If he wins the FedEx Cup this weekend, Scheffler will set a new record for on-course earnings in a single PGA Tour season, blowing away the mark set by Rory Mcllroy in 2019.
Scottie Scheffler has been driving the same car since college, a Chevy Suburban that now has 178,000 miles and that he admits could use a wash. “As long as it keeps running, I’m probably going to keep driving it,” he told reporters a few weeks ago. Now, coming off undoubtedly the best season of his career and on the verge of history, he’s got more than enough money for an upgrade.
During the 2021-22 PGA Tour regular season, which began in September, the 26-year-old golfer set a record for official on-course earnings at just a shade over $14 million. If Scheffler wins at the Tour Championship on Sunday—he currently holds a two-stroke lead—he will collect another $18 million. Combined, that mark of $32 million for the regular season plus FedEx Cup playoffs would blow away the previous high by roughly $9 million. (Rory McIlroy earned a total of $22.8 million in 2019.)
It’s hard to overstate Scheffler’s dominance. He won four times this season in a span of just six starts, including the 2022 Masters at Augusta National Golf Club, where he fended off a late run from McIlroy to earn his first green jacket. He added another six top-five finishes en route to becoming the world’s top-ranked golfer in March. Thanks to performance bonuses on top of his base pay from sponsors that include Nike, TaylorMade and Titleist, Forbes estimates that Scheffler’s endorsement income over the past 12 months has grown to $12 million. His total haul of $44 million, including the potential FedEx Cup winnings, would have placed him sixth on Forbes’ recent list of the world’s ten highest-paid golfers, $1 million ahead of McIlroy. (Scheffler missed the list because the FedEx Cup playoffs fall outside its tracking window.)
“It’s a great time to be a good golfer,” says Martin Conway, a professor at the Georgetown University Sports Management Institute. “[This is a] combination of his talent and arriving at a time when the inflation in golf earning opportunities has never been better.”
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
The PGA Tour’s average for winnings has risen exponentially over the past 40 years.
It’s true. Over the past decade, the on-course earning average for tour members has grown 57%, to $1.6 million. That figure balloons to an astronomical 4,094% when compared with 1980, the earliest publicly available data from the PGA Tour.
But even more cash is flowing into the sport thanks to the emergence of the LIV Golf. The upstart tour, which is backed by the $620 billion (assets) sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, has not hesitated to shell out enormous sums just to entice players to its events. Thanks to exorbitant sign-on payments totaling an estimated $370 million, LIV placed seven golfers among the ten highest-paid in the world. Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka all reportedly received nine-figure guarantees, roughly half of which industry experts believe they received upfront.
“Scottie Scheffler is now equated to performance.”
Scheffler hasn’t been tied to any LIV rumors as of yet, but he’s definitely a benefactor of a perfect storm. In response to LIV, the PGA Tour has made changes to improve the paydays and conditions for its top players. On Wednesday, tour commissioner Jay Monahan announced a series of changes that include 12 “Elevated Events” for the 2023 regular season that will average $20 million in prize money, a doubling of the Player Impact Program to 20 players and $100 million, and a $500,000 guarantee for every fully exempt player. The PGA Tour also plans to return to a calendar-year schedule in 2024 and introduce a handful of events that, like LIV, have no “cut.”
“It’s like being a Major League Baseball player in 2023 compared to 2002,” Conway says. “Maybe it’s comparable, maybe you’re not even as good, but the purses and the earnings opportunities are sky high.”
The potential payoff for those at the very top of their game is even greater. “I think of it in terms of the multiplier effect,” Conway says. He adds that winning one of the four majors, ranking No. 1 or earning more money than anyone else could make sponsorship opportunities double, triple or even quadruple.
Scheffler, who joined the PGA Tour in 2018, is getting close to that status. Born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, he later moved to Dallas, where he attended Highland Park High, the alma mater of Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford and Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw. He too proved to be a natural winner, bringing home three straight individual state championships before leading the University of Texas to three Big 12 titles.
Can he similarly dominate the PGA Tour in years to come? Don’t bet against him.
“Scottie Scheffler is now equated to performance,” Conway says. “Ultimately he’s dependable and reliable. Performance day in and day out.”
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