An open letter to professional golf

In this week’s View From The Fairway, Derek Clements writes an open letter to the world of pro golf, worried that our sport has become obsessed with money.

Dear world of professional golf,

Where do I start? I want to say at the outset that I love you dearly but boy do you push my loyalty to the limit.

I have just watched The Big Five Roundtable, featuring Bernhard Langer, Ian Woosnam, Sandy Lyle and Nick Faldo. You surely don’t need me to tell you that the fifth member was the late, great Seve Ballesteros. It stirred some fabulous memories and reminded me of some golden times in the sport of golf. Different times. Times when the glory of winning was enough, when the people who played our sport were not obsessed with money. If you haven’t seen it then I recommend that you find it on YouTube.

Remembering Golf's Glory Days

I have been following golf for more than 50 years. My true love affair began while watching Tony Jacklin win The Open at Royal Lytham in 1969, the first Englishman to claim the title for 18 years. It was a golden era.

Jack Nicklaus was in his prime. Arnold Palmer was still producing moments of magic. And the diminutive Gary Player was defying the odds - and telling us about the hundreds of push-ups he did every day (some things don’t change!).

I watched Jackin win the US Open at Hazeltine in 1970. I was at St Andrews the same year and followed Jacklin as he played the front nine in 29 shots and Nicklaus went on to beat Doug Sanders and claim The Open, hitting his final drive through the 18th green with a persimmon driver and a balata golf ball!

I watched Lee Trevino win back-to-back Open Championships, breaking the heart of Jacklin in the process. I saw the USA routinely thrashing GB&I in the Ryder Cup.

I watched in awe as Nicklaus and Tom Watson went toe to toe at Turnberry in 1977 in what remains the greatest golfing duel I have ever witnessed. The two greatest players in the game destroyed a world-class field and disappeared over the horizon as they produced a stunning display of shotmaking for 72 holes before Watson emerged victorious.

I saw the emergence of Ballesteros, Langer, Lyle, Faldo and Woosnam. And I finally got to watch Europe win the Ryder Cup at The Belfry in 1985 when one of my heroes, Sam Torrance, holed the winning putt. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

I marvelled at Ballesteros every time I saw him play. He had incredible charisma and possessed magic in those wonderful Spanish hands. 

I watched a 46-year-old Nicklaus win the 1986 Masters. People talk about comeback wins - this was in a different league.

I was never a huge fan of Faldo as a human being but he was a golfer who took dedication and hard work to a different level. 

And then there was the 1996 Masters when Greg Norman seemed destined to finally claim the Green Jacket, only to collapse in the final round and lose out to Faldo, his nemesis. Even Faldo felt guilty to have denied the Great White Shark.

Later that same year I watched with my jaw on the floor as Tiger Woods emerged. But that was as nothing when compared with what Woods achieved at the 1997 Masters when he rewrote the record books. It is often forgotten that, in the company of Faldo, he played the opening nine holes in 40 shots.

There has been more. Much more. Of course there has. Woosnam winning The Masters, Darren Clarke's heroics at the Ryder Cup at the K Club weeks after the death of his wife, Clarke winning The Open, various European Ryder Cup victories, Colin Montgomerie winning eight Race to Dubai titles, John Daly winning the US PGA and The Open, the Tiger Slam in 2000/01, Woods winning The Open at St Andrews without finding a single bunker. On and on it goes.

And here is the thing, and the whole point of this open letter, at no point during any of the above heroics was the subject of money ever uttered. It was enough to win.

Professional Golf is Now Obssessed With Money

But now, in 2026, the world of professional golf is obsessed with money. Moolah. Wonga. It dominates everything.

Win a routine, run-of-the-mill PGA Tour event and you will pocket $1.6m. Scottie Scheffler topped the 2025 money list with more than $27.6m in official prize money alone. If you win the FedEx Cup then you can expect to be boosting your bank balance by more than $10m. 

In 2025 we saw America’s players being paid to play in the Ryder Cup for goodness sake - most of us would give our right arms to represent our country/continent in our sport’s biggest team event. And ticket prices touched $800.

Prize money at the majors has gone through the roof. Last year Rory McIlroy collected $4.2m for winning The Masters, while Scheffler’s Open success was worth $3.1m - he earned a further $3.42m for winning the US PGA. JJ Spaun’s US Open success was worth $4.3m.

When Jacklin won The Open in 1969 his prize money was £4,250. The total prize fund for the tournament was £30,000.

And then there is LIV Golf. It saw 14 events on its 2025 schedule and 13 of them had a total purse of $20m with the winner of each picking up a staggering $4m for winning a 54-hole golf tournament. In addition, there was another $5m at each event spread out to the top three teams, with the winning team splitting $3m among its four players. In LIV Golf's season-ending event, the winner got $18m.

To top it all, Brooks Koepka, a five-time major champion, has decided that he has had enough of LIV and, quite astonishingly, has been readmitted to the PGA Tour, where he will return at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. Now please don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of Koepka. He is somebody who speaks his mind. And nobody who saw the first series of Full Swing can fail to have been moved by what he was going through at a time when he had effectively lost his game.

I welcome Koepka back. I believe he will be an asset to the Tour and I absolutely guarantee that there will be massive interest in his return at Torrey Pines during a week when everything he says and does will come under the microscope. 

My issue is that he has been allowed to return with impunity. Some may point to the $5m charity donation he has agreed to make and the bonuses he will miss out on, but that is a drop in the ocean to a man of his wealth. There will be plenty of players who harbour resentment against Koepka and I fully understand why they would feel that way. Why was he not suspended? 

When Hudson Swafford left LIV and announced that he wanted to return to the PGA Tour he was suspended until 2027. It seems that different rules apply. Swafford is now working in real estate but I am certain that his legal team will have something to say about all of this.