SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Rory McIlroy didn’t play the RBC Canadian Open last week, but he was quick to mention how significant a tournament it is as the PGA Tour will have a new look come 2028.
McIlroy, who won the 2019 edition in his debut in Canada and then defended in 2022 (after the two cancellations due to the COVID-19 pandemic) had played the Canadian Open five times before skipping last week at TPC Toronto, returning to his home in London for a week of family time and U.S. Open preparation.
Brian Rolapp, the CEO of the PGA Tour, is set to make a fulsome announcement next week at the Travelers Championship addressing the future of the PGA Tour. On the agenda is a schedule update about Track 1 and Track 2 tournaments, which will help determine where the best players in the world will be teeing it up more often after next season.
McIlroy said he doesn’t believe the Canadian Open should be on the lower-tier Track 2.
The Canadian Open is the third oldest event on the PGA Tour schedule after the Open Championship and this week’s U.S. Open.
“Track 2 is a glorified Korn Ferry (Tour) event. That’s what Track 2 is going to be. I don’t think the Canadian Open should be one of those,” McIlroy said.
In the end, though, money talks.
The rumoured cost for a Track 1 event from a sponsor is set to be upwards of $30 million. RBC already sponsors one signature event on the PGA Tour schedule, the RBC Heritage, and is one of just a pair of two-event sponsors on the calendar alongside Genesis.
The Track 1 schedule will likely consist of at least 18 tournaments, plus the majors and The Players, and boast the top 120-or-so players on the PGA Tour. The Track 2 events will be for all others, and the reward for those who tee it up there will be to earn their way onto the Track 1 circuit the following year.
RBC announced a multi-year sponsorship renewal for both the Heritage and the Canadian Open last August but there is no answer, at least for now, about the future of either event.
The 2026 edition of the Canadian Open was won on Sunday by Bud Cauley, with more than 134,000 fans through the gate.
The event will return to TPC Toronto for the third year in a row in 2027.
There is a scenario, of course, where the Canadian Open isn’t really “open” in the traditional sense moving forward. More than 20 Canadians teed it up on home soil last week, many of whom earned their way via sponsor invites or various cross-country qualifiers. Those would be all but eliminated if the event went to Track 1. The other side of that coin is that the field would boast essentially all of the biggest names on Tour.
The Canadian crew for its home open could be trimmed by more than 80 per cent.
“That would certainly suck,” Nick Taylor, who won the Canadian Open in 2023, said last week. “I talked to a lot of guys that are on the (Player Advisory Council), a lot of people with the Tour. I think the goal in mind is to have the best product possible. That’s the scenario that I’ve asked and questioned and what happens in that scenario or in that guess, I guess time will tell.”
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If RBC, which has long spent what it needed to continue to make the field as strong as possible year after year, does want to continue to be title sponsor of two Track 1 events, then it wouldn’t be surprising if it acquired some partners to share the load.
The Players Championship, for example, has three “proud partners” in Morgan Stanley, Comcast Business and Optum. Even the RBC Heritage is “presented by” Boeing. There could, hypothetically, be a scenario where it’s the Canadian Open presented by RBC and some other businesses (BDO comes to mind, as it is Golf Canada’s only “elite” partner, a category that didn’t exist until the sides wanted to up their agreement).
McIlroy had long said he was going to cull his tournament load as he got older, so for 2026, the Canadian Open was a victim of his personal scheduling (“which will get less and less as the years go on,” he said Wednesday at Shinnecock). That doesn’t mean he won’t be back again, but as he zoomed out with his comments, he repeated that he wasn’t in the room anymore making decisions about the future of the Tour.
“It’s funny. Like I think, as they've done all this work, you start to realize that the way the Tour was before LIV came along was actually pretty good,” McIlroy said.
“It was a pretty good structure, and everything sort of worked pretty well. LIV created this false economy where we had to up prize funds and had to cut fields and try to support the top players and all that stuff, which I think needed to happen because that was the only way to retain talent at the time, but now that LIV looks like it's less of a threat, I think, as I said, the old ways of the PGA Tour weren't actually that bad.”
