The Players Championship purse 2017: Si Woo Kim takes home $1.89 million in prize money

Si Woo Kim is The Players Championship winner for 2017, which means he’ll take home $1.89 million out of a $10.5 million total purse. That’s a relatively massive haul — the biggest in golf for any non-major tournament, as is fitting for the sport’s unofficial fifth major. It’s the biggest win of the South Korean’s still-young career. He also finished atop the leaderboard at the Wyndham Championship last year.

Kim entered the tournament as the No. 75 player in the world. At 21, he’s the youngest Players champion in history. He’s also nearly $2 million richer than he was before.

Kim is a young star, but he hadn’t been playing well this year. He’d missed five cuts and withdrawn three times in 13 events. He also hadn’t finished anywhere higher than 22nd on any leaderboard. This came out of absolutely nowhere.

Golf tournaments are perpetually competing for eyeballs and prestige, and one way of getting a status bump is to offer a huge purse. That increases the stakes and makes the tournament more attractive for players, and it generally turns the event into a bigger deal if it has more cash on the line. The Players has long had one of golf’s most lucrative purses. It was, as recently as last year, the largest purse in golf.

This year’s $10.5 million Players purse is unchanged from a year ago. At that point, the Players purse was $500,000 ahead of the four majors. But the Masters jumped up to $11 million this year, and the U.S. Open is on its way up to a record $12 million in June. So The Players is gone from its perch at the very top of the sport.

Still, The Players has pretty well entrenched itself as the No. 5 tournament on the schedule. It’s a big event, not just because of the purse but because of its tradition and location at TPC Sawgrass, a famous course with a famous hole that every golf fan knows. The winner also gets 600 points toward the FedExCup and a five-year PGA TOUR exemption. It’s a big deal all the way around.

Here’s how the payout breaks down at the top of the leaderboard. If there’s a tie, the players take the average of the payouts for their positions.