Players Championship 2015 Payout: Breaking Down Prize Money Purse Distribution
One tournament never overshadowed by the intrigue of majors is The Players Championship, which is golf's so-called fifth major. Along with winning the prestigious event comes a massive payday, and that's never been truer as the 2015 edition begins.
Up for grabs for the world's top golfers this weekend is a cool $10 million to be distributed between the field—with $1.8 million of that going to the winner, per PGATour.com. That ties the Masters and PGA Championship as the most lucrative purses in the sport.
Whoever swings his way into the No. 1 spot will certainly have earned it, at a TPC Sawgrass course in Jacksonville heralded as one of the most treacherous in all of golf. There are no official numbers on the prize money distribution for The Players, but an identical purse at the 2015 Masters, provided by Augusta.com, sheds light on how it might be split.
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2015 The Players Championship Purse Distribution
| 1st | $1,800,000 |
| 2nd | $1,080,000 |
| 3rd | $680,000 |
| 4th | $480,000 |
| 5th | $400,000 |
| 6th | $360,000 |
| 7th | $335,000 |
| 8th | $310,000 |
| 9th | $290,000 |
| 10th | $270,000 |
| 11th | $250,000 |
| 12th | $230,000 |
| 13th | $210,000 |
| 14th | $190,000 |
| 15th | $180,000 |
| 16th | $170,000 |
| 17th | $160,000 |
| 18th | $150,000 |
| 19th | $140,000 |
| 20th | $130,000 |
| 21st | $120,000 |
| 22nd | $112,000 |
| 23rd | $104,000 |
| 24th | $96,000 |
| 25th | $88,000 |
| 26th | $80,000 |
| 27th | $77,000 |
| 28th | $74,000 |
| 29th | $71,000 |
| 30th | $68,000 |
| 31st | $65,000 |
| 32nd | $62,000 |
| 33rd | $59,000 |
| 34th | $56,500 |
| 35th | $54,000 |
| 36th | $51,500 |
| 37th | $49,000 |
| 38th | $47,000 |
| 39th | $45,000 |
| 40th | $43,000 |
| 41st | $41,000 |
| 42nd | $39,000 |
| 43rd | $37,000 |
| 44th | $35,000 |
| 45th | $33,000 |
| 46th | $31,000 |
| 47th | $29,000 |
| 48th | $27,400 |
| 49th | $26,000 |
| 50th | $25,200 |
Above numbers estimated based on 2015 Masters payouts, which had an identical $10 million purse.
Top Contenders
Jordan Spieth
Jordan Spieth is on top of the world of golf as The Players and the rest of the year's majors loom. Winning the Masters at age 21 will do that.
An emergence into the top group of golfers was expected from Spieth following his breakout 2014 year, but few expected this sort of dominance. He won two PGA Tour events before the Masters even came, then descended upon Augusta National Golf Club and posted one of the best 72-hole performances ever seen at the course.
If he aspires to keep his winning trend going into The Players, he will join yet another elite group, as ESPN Stats and Info shared:
"Jordan Spieth: Seeking to become 5th golfer (Jack Nicklaus, Hal Sutton, Tiger Woods, Martin Kaymer) to win Players + a major in same year
— ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) May 6, 2015"
This time last year, Spieth was coming off his near miss at Augusta and put together some of his best golf at The Players. He carded rounds of 67 and 66 before the weekend, only to finish in a tie for fourth place.
The steps that Spieth has taken in his game from then to now are immeasurable. But at the same time, he's now a marked man with a green jacket and all of the hype surrounding him. It's not easy to win with that sort of pressure.
Rory McIlroy
Rory McIlroy isn't happy about conceding a lot of the attention around him entering 2015 to Spieth. Maybe he hasn't said as much, but there's no mistaking that when dissecting his play as of late.
After Spieth came out and posted the best two-round spurt that the Masters has ever seen, McIlroy looked like a man possessed over the weekend, posting rounds of 68 and 66 that propelled him to a fourth-place finish. He took a few weeks off into the WGC-Cadillac Match Play Championship and emerged from the star-studded field to win.
That completes a mixed bag of results so far in 2015, though certainly results that indicate he's on the up and up, per NBC's Golf Central:
For all of McIlroy's successes in winning three of the four major tournaments, he's never won the unofficial fifth one at The Players. That seemed to loom large in last year's event, when he rattled off rounds of 69 and 66 over the weekend to take a tie for sixth.
This time around, McIlroy is fixed on a much higher finish. And his recent results give him a decent chance at one.
As long as Tiger Woods is in the field of a golf tournament, he'll be among the most talked-about figures. But he has much more than his career legacy going for him entering The Players.
Woods' 2015 year started out with an injury scare that caused him to miss two months prior to the Masters, but he returned in full force at the year's first major. His 17th-place finish doesn't indicate that as much as his five-under score and rounds of 69 and 68 did, returning to the form needed to contend at the top of leaderboards.
His longtime major drought is still in play, but The Players—where he won for the second time in his career in 2013—has been kind to Woods. With the way he's approaching this year's tournament, he seems intent on continuing his success there, per ESPN's Jason Sobel:
For all of the signs Woods is showing on the course that he's closer to playing at the level that he used to, he's yet to put it together for a full 72 holes and show the world's top golfers that he's truly back. A victory at The Players this weekend would certainly do it.
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