John Niyo: Detroit's Rocket Classic, PGA Tour need to forge a future together

DETROIT — Say what you will about this city — and people have said plenty over the years — but we keep showing up.

That alone should be reason enough for the PGA Tour to keep doing the same.

But it’ll take more than that if they’re going to continue to make this work here in Detroit, where Sunday’s entertaining — and exhausting — final round of the Rocket Classic provided another nationally televised showcase for the city, along with a tense reminder: Nothing’s guaranteed.

Just ask Jake Knapp, who set the tournament record with an 11-under 61 on Friday but left a 12-foot putt five inches short on the 18th green Sunday to miss a playoff. Or Chris Kirk, a six-time Tour winner who missed a 9-foot birdie putt to win on the first hole of the three-man playoff, then missed a 4-footer to bow out on the second. Or Max Greyserman, who narrowly missed a string of birdie putts down the stretch, leaving the door open for another first-time Tour winner.

“This one’s gonna sting a little bit,” said Greyserman, who watched Aldrich Potgieter — the 20-year-old South African whose booming drives sounded like detonations all weekend — drop an 18-footer on the fifth hole to claim the trophy.

Potgieter, the youngest player on the PGA Tour, actually made his debut here in Detroit two years ago. But he sounded like a weary veteran by the time Sunday’s final round ended.

“Finally got one to the hole, and I just saw the ball roll end over end, and I knew it was going to go in,” sighed Potgieter, who battled the heat and the wind and his own shaky start Sunday. “I'm just happy to walk away as a winner.”

He’ll be welcomed back next year as the defending champ, too. But beyond that, who's to say?

Because all that uncertainty also includes the future of this 7-year-old tournament, a passion project for local billionaire Dan Gilbert that has become an integral piece of the summer sports landscape in this city. Rocket Companies’ current contract with the PGA Tour runs through next year’s tournament, and there’s an option year for 2027 with a deadline that’ll spur negotiations over the next month regarding Rocket’s title sponsorship.

'Hopeful' for new deal

Bill Emerson, president of Rocket Companies, remains “hopeful” a deal can be reached, while Brian Rolapp, who’ll assume his new role as PGA Tour chief executive officer later this summer, echoed those sentiments when he made a stop in Detroit earlier this week as part of a listening tour.

“Every time I come to Detroit, the growth and the change and the revitalization of the city is palpable, which is great to see,” said Rolapp, the former NFL executive whose son, Will, was part of Michigan football’s recent national championship team. “So I don’t know where we stand, but so far my experience here has been great.”

In the meantime, preparations will plow ahead at venerable Detroit Golf Club, where the century-old Donald Ross-designed North Course will undergo a$16 million restoration before the 2026 tournament. This event will be held a month later next summer, July 30-Aug. 2, and the hope here is that placement could be a longer-term arrangement for the tournament, which has bounced around on the Tour schedule ― mostly in late June or early July ― throughout its brief history in Detroit.

Next year’s dates should give the Rocket Classic a better shot at attracting a stronger field, coming two weeks after the British Open at Royal Birkdale and at — or near — the end of the FedExCup regular season. In theory, that’ll be more motivation for golfers to play in Detroit to secure both their positioning in the 70-man starting field for the FedExCup Playoffs in August as well as the top-50 qualifying for 2026 “signature” events.

Those eight signature events, which feature bigger purses and smaller fields, are a change that began last year in response to LIV Golf poaching high-profile players with massive payouts, backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). The shift has been endorsed by some of the game’s influential stars, and TV ratings for those events suggest this model is here to stay.

But it has proved to be a challenge for the rest of the tournaments on the Tour schedule, as the marquee names load up on those events from January to June — the $20 million purses are double the healthy $9.6 million this year’s Rocket Classic offered up — and are more inclined to bypass stops like Detroit. This year’s field featured 11 of the top 50 players in the world rankings, headlined by two-time major winner Colin Morikawa, who finished runner-up here in 2023 and was in contention again through the weekend. But even that felt like a victory for tournament organizers, given that they were stuck immediately after the U.S. Open and signature-event Travelers Championship on the calendar.

“It’s hard,” Morikawa admitted this week, when asked about finding room in his schedule for stops like this one. “Because as much as we would like to play — trust me, we would love to go to new cities, see other places, see other areas — you just have to build (your schedule) around certain signature events and majors, you know?”

Detroit stands out

Everyone knows, but knowing and doing are two very different things, especially with negotiations between the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf still locked in a stalemate about what pro golf will look like going forward. As Rolapp acknowledged this week, “Fans want to see the best golfers competing against the best golfers.”

“I think we’re gonna take a very hard look at the competitive model and figure out how we can improve it for the benefit of the tour and the benefit of the fans,” Rolapp said. “But again, as far as this tournament’s place in it and anyone else, I think it’s a blank sheet of paper and we’ll take a look at it.”

The PGA Tour won’t release its full 2026 schedule until later this summer — last year that announcement came in mid-August — but the Rocket Classic isn’t the only tournament approaching sponsorship limbo. Even after locking up new deals in recent months with AT&T, Valspar, 3M and John Deere, a handful of tournaments still aren’t renewed beyond this year. And much like in Detroit, the Wyndham Championship in Greensboro, N.C. — a tournament that dates back to World War II and will host the tour’s final regular-season event at the end of July — has a sponsorship deal that expires after 2026.

Still, even without a “significant” designation, Detroit stands out as a uniquely important stop, one of only two Tour events located in an urban core. (The Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta is the other.) And this seven-year itch notwithstanding — at first glance, the galleries did seem a bit smaller this week and the hospitality suites weren't exactly packed — both sides need to find a way to honor that.

It goes beyond the charitable dollars, too, though the $10 million that Rocket Companies has invested here since 2019 includes a "Changing the Course" initiative, which is helping bridge the digital divide in Detroit. It’s also about connecting with a different audience here, and all it takes is a walk around this historic course during the tournament to see what that looks like.

“If you look at the underlying popularity in the sport of golf, both from the fan standpoint and the playing standpoint, it's growing tremendously, and it's growing among young people and diverse people, which I think is fantastic and bodes well for the sport,” Rolapp said. “So I think the more events we can do, or anything we can do to actually encourage that growth, is not only good for the game of golf, but it's good for the PGA Tour."

All the more reason, then, for both sides to make good on a promise here.

We went a decade without a PGA Tour stop in this golf-mad state — Michigan boasts the most public courses in the country, by the way — but Gilbert’s insistence on bringing the PGA Tour back specifically to Detroit was an important step in rebranding the city’s image nationwide. It also helped set the stage for some of the bigger sporting events that’ve built on the momentum we've all seen downtown, from the wildly successful 2024 NFL draft to the upcoming NCAA Final Four and beyond.

“I think there's a reason why you're seeing more events come here,” Rolapp said, “especially with the trajectory of the city."

And if seeing is believing, this one should be a gimme, shouldn’t it?

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