Goydos: Appearance fees would damage PGA Tour

• By Ryan Ballengee
• May 3, 2012 10:12 AM ET

In the rekindled debate about appearance fees on the PGA Tour, Paul Goydos believes instituting such a practice would betray one the Tour's biggest strengths. 

"I generally don't like the idea," Goydos said Thursday on "Morning Drive." "The problem I have with appearance fees is they tend to concentrate the tournaments. Like in Europe, they have about eight or nine events where all the top players show up, they're all paid to show up and they play. But they also have 40 other events with fields nobody's ever heard of, in a sense.

"I believe our tournaments are deeper and stronger for longer (through the year).”

The debate was renewed when Ben Curtis earned 24 Official World Golf Ranking points two weeks ago for winning the Valero Texas Open. Matt Kuchar was the only top-20 player in the field in San Antonio. Appearance fees may have beefed up the field, allowing it to dole out more ranking points.

Goydos, however, believes appearance fees would be a death knell to smaller events.

"If you start paying appearance fees, the weaker events are essentially going to go away and we're going to wind up with a more concentrated schedule," he said.

Rather than pay an appearance fee to a small subset of the field, Goydos believes tournaments interested in doing so would be better served boosting the total purse.

"Let's say we're having a $5 million tournament and we're paying $3 million in appearance fees," Goydos surmized, "why don't we play for $8 million and let capitalism really function? Let the best man that week win."