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The week to end all weeks began well enough for Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner. On Tuesday he spoke in a news conference at the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass about the tour’s massive new media rights deal, which would bring in substantially more money and widen the game.
On Wednesday morning, he chaired the meeting called to select four people to be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame next year. Throughout he looked relaxed, engaged and attentive, keen to learn more about the eminent golf names under discussion. On Wednesday evening, he gave a party at his house. So far so good.
Monahan wasn’t to know what was brewing and that everything, including the tournament, would soon be overwhelmed by the coronavirus. He wasn’t to know then that arrangements for dealing with what was a virus at the start of the week and a pandemic at the end would occupy most of his waking hours for the next few days and that play in the PGA Tour’s flagship event would end after Thursday’s incomplete first round.
Meanwhile, Tim Finchem, Monahan’s predecessor, was enjoying the role of commissioner emeritus at the PGA Tour’s pre-eminent event. On Tuesday he had lunch with Deane Beman, his predecessor as commissioner, and they talked both British and US politics, about the changes being done to Pablo Creek, Finchem’s course in Jacksonville, about Mountain Lake in mid-Florida, and a few other things.
Once Beman had left, Finchem turned to a lunch guest and grilled him about The Crown, the Netflix series about Britain’s royal family. He asked in particular about Aberfan, the tragedy in 1966 when 116 children and 28 adults died in a mining accident in south Wales. “Do you live near there?” he asked. “Did Prince Charles learn Welsh when he went to college in Wales?” Then, lunch over, and with no real sense of what was about to hit the Players and create such problems for Monahan, he was on his way to hit balls.
As Finchem left the Commissioner’s Suite he carried his neatly folded jacket in his left hand and listened as a companion explained how he was trying to stop taking his club back on the inside, to prevent it pointing to the right of the target at the top of the backswing. In turn, Finchem talked about how he had been taught to take the clubhead away as if reaching out to touch a tree a few feet to his right and then moving the clubhead up the trunk of the tree to get it on line.
There they were for a few calm minutes beneath the Florida sun, two old men, both awestruck lifelong golfers seeking techniques that would enable them to unravel the mysteries of an ancient game.
As commissioner, Finchem’s particular strength was in the boardroom, where he would quietly lead the PGA Tour and other bodies through crises. In discussions he often would lean back, listening to the voices around him.
As Finchem’s successor, Monahan’s forte is that he is a people person. He is as comfortable in a boardroom or a cocktail party as he would be in a pub or a four-ball on a golf course. “He is very polished,” someone said. “He’s Irish,” Finchem replied. “He has the gift of the gab.”
As the week wore on, Monahan was more and more in the spotlight as he explained each of the PGA Tour’s actions vis-à-vis the coronavirus. He held further news conferences on Thursday at midday, when he said that play would go on the next day and at the next three tournaments without spectators being present, saying that among the calls he had made that day was one to President Trump. At 9:50 that night all changed, and the Players and the three subsequent tournaments were cancelled, a decision he explained at an 8 am news conference on Friday.
That morning, Monahan didn’t look like a man who had probably been up most of the previous night and much of the night before that. He was asked how he was sleeping.
“Who cares about my sleep?” he asked before launching into an impassioned declaration. “I love our players. I love this tour. I love our charities. I love our volunteers. I love everything we do. … So to cancel is a really hard decision. It’s gut-wrenching.”
That was the essence of the current commissioner. Monahan cares even more than he says he does, which is saying something. When talking, he chooses and emphasizes the right words, and thus last week it was difficult not to sympathise with him as the week wore on even if a feeling lingered that though the tour had come to the right decision at last, it should have been made earlier. There was no doubting Monahan’s sincerity. It rang out like a pealing bell.
“Jay didn’t sleep the night before last … trying to do what’s right for the tournament, trying to do what’s right for the tour, the players, spectators, sponsors, media, everyone,” Rory McIlroy said. “I drove past his house this morning … and just looked, and thought: ‘Jesus, it’s been a stressful week for him.’ ”
For Finchem, 72, it was a week during which he basked in the friendships he had built during his 22-year tenure as commissioner and his anticipated election to the World Golf Hall of Fame. “I bore the load (of the tour) for a good many years,” he might have said but didn’t. “Let someone else take it on now.”
For Monahan, 48, it was the end of a very difficult week, surely the worst one of his 38 months as commissioner. He got through it with diplomacy and charm and at the end of it he emerged as he really is, a warm-hearted man, a leader with a genuine affection for people and a love of golf and golfers.
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