Someone is about to make a boatload of cash at Riviera
The annual stop at Riviera is one of the best on the PGA Tour, and it also boasts one of its richer purses.
The Genesis Open was, on paper, the best PGA Tour event in years. The hype was justified. It had everything. It had the course, Riviera, which is the best on the regular PGA Tour rotation. It had the field, one of the deepest and more international groups you’ll ever get for a non-major or World Golf Championships tournament. And it had the headliner, Tiger Woods, who is the game’s ultimate rainmaker and takes a tournament to another level every time he enters.
Woods is the biggest reason for the money boom on the PGA Tour. We all know this. Tiger took the game to previously inconceivable heights. His contemporaries, including Phil Mickelson, all acknowledge it and praise him for it. Thanks in large part to Tiger, almost every single winner’s check on Tour these days is well over $1 million. Only a handful of purses are below $6 million total, and many are now over $7 million. It’s just a crazy amount of money, and we’re just talking “regular season” events — not the majors, or The Players, or the WGCs.
This week’s Genesis Open is one of the several over $7 million, checking in at $7,200,000 this year. That’s an increase from last year’s $7 million purse. The winner will bank just shy of $1.3 million of that total purse, which can get someone a few nice things in nearby Los Angeles.
None of the contenders on the first page of the leaderboard are exactly hurting for cash. There’s Bubba Watson, with his massive $38,628,735 in career earnings. Bubba chased the money last year on the equipment side, reportedly banking around $1 million for switching from his traditional Titleist ball to the neon-colored Volvik balls. The result was a significant, almost historic, drop down the Official World Golf Ranking. This year, he is back to Titleist and playing much better. A win Sunday, and he’d quickly make up an amount comparable to that fat endorsement check from Volvik last year.
The names hovering around the lead with Bubba include Patrick Cantlay, Kevin Na, and yes, Mickelson. Cantlay is probably the least accomplished of the group, with $4,254,418 in career earnings. But make no mistake, he’s a stud with one of the greatest amateur careers in history and a future full of millions in payout checks.
Here’s your payout table for this year’s Genesis Open. We’ll update this when results go final as some of these totals will obviously be impacted by ties in different spots on the leaderboard.