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Even before the inevitable questions about the state of his putting, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler was asked to address the latest developments in the PGA Tour-PIF deal following the Tour’s testimony at a Senate Subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
“It always surprises me,” Scheffler said on Wednesday in North Berwick, Scotland ahead of the Genesis Scottish Open of the line of questioning at his press conferences. “Sometimes I feel like we’re going to get asked a lot of LIV Golf questions and they never come, but this time these questions came a little earlier.”
Asked for his reaction to watching Tour executive Ron Price and Policy Board Director Jimmy Dunne answer questions in Washington, D.C., for three hours from several Senators led by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Scheffler said, “we didn’t really learn a whole lot, again. As a player on Tour, we still don’t really have a lot of clarity as to what’s going on and that’s a bit worrisome. They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t really have the information that we need. I watched part of yesterday and didn’t learn anything. So I really don’t know what to say.”
Scheffler reiterated the company line while also expressing his dismay at how the announcement of the deal was rolled out. “It’s just a framework agreement right now so I don’t know what that entails,” he said. “We are not involved in any of the discussions. None of the players were involved in the original framework agreement, and so we just don’t really.”
Asked if he should have been involved, Scheffler said, “Probably not. But I’m sure that a few of our players’ members should probably have been involved.”
“I just try to keep my head down and play golf,” he added. “I don’t get too involved in a lot of that stuff. I love playing golf on the PGA Tour and that’s the spot for me. I’m hoping that’s going to exist for a long time. I felt like we were doing a good job before and then the agreement happened and now we have to navigate the whole deal.
“I think the Tour is working hard to try to get us more information but like I said, it’s tough when you’re in negotiations to make everything public. It’s hard to negotiate the public side. I understand the privacy of it but I just wish that definitely our player reps need to be more involved in the process.”
Scheffler was one of the more than 20 top-ranked players that gathered in Delaware last August during the BMW Championship in a meeting organized by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that led to the commitments to play in 18 designated events with purses ranging from $15 million to $25 million this season. (Only Joaquin Niemann, who attended the meeting, later defected to LIV.) Scheffler was asked if he felt the meeting turned out to be a waste of time.
“I think when the merger announcement, it may have felt like a waste of time but at the end of the day, I think it [was] good to get everybody together,” he said. “I think that we are banded together as players and I think you saw the [Golfweek] article that came out on Patrick [Cantlay] a few weeks ago, and a lot of guys were posting on their social media and stuff like that because it was a ridiculous article.
“That’s what I appreciate as a player is having my voice heard and being able to come to a consensus with all the players and kind of go from there and that’s what we are working towards right now is try to get a consensus. We are a player-run organization, so we are doing our best as players to make it feel that way.”
Scheffler argued that the Tour’s current system of a 16-player advisory council voted on by the membership who pass along the concerns of the players to the five-player directors still works — in theory.
“As long as the player directors’ voices are being heard, we are the ones that put them in that position to be there and we want their voices to be heard, and that was really the only frustration with the original announcement is that none of those four or five guys were involved at all,” Scheffler said. “But as far as how things are going now, there’s open lines of communication. We have had numerous discussions with the Tour officials and players as weeks have gone on with stuff, and I feel like we’re going in the right direction.”
Scheffler did concede that he found it a bit disconcerting that longtime Tour independent director Randall Stephenson, the former CEO and Chairman of AT&T, stepped down from the board last week, stating in a letter that the deal with Saudi Arabia’s PIF “is not one that I can objectively evaluate or in good conscience support.”
“It was a little bit concerning that someone like him wouldn’t be on board. We have players reps and we have other people that are on that advisory board, and any time we lose one of those members is definitely a bit concerning,” Scheffler said. “Those guys are put in position for a reason, and for anyone to leave is tough for us. We’ll see what happens.”
As for his recent putting woes, Scheffler said, “I believe that I’m a very good putter, and everything returns to the average.”
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