Several golfers, including Tiger Woods and Bryson DeChambeau, already have NFTs, but the PGA Tour is looking to establish a platform of its own.
As more individuals and organizations dive head-first into NFTs, the sports world continues to welcome new opportunities to own moments. The PGA Tour may be next.
In a memo obtained by Sean Zak of GOLF.com, the tour has said it hopes to create “a new incremental revenue opportunity for players” by establishing a video-based NFT platform. The memo states the platform should “meaningfully engage with fans,” provide a “‘best-in-class’ partner to build and promote players’ brands” and be a source of “incremental, long-term revenue” for its members.
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Golf is just the latest sport to follow in the footsteps of NBA Top Shot, which launched in October 2020 and not only became the first to successfully distribute memorable sports moments, but was one of the first NFT marketplaces to explode.
Now, roughly a year later, more sports leagues are trying to replicate the success the NBA achieved. In addition to the PGA Tour, Major League Baseball dabbled in NFTs a bit this season, switching from the WAX blockchain to the Topps website to offer a couple of series’ worth of tokens. The NFL teamed up with Dapper Labs, who powers Top Shot, to announce “NFL All Day,” which is currently working on whitelisting new members.
Some players with established brands on tour have already begun to explore NFTs. Tiger Woods released 10,000 digital images — some of which were virtually autographed — through Autograph, which is a company co-founded by Tom Brady. Woods serves on the advisory board for Autograph, which has released NFTs for Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Derek Jeter, Naomi Osaka and others through the DraftKings Marketplace.
Bryson DeChambeau also experimented with an NFT drop this year, selling 10 limited-edition trading cards on OpenSea. While Woods’ thousands of NFTs range from $12 to $250,000, DeChambeau’s drop only initially totaled approximately $64,000 in sales. Since then, OpenSea has recorded a sale of $96,076 on DeChambeau’s rockstar drive at the Arnold Palmer Invitational this year.
While that was an incredible moment, the latest offer on that NFT isn’t anywhere close to $96K; it’s just under $100. The “experiment,” as DeChambeau’s agent Brett Falkoff called it, didn’t really produce the desired results, which would seem to indicate that the market for owning golf moments on the blockchain may be limited.
Regardless, the PGA Tour will give this a go in an attempt to increase revenue for players and help build off the work they do to promote themselves. Not only that, in the hypothetical event the bullish crypto community decided to pump money into golf NFTs, the sport — and its biggest names — would grow in visibility. It seems like an easy low-risk, high-reward chance to take.
A formal announcement is expected to come sometime next year.