re: Did Taylor Gooch get fired from the 4 Aces team?

Charles Howell won 3 times in 609 starts on the real Tour, I think he's the one that should be glad all the good players weren't there.

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Agreed and he was the poster child of someone who made sense to leave for LIV.

- 3 career wins, last win nearly 5 years ago
- early 40s, window to compete on PGA closing
- 2 young children
- was #125 on the money list so just doing enough to keep his status

He had a very similar situation as Pat Perez. I don’t blame either of them for taking the guaranteed money.

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True enough, he may fit into that pattern. But there are many patterns that fit just as well. Like Cam Smith, who was ranked #2 in the world and just won the British Open.

But there are also many more, just like Charles Howell, on the PGA tour now, who didn't leave.


It's been my observation, at this point, that the guys playing on the LIV tour look just like the guys playing the PGA tour.

That is why Jay Monahan had to get the bleeding stopped. He could only fight free with fire. That is why last week's prize money was 3.6 mil to the winner in a 20 million purse.

So many complained that the PGA couldn't compete against LIV financially, and Monahan cried about being just a charitable organization. And just look at the poor,tax-exempted PGA now. Look at the size of these purses. It's a miracle, my friends, a freakin' miracle.

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How much money has LIV donated to charity? The PGA tour has done more than any other professional league in that regard. I'm not saying the PGA tour was perfect, far from it, but in a eye test against the shark and the Saudi's they are definitely the lesser of two evils.

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Nonsense. The players have known for decades that the PGA was not sharing billions of dollars in profits and they were not all going to charities. All of a sudden, due to the mass exodus of players leaving for LIV, they almost double the prize money and shorten the season overnight.

And who owns a billion-dollar pro-sports business these days and doesn't have to pay one red cent to the federal government? Under those circumstances, paying off a few charities is the least the PGA could do.

There have been many an article that has been written about how much money the PGA actually gives to these charities compared to the money they are racking in. For example:

"The short answer is that the bulk of the PGA Tour’s money does not appear to be going to charity, despite the fact that the organization promotes its charitable giving as “a centerpiece of its golf events, tournament telecasts, and website,” as CNN points out in an article exploring the PGA Tour’s giving.

"Instead, the PGA Tour has been spending the lion’s share of its money on things like lobbying, executive compensation, administrative costs, and promotion of the PGA Tour and its events between 2014 and 2018, according to a review of the most recent, publicly available tax filings by the organization."


This is despite the fact that the PGA Tour claims to be committed to “generating substantial charitable contributions in the communities where its tours are played.” In fact, most of the PGA Tour’s charitable contributions are actually raised and dispersed by local non-profit organizations that help oversee and manage individual tournaments that the PGA Tour sponsors.

For example, the Thunderbirds Charities is a non-profit organization formed in 1986 for the express purpose of raising and distributing funds via a tournament called the Waste Management Phoenix Open. The group raised $4 million for charity in 2021. But aside from providing a platform for fundraising, the Tour itself has almost nothing to do with the tournaments’ charitable efforts.

The Tour only made direct charitable contributions of $42.7 million in 2018, which is a paltry 3% of their $1.47 billion in revenue. While the Tour publicly takes credit for $190 million in charity, that inflated number reflects the total given by the tour and the local non-profits that put on the tournaments.

A 2013 ESPN investigation into the Tour’s charitable giving and tax-exempt status found that the local non-profits charged by the Tour to do the actual fundraising weren’t living up to their missions either. It found that those local organizations typically gave an average of 16% of their tournament revenues to local charities, with the rest going to prizes and promotional costs. ESPN even found that the Thunderbirds paid over $650,000 of the money raised back to Waste Management – the tournament sponsor – for trash removal at the event.

Meanwhile, PGA Tour executives are being handsomely compensated. According to the most recent compensation figures that all nonprofits must disclose, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan collected $7.4 million in compensation in 2018. Monahan earned more than all but four of his own players that year.

The Tour also had enough left over to pay outgoing chief operating officer Ed Moorhouse another $7.4 million when he retired that year while shelling out $817,000 to former commissioner Tim Finchem (even though Finchem retired from the PGA Tour in 2016).

LINK #!

16 percent is still better than the 0 percent LIV is contributing.

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charity watchdog groups have set standards to determine what a responsible charity is, and Charity Navigator says -- at a minimum -- 65 percent of the money raised should be spent on providing actual charity.

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I guess we should just take their opinion at face value. Charity Navigator is also a 501(c)(3). Charity Navigator in 2021 filed returns claiming $5,855,509 in gross revenues and $4,183,209 in expenses. Their CEO makes a salary equal to ~4% of their gross revenue (Monahan's is about .01% of the Tour's). So doesn't look like they're donating 65% of their revenues to charity either. Weird

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But off-hand, I think it's good for Kirk that all the best PGA players were doing something else this weekend.

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Just fired a 67 R1 at Bay Hill, sitting 2nd behind Rahm among a fully loaded Elevated Event field.

6th in strokes gained for 2023.

One of the best stories in golf at the moment.