There was a time when playing for pride and country was enough.
At its birth in 1994, the Presidents Cup paid its competitors exactly nothing. Every dollar the event generated went to charity. For 13 editions, from 1994 through 2021, no player, captain or vice captain received a cent personally. The Tour allocated money in their names to charities of their choosing instead.
That changed in 2022, when the PGA Tour introduced a $250,000 stipend for participants to use at their own discretion. The money is no longer earmarked for charity, though many players and captains still choose to give it all away. The Tour also continues to guarantee at least $1 million in charitable impact for the host city.
What happens in the matches is another matter. It’s financially irrelevant. Results have no bearing on what anyone receives.
The idea of paying touring pros to represent their country in international match play used to be a non-issue. No one talked about it. But as the Ryder Cup — the Presidents Cup’s more prestigious cousin — swelled in stature, some players began to grumble that they should be compensated for their contributions to what had grown into a biennial cash cow. In 1999, at the Ryder Cup in Brookline, Mark O’Meara, David Duval and Tiger Woods were among those who suggested as much.
“It burns the hell out of me to listen to some of their viewpoints,” U.S. Ryder Cup captain Ben Crenshaw said at the time, echoing a sentiment shared by many fans.
In the decades since, the financial structure around the Ryder Cup has changed (U.S. players now receive $500,000 each, with $300,000 pegged for charity and the rest treated as a personal stipend) and money has become a recurrent source of friction around the event, a proxy for differing views of what the competition should represent. Some European players have scoffed at the idea of payment, with Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry among those who have said they’d sooner pay for the privilege of playing than be paid to play.
In the Presidents Cup, money has been less of a hot-button issue, in part, perhaps, because the event itself draws less attention. The stipend is mostly treated as a footnote, not a flashpoint. And watching the competitors this week, it’s easy to see why money isn’t the stuff of post-round Q&A’s. The tension around the matches is palpable. The pressure of playing for something other than a paycheck serves as a steady, stressful signal of what’s really at stake.
The only material prize sits on a table somewhere near the 18th green: 28 pounds of sterling silver, plated in 24-karat gold vermeil, with beaded embellishments and an etched oval logo.
The winning team gets to take that with them.
As for the other rewards? If the Internationals finally break through, they’ll return home as conquering heroes, upstarts who slayed a team-golf Goliath. For the heavily favored Americans, who are trailing heading into Sunday singles, a win would trigger a familiar celebration, but also, surely, a sense of relief.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: golf.com
