accomplish. We’re trying to build the best competitive model we can for our members and for our fans and ultimately for our partners,” Rolapp said. “By definition, we’re not going to fulfill every preference of every stakeholder. I think that’s impossible. But I think what we can do is build something bigger than ourselves, and that’s one of the trade-offs I think we’d have to consider.
“But we believe that having this Championship Series and delivering to fans the best golfers week in and week out is a goal worth pursuing, and that’s the larger ideal.”
The scenarios that exist for the Canadian Open are actually three-fold, then.
The first is that RBC either goes all in (on their own or with another entity propping it up) and it becomes part of the Championship Series and Canadian golf fans get to see the best of the best on Tour, but a half-dozen or fewer homegrown talents. The second is that it becomes a Challenge Series event — perhaps one that does not run during the same week as a Championship Series event — and it features dozens of Canadians but few, if any, notable stars.
Although the former takes away what makes the Canadian Open what it has long been, it’s hard to see a scenario where the key stakeholders of the event accept it dropping to a “lower” level, despite Rolapp explaining that was not the case.
“I think the best way to think about what we’re doing here is that right now we have 47 events at the PGA Tour. We’ll have 47 events going forward. That current model serves roughly 230 players. We’ll serve that amount of players, the same. We are just organized now in a more simple understanding competitively,” Rolapp said.
And of course, there’s Rory McIlroy’s comments from last week at the U.S. Open.
“An event like … the Canadian Open, potentially going to one of these Track 2 (events). Track 2 is a glorified Korn Ferry (Tour) event. That’s what Track 2 is going to be. So, I don’t think the Canadian Open should be one of those,” McIlroy said.
The third is an intriguing proposition, given the status of the Canadian Open as a national championship.
As part of Tuesday’s announcement, the top players from the Championship Series will be eligible for a “limited series” of elevated international events played in the fall and these events “will include prominent national opens.” This is set to be delivered in conjunction with the DP World Tour as part of its strategic alliance. But there’s no reason why the conversation couldn’t be had about kicking things off in Canada, where September is the best month of the year to be playing golf.
As it stands, no decisions have been made specifically about the Canadian Open. And, we’re a year-and-a-half away from the new-look PGA Tour to begin.
Until then, however, plenty of time will be spent on bringing the status of Canada’s biggest national golf championship into focus.