RJR-Nabisco to Withdraw Sponsorship of PGA Tour

RJR-Nabisco will withdraw its sponsorship of the richest tournament in professional golf as well as other golf programs valued at several million dollars a year, Nabisco and the PGA Tour said Thursday.

The cutback, scheduled to begin in 1991, will eliminate the $2.5-million, season-ending Nabisco Championship tournament; the $1-million individual bonus pool for the top 30 money-winners on the Tour; the $1-million charity competition and sponsorship of the Tour’s statistical programs.

All those programs will remain in place for the current season, said the announcements by RJR-Nabisco in Winston-Salem, N.C., and from Tour headquarters in Ponte Vedra, Fla.

The total value of the programs is about $5 million a year and represented the largest commercial sponsorship on the PGA Tour.

Under a renegotiated contract between the PGA Tour and RJR-Nabisco, the company will maintain its umbrella sponsorship of similar programs on the Senior Tour.

“This is a business and marketing decision,” T. Wayne Robertson, senior vice president of RJR Sports Marketing, said.

“We concluded that although our golf sponsorship was good for our companies, the programs had grown so rapidly in the last couple of years they received a disproportionate share of our marketing dollars. Therefore it was necessary to shift some of those funds to other areas.”

The renegotiation will reduce Nabisco’s golf sponsorship by about $50 million over the life of its 10-year contract with the Tour.

The renegotiation and the reduction follows the $26-billion leveraged buyout of the company last year by Kolhlberg, Kraviss and Roberts and the subsequent restructuring of the organization and sale of several subsidiaries.

The statement by the PGA Tour quoted Commissioner Deane Beman as saying, “We believe that we have reached a fair and equitable settlement and one that provides funding sufficient to give the PGA Tour substantial flexibility in determining the future direction of these programs.”

Substitute commercial sponsorships are a possibility, the statement said.

“The Tour will definitely continue the majority of these programs in some form,” Beman said.