It was scientist Charles Darwin who said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan can take some comfort from those words as the social-media screeds, rotten tomatoes and middle fingers come at him these days.
Since the bombshell news of the PGA Tour’s working agreement with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund landed last week, Monahan finds himself as the centerpiece for the collective scorn felt by so many for a deal that no one saw coming and many feel queasy about.
Does Monahan deserve to be the bad guy?
That’s how he is seen at the moment both for his secrecy and the hypocrisy he acknowledged in what he said for months and what he ultimately did.
It’s difficult to paint a pretty picture right now because of the emotion involved, and it was Monahan who played the emotion card first, using the Saudis’ human-rights record and ties to 9/11 in pushing back against their aggressive entry into professional golf.
It is a hurdle some never will get past. To them, Monahan will wear his own words like a scar.
Many people – players, fans and others – want him gone, but that’s not likely to happen.
“The tour is going to continue as it always has, and under the leadership of Jay Monahan,” Ed Herlihy, the chairman of the PGA Tour Policy Board, said last week.
Now that this plane is in the air, someone needs to figure out how to fly it. Monahan is the only one with a pilot’s license. He knows how to make this work, and for his own benefit as well as the PGA Tour’s, the next moves are critically important.
Monahan has a credibility problem at the moment – it suddenly got much tougher for him to convince a sponsor or players to believe all of what the commissioner is telling them – but he also had a duty to do what is best for the PGA Tour.
If – and until the details of this new deal are clarified, it’s a big if – this agreement to give the Public Investment Fund a seat at the PGA Tour table is structured the way it’s being explained today by keeping all power with the tour, Monahan will have done his job even if he preferred a different path.
Secrecy was essential. The uncomfortable about-face was necessary. That doesn’t make it feel any better, just helps explain it.
As Jimmy Dunne, a Policy Board independent director who was instrumental in brokering the deal, has laid it out, the Saudis are not investing any money into the PGA Tour, and what they really wanted was to be part of golf’s ecosystem. If there is money to be made, much of it will be directed toward the new for-profit company that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the PIF’s governor, will chair and Monahan will serve as CEO.
That sounds too good to be true.
And if something sounds too good to be true …
There is danger in letting a group with unimaginable and unmatchable wealth into the room where it happens, but, as Rory McIlroy said last week, you ultimately would rather have them as a partner than an enemy.
Monahan had to have been emotionally torn by making the deal, but he also understood what not doing it might mean. Monahan leads with empathy and compassion, but he also understands the art of the deal. He knows his way around boardrooms and business deals, having negotiated massive new media-rights contracts, then dealing with the unprecedented impact of COVID.
Then LIV Golf came along.
It achieved its goal of disrupting the game even if it ultimately will be remembered as a two-year league that made a splash with the money it spent, not with the product it produced.
It bears repeating that the PGA Tour is not merging with LIV Golf. It is taking on the PIF as a business partner. LIV almost certainly will go away after this year, and the Saudis may be glad it’s gone, having lost the narrative war surrounding “sportswashing,” but winning a measure of professional respect.
When Monahan studied the landscape, the tour’s spreadsheet and listened to his advisers, particularly Policy Board members Dunne and Herlihy, Monahan understood that, in his words, “circumstances change.”
As Monahan said last year, the tour could not win a war of resources against LIV Golf’s backers. Even as LIV struggled to gain an audience in the U.S., it had the money and patience to bleed the tour dry.
The tour had taxed its reserves through COVID and underpinning the $20 million purses of the new “designated” tournaments, in which it supplemented sponsors unwilling to pay the full and hefty increases.
Continuing down the path of designated tournaments might not have been sustainable without difficult tradeoffs.
The old axiom about following the money? This is where it led.
Legal fees are said to have been running into the millions each month, and the LIV-related lawsuits were likely to run on for years.
While Monahan and his group felt confident the Saudis would never submit to cooperating in the discovery process, ultimately leading to the dismissal of their lawsuit, it became evident the tour wasn’t particularly excited about that either. The antitrust fire burning around the tour isn’t likely to burn out any time soon.
Monahan chose what he believed to be the prudent path rather than the popular one.
He had to understand the potential consequences, and he believes this can lead to something not just different but better.
It’s not a path that he intends to walk alone.
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Top: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan has a credibility problem but a duty to do what's best for the tour.
james gilbert, pga tour via getty images