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It should not be this hard to like golf.
Even if you can chuckle at a golf company putting a YouTube channel logo on a driver and charging $700, accept that the polo in the pro shop can easily cost upwards of $100, rationalize the cost and hassle of the trip to the top-tier golf resort, or nap your way through umpteen “playing through” commercial breaks on the Sunday afternoon broadcast, at least live professional golf has generally been good.
You walk around or find a good spot and take a seat. And either way, you see the best players in the world in competition closer than just about any other sport can offer. Most of the time it’s an excellent value — I can buy a ticket right now for Sunday at the 2025 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club outside of Pittsburgh for $185.
That would not get me past the gates on Tuesday at the 2025 Ryder Cup, three full days before the competition actually begins. And if I actually wanted 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 made it beyond the limits of most golf fans.
A single ticket for each match day at the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in New York will cost $749.51.
Seven hundred and forty-nine dollars and 51 cents. For one ticket. For one day.
It’s beyond. It just is. I do not want to hear about supply and demand, or how much tickets go for on the resale sites. Rory McIlroy is not Taylor Swift, and face value for tickets to her shows is nowhere near that high.
The Ryder Cup is a massive event with ticket prices that now reflect that. (Adam Cairns / USA Today)
That’s four times the prices at the last U.S.-hosted Ryder Cup, at Whistling Straits in 2021. It’s $255.27 to attend practice days, and $423.64 for Thursday’s practice round, opening ceremony and celebrity competition. 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 desire. How good are these hot dogs if I have to pay an extra $500 for them? And can you bring a case of them around to the parking lot? Because I’ll need to bring them home to feed the family for a while. Throw in some buns, yes.
It will cost a family of four $3000 to attend the Ryder Cup. I’m not arguing everything should be for everyone, but that feels excessive, no?
I expect the crowd at Bethpage Black, as a result, to be a bizarre mix. On one hand, it’ll be overly corporate, because those charge cards don’t blink. Those fans also do not care what’s happening on the course, because they’re more concerned with making deals under the tents. Then you’ll have the crowd that has scraped together the cash to get in, and feels that paying $1,000 (once you include parking, merchandise and alcoholic drinks) entitles them to do and say anything they damn well please. Should be fun!
Normal golf fans are outraged. They should be. We have put up with years of bickering and lawsuits, and desperate decisions that aided bank accounts and made the product worse. Purses have never been higher, but the same can be said for the costs of sponsoring and airing a PGA Tour event. That means more commercials and less golf shots, and we wonder why TV ratings are down week to week.
But at least the live product was good. It still is — if you live near a pro golf stop on any 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 is heightened, and the atmosphere around that first tee box can take your breath away.
I hope you can experience it one day. I hope you’ve been lucky enough to be able to go to Bethpage and not worry about the cost. But if you can’t, I hope what has been done here is only an outlier, and not a sign of what is to come.
(Top photo: Alex Burstow / Getty Images)
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