WGC Mexico Championship purse: Winner’s payout is huge $1.67 million in prize money

The World Golf Championships are probably the sweetest deal in the game. To get there, you need to have ascended substantial heights in the Official World Golf Rankings. But once you’re there, it’s a no-brainer to play every WGC you can.

It’s pretty simple -- you show up, play four rounds, and walk away with a minimum of $40,000. There’s no cut. You get a nice check and more free world rankings points. It can protect that exclusive club that qualifies for the WGCs, boosting their earnings and points for otherwise poor efforts. In 2017, the pots at the WGCs are even larger. The purses have jumped to $9.75 million, which is another $250k more over the previous year. That’s been the incremental bump each of the past few years as the purses continue to skyrocket all across the Tour, but especially at these elite events.

The PGA Tour holds these WGCs in incredibly high regard and keeps the pots filthy rich to keep all those top names coming back up to four times per season. The WGC Mexico Championship is the first of the calendar year with the Match Play coming in a few weeks, Firestone in early August, and the HSBC Champions event in China during the fall wraparound schedule. That event in China, oddly enough, was the only non-USA based “world” golf championship until this event moved from historic Doral to Mexico City. Given Doral’s owner, that came with much public drama and controversy but this week has been an unqualified success. The best players have lit it up and provided a loaded Sunday leaderboard, and this venue has been a welcome change of pace with its tight and narrow tree-lined fairways.

The winner on Sunday probably doesn’t need the money, but he’ll still get a massive $1.66 million payout. The WGCs are the richest non-major and non-Players games on Tour. Here’s a breakdown of some of those big money events from last year:

The U.S. Open has already announced it is bumping this year’s upcoming purse to $12 million so that will accelerate the arms race again.

The best deal might not be the piles of cash for the WGC winners, but rather the sizable check that the last-place finisher gets. Or even those who don’t finish. We saw this last year with Daniel Berger, who hit one tee shot at Firestone, withdrew, and still collected his $50,500 for showing up at the WGC Bridgestone. And you can also hit it all over the yard for four days, not really give a rip, shoot some 30 or 40 shots worse than the first place finisher and collect that big last-place money. This always leads to another round of jokes, as we saw last year with Steve Bowditch, who was 49 shots behind this event’s winner Adam Scott.

Here’s the full purse breakdown (these amounts will obviously be impacted by ties and we’ll update when the results go final)

Update: Here are your final payout totals from Mexico City: