PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said his sport has done a lot of work preparing to engage in gaming and sports betting later in 2019.
“We’ve spent a lot of time over the last two and a half years clearly understanding all of our options and getting ourselves in a position where we can participate. Participate with the right partners, and participate in a way that we think resonates with fans,” he said. “Without getting in front of it, I think you can expect to hear developments from us in the second half of this year.”
Monahan spoke on the red carpet at Wednesday night’s Sports Business Awards, where his PGA Tour predecessor, Tim Finchem, received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Finchem was commissioner when the advanced tracking system ShotLink was introduced in 2001. ShotLink uses laser rangefinders and TrackMan radars to calculate 22 data points on every shot. Monahan called ShotLink “one of our great assets.”
The PGA Tour has been testing an optical tracking component designed by SMT as an upgrade to the system, called ShotLink Plus. This will continue adding to the wealth of data collected by the sport, and could be of great interest to sportsbook operators. The NBA, the NHL, and MLB are among the leagues to generate revenue by licensing official data feeds to betting operators. The PGA Tour has joined lobbying efforts by the NBA and MLB to mandate official data use.
“I think that’s going to bear itself out,” Monahan said. “When you’ve got four days of competition, anywhere from 120 to 156 players playing, and the fact that every shot—tee shot, approach shot to a green, what happens in and around the green—and all of that data going back to 2003, every shot captured.
“I think it allows a fan to be well-informed about how a player plays on a certain golf course, how a player plays in certain tournaments, how a player plays in certain conditions. I think it’s going to feed the heavy appetite that people have not only to consume our content but, as gaming continues to develop, if they’re going to participate.”
Sports teams, leagues, and media companies are all investigating various ways by which gamification—even free-to-play contests—can fuel engagement. But the broad variety of options in part explains why the PGA Tour has not yet announced any major initiative in the space.
“There’s so many different points of entry, from operators to daily fantasy to just games within broadcasts that are non-betting games, just to the way you orient yourself understanding the way people are consuming information,” Monahan said.