After several PGA Tour players raised concerns during the 2026 season about the impact sports betting is having on professional golf, the Tour is increasing efforts to prevent further disruption of its on-course product.
“We are concerned about fans interacting with our players in a negative manner, and certainly the potential for fans to try to impact the competition in some way,” PGA Tour senior VP of tournament administration Andy Levinson said at the Tour Championship last week.
The Tour is adding security measures to better control poor crowd behavior during the 2027 season, including training volunteers to identify and report fans causing problems. “We’re revamping our fan code of conduct,” Levinson said. “We’ve put a lot of effort into that. We have an ambassador program, which is a group of volunteers that is being trained to be amongst the crowds and look for certain types of behavior and then notify security.”
New programs are also being created to help track and monitor online commentary from fans about players they have bet on. Less than 5% of ejections at PGA Tour events this year were from sports betting-related incidents, according to PGA Tour VP of gaming Scott Warfield. “One is one too many for us and it’s why we spent the summer talking to players getting their feedback on this, leading to some of the stuff we’re looking at for 2027 with the tracking of harassing comments that usually start on the course, go online, or vice versa.”
