Jack Nicklaus was once given a rare choice about his own career, and money was at the center of it.

When Nicklaus appeared on E1 #SirNicksRoundTable on March 3, 2023, Nick Faldo asked him to choose between three career paths: his original career, one competing in Tiger Woods’ era, or a modern career with far greater earnings.

Faldo put the difference between them in quite stark terms. Nicklaus had 18 major championship wins and 73 PGA Tour titles. But he only made a fraction of the money that today's stars make. “You made five and a half million dollars for your 72 wins,” Faldo said.

“I don’t really care,” he said. “During my era I did what I did. There wasn’t much money in it… we thought it was money then.”

These figures clearly show the gap. On the one hand, Nicklaus took home around $5.7 million from PGA Tour events. Whereas on the other hand, Woods's official PGA Tour earnings have already gone beyond $120 million.

Nicklaus estimated his lifetime playing income at “maybe seven and a half or eight million,” adding that modern players “spend that much on jet fuel every year.”

For Nicklaus, the difference wasn’t just financial but philosophical. As he said, “The game of golf we played was because we loved the sport. We never played it for money… Today the guys make a living on the golf course, which we didn’t.”

Nicklaus saw no reason to revisit his career choices. The era he played in had already given him everything he valued.

PGA Tour Nicklaus Knew Looks Nothing Like Today

In Jack Nicklaus' time, the earnings from professional golf competitions were quite low. Money to the winners started increasing gradually by the first half of the 1990s.

The total amount of money for the PGA Tour prize fund in 1990 was a bit more than $71 million, which is a lot less compared to the commercial size of the game today.

The expansion of the market went up more rapidly during the time when Tiger Woods was becoming a rising star after 1996.

As a result, PGA Tour prize money rose from around $46 million in 1990 to over $160 million by 2000. With time, and as the world grows faster in the tech world as well, the sport attracted more TV viewers and gained more support from sponsors. 

In fact, in 2026, the PGA Tour is expected to have more than $400 million in yearly prize money.

Read more at Daily Club Golf!

Written by

Dolly Bhamrick

Edited by

Oajaswini Prabhu