Tiger Woods’ $15 million bonus was a bargain — he’s owed so much more.

The only shared commonality between Jay Monahan and Charles Dickens — other than both debuting to American audiences in Boston — is that each created a PIP that inspired great expectations among the lower orders. Dickens’ ‘Pip’ was the protagonist of his exquisite 1861 novel; Monahan’s is more prosaic: the Player Impact Program, his widely-criticized plan to reward those players who most impact the PGA Tour’s business. 

Monahan’s PIP only measures positive impact, so Greg Norman doesn’t number among its beneficiaries. But, like Abel Magwitch in Great Expectations, much of what transpires is due to his unseen hand. 

Depending upon one’s disposition — toward the PGA Tour and LIV, toward meritocratic compensation, or even toward corporate talent-retention policies — the Player Impact Program represents a bribe to secure loyalty, money for nothing, or a commonplace way to bonus high-impact performers. Those sentiments are not mutually exclusive; rather, there’s significant overlap in reasonable judgments about the PIP. 

This week, the Tour announced the final results in the only season-long race whose standings it doesn’t aggressively promote. The PIP pot doubled in 2022 to $100 million, and so did the number of recipients, to 20 (with three more added for reasons too byzantine to bother with here). Tiger Woods collected $15 million to go with the $8 million he received from the inaugural PIP pool last year, despite Phil Mickelson’s Trumpian attempt to prematurely declare a victory he hadn’t earned. 

That’s $23 million just for being Tiger Woods. But then, it took a lot of work to become Tiger Woods, and Tiger Woods adds immense value to the PGA Tour, to a multiple of $23 million. It also took a lot of work to become Rory McIlroy (second, for $12 million in ‘22), Will Zalatoris (9th, $5 million) and Viktor Hovland (20th, $2 million). The respective deservedness of others on the PIP list — everyone below Woods in the mortals division — will be debated. This is a sport where competitors like to boast of eating only what they kill (never entirely true) and because a perception exists that PIP payouts are entirely unrelated to how recipients perform inside the ropes (also not entirely true, but less true this year than it was last). 

The criteria used in ’22 leans toward placing greater value on performance — measuring screen time on weekend telecasts, for example, though carding a comical quad might guarantee a…