For three years, men’s professional golf has felt like an endless loop of a scene from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, in which an aspiring tycoon turns to an established tycoon and asks, “What’s your number?” — meaning the dollar amount with which he would be content. The answer?
“More.”
This week, the sport — or at least the PGA Tour’s corner of it — inched closer to drawing a line under the flagrant greed that has disfigured the game, diluted the product, disgusted fans, alienated sponsors, undermined partners, undercut governing bodies and beggared reputations, all while enriching golfers beyond their dreams and the parameters of any rational market valuation. On April 24, Jay Monahan notified a couple hundred guys of the equity value they’ve been gifted in the for-profit PGA Tour Enterprises. Recipients’ eyes will have danced directly to their numbers, but only the obtuse will miss the subtext that Monahan is too politic to spell out: Want more? Work to earn it. Don’t like it? Go forth and multiply.
Tour players have moved from imagining themselves as part of a member-led organization to one that’s member-owned, newly flush with compensation that was earned in much the same way that hostage-takers earn a ransom. Of course, there’s an enormous difference between being even nominal owners and actually being equipped for such a role. Rory McIlroy admitted as much when he met the media in New Orleans on the day Monahan’s memos were dispatched.
“We’re golfers at the end of the day. We don’t need to be trying to run a $15 billion business,” he said. “We need to go out there and play golf and let the business people do the business things.”
Players will eventually get back to playing, but not before one crucial and outstanding aspect of the Tour’s future is decided upon — a deal, or not, with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The absence of meaningful progress on negotiations with the Saudis has McIlroy keen to rejoin the Tour’s Policy Board, which he quit five months ago.
“I think I can be helpful. I don’t think there’s been much progress made in the last eight months, and I was hopeful that there would be. I think I could be helpful to the process. But only if people want me involved, I guess,” he said, with commendable optimism. “If it was something that other people wanted, I would gladly take that seat.”
Sponsors and fans might welcome the Tour’s only active needle-mover getting involved anew, but others won’t be thrilled at the prospect. A small faction on the board sees McIlroy as allied with those who engineered the Framework Agreement last June, and also view his publicly stated position — that a Saudi compromise is both essential and urgent — as incompatible with their positions, the particulars of which they haven’t yet revealed for the record.
The game of musical chairs among player-directors is emblematic of the PGA Tour’s board-level dysfunction. McIlroy left in November and a small group of players chose Jordan Spieth as his replacement. Now Webb Simpson wants out and has nominated McIlroy as his backfill. Yet any grumblings about the need for a credible confirmation process this time ring hollow when Tiger Woods was summarily added with no expiration on his term, something conveniently overlooked by player-directors who prefer to focus their governance gripes on the secretive process that led to the Framework Agreement.
McIlroy rejoining the board wouldn’t necessarily hasten progress toward a settlement with the Saudis. No one player wields that influence. The lack of momentum on that front doesn’t owe to inertia at Tour headquarters or apathy among the Strategic Sports Group investors whose billion-five has just been spent on the equity program. It’s at least partly because briery issues remain unaddressed — how LIV golfers could return to the PGA Tour, the future of team events — and the only man in the PIF orbit empowered to negotiate those, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, apparently lacks the time or inclination to do so right now.
But McIlroy’s return might help usher the board beyond the schoolboy squabbles that have beset proceedings for 10 months, and which have exhausted even their entertainment value. The sooner that happens, the sooner players will do what he suggested: get back to playing and leave the business to those qualified for the job.
Players got what they wanted — more. More money and more power. When they eventually accept that their role is one of oversight and not management, then perhaps the Tour can focus on giving more to disaffected fans and sponsors who are weary of being squeezed like gullible johns on the Vegas Strip. Because those stakeholders are perilously close to withdrawing their equity from the sport.
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