It shouldn’t be that hard to love golf.
Even if you can chuckle at a golf company placing a YouTube channel logo on a driver and charging $700, accept that the polo at the pro shop can easily cost more than $100, rationalize the cost and hassle of the trip to the top golf resort, or sleep your way through countless ‘playthrough’ commercial breaks in at least the Sunday afternoon broadcast was generally good live professional golf.
You walk around or find a good spot and sit down. And either way, you’ll see the best players in the world closer to competition than any other sport can offer. Mostly it’s excellent value – I can buy a ticket right now for Sunday’s 2025 US Open at Oakmont Country Club outside Pittsburgh for $185.
That wouldn’t get me past the gates of the 2025 Ryder Cup on Tuesday, three full days before the competition actually starts. And did I actually want to see Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm and the rest of the best players in the world in an alternate shot match? The PGA of America has crossed the boundaries of most golf fans.
A single ticket for each day of play for the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in New York costs $749.51.
Seven hundred forty-nine dollars and 51 cents. For one ticket. For one day.
It’s over. It’s just that way. I don’t want to hear about supply and demand, or how many tickets are for sale on the resale sites. Rory McIlroy is no Taylor Swift, and the face value for tickets to her shows isn’t nearly as high.
The Ryder Cup is a huge event with ticket prices now reflecting that. (Adam Cairns/USA Today)
That’s four times the price of the last US-hosted Ryder Cup, at Whistling Straits in 2021. It costs $255.27 to attend practice days, and $423.64 for Thursday’s practice round, opening ceremony and celebrity match . Has the PGA of America gone mad?
They rationalize that these tickets are actually Ryder Cup+ tickets, a marketing ploy that means I can get all the food and non-alcoholic drinks I want. How good are these hot dogs if I have to pay an extra $500 for them? And can you take a box of it with you to the parking lot? Because I have to bring them home to feed the family for a while. Throw in some sandwiches, yeah.
It costs a family of four $3,000 to attend the Ryder Cup. I’m not saying that everything should apply to everyone, but that feels excessive, doesn’t it?
As a result, I expect the audience at Bethpage Black to be a bizarre mix. On the one hand, it will be overly corporate, because those payment cards don’t flash. Those fans also don’t care what happens on the course, because they are more concerned with making deals under the tents. Then you have the crowd who scraped together the money to get in, and who feel that paying $1,000 (once you count parking, merchandise, and alcoholic beverages) gives them the right to do and say anything whatever they want. Must be fun!
Regular golf fans are furious. They should be. We endured years of bickering and lawsuits, and desperate decisions that benefited the bank accounts and made the product worse. The purse has never been higher, but the same can be said for the cost of sponsoring and broadcasting a PGA Tour event. That means more commercials and fewer golf shots, and we wonder why the ratings are dropping week after week.
But at least the live product was good. That’s still true: If you live near a professional golf stop during a tour, you should go. You’ll probably enjoy it.
But the Ryder Cup is the Ryder Cup. It’s the only event we have that can rival the Masters, and it brings out a sense of nationalism in all of us. The stakes feel so high that the anticipation for every shot builds, and the atmosphere around that first tee box can be breathtaking.
I hope you can experience it someday. I hope you have been fortunate enough to be able to go to Bethpage and not have to worry about the cost. But if you can’t, I hope what’s been done here is just a blip and not a sign of things to come.
(Top photo: Alex Burstow/Getty Images)