Some years after I began covering the Players Championship I plucked up the courage to request an interview with Tim Finchem, then the commissioner of the PGA Tour.
I knew him to be just about the most important man in golf who was at the peak of his powers. Truth be told, he seemed a cold fish, cerebral and austere, and I suspected that he didn’t suffer fools gladly. He seemed far from the man who, he later revealed, had been a Rolling Stones fan, who chose “Sympathy for the Devil” as his favourite recording and attended the band’s “Steel Wheels” tour.
I half expected my request to be turned down, overlooking an advantage of my own – that I was writing for The Times, the London-based newspaper known as “the Thunderer,” and I, its golf correspondent, was a vehicle to communicate words from and about him around the globe.
These interviews, or chats would be a better word because they were fairly informal, usually took place in the boardroom on the first floor of the TPC Sawgrass clubhouse, an air-conditioned room with a rectangular table circled by chairs. Soft drinks and different types of water were on hand, as was ice. A television was nearly always on, beaming the tournament that was going on outside the room. I noticed Finchem’s eyes occasionally wandered towards it. He might have been talking about the World Golf Championships, say, or the increase in popularity of golf, but, momentarily distracted, he would break off, make a comment about what he saw on the television and then continue.
Once or twice we met for lunch in the Commissioner’s Suite at Sawgrass. Wherever we met I always got the impression that Tim Finchem was in a genial mood, keen to talk. He always gave me his full attention.
It quickly became clear that, far from how I had imagined him to be, he was, in fact, warm, dry in humour and much more comfortable talking in these sorts of situations than he seemed when at a podium addressing a meeting about the future of golf.
At our first interview in the late 1990s an American sports magazine with a cover story about him was lying on his desk. I commented on it and he gave a slight snort. “That’s not good ink,” he said. “Your paper is good ink.”
That gave me confidence and marked the start of the one dozen interviews I had with him over a 15-year period, for The Times and later Global Golf Post. It quickly became clear that, far from how I had imagined him to be, he was, in fact, warm, dry in humour and much more comfortable talking in these sorts of situations than he seemed when at a podium addressing a meeting about the future of golf.
Our conversations ranged from a recent trip he had made with his daughter to Rome where they ate in a restaurant that served 50 different types of water to his enthusiasm for skiing and hiking.
On one occasion we were joined for lunch by Deane Beman, his predecessor as commissioner. At another, Finchem grilled me about “The Crown,” the Netflix series about the British royal family that he and his wife had binge-watched during COVID. He asked about the Aberfan disaster when 116 children and 28 adults died in a mining accident in south Wales. He wanted to know whether the then Prince Charles (now King Charles III) had learned Welsh when he went to college in Wales. Once, when I began by questioning him about the Ryder Cup, which I am sure the PGA Tour would have loved to own and run but didn’t, he took mock umbrage: “You come in here and that’s your first question?” he said smiling.
Tim Finchem in 1995
COURTESY PGA TOUR
Most conversations though centred on playing golf and he soon revealed himself to be a struggling amateur with a fierce desire to improve.
In an article after one of our interviews I described him not as the PGA Tour’s commissioner but an enthusiast forever bemused by the game. “I liked that,” he told me later. “You made me sound like a golfer.”
“I guess I am realising I am falling in love with practice,” he said on one occasion, tilting his chair backwards so he could put his feet up on the table. “This year and last year have been difficult to get anything going after the winter. Now is the time I’ve got to play between April and late June.”
“Are you working on anything,” he was asked. “A couple of years ago you said you were. You were working with one particular professional.”
The answer was quick. “If I go off and can’t play for two weeks when I come back it takes me about 40 minutes to conjure up the way I was supposed to be thinking about what I’m doing … it’s awkward.” He grinned. “The typical woes of the average player.”
Then he brightened. “But I have my moments. I played quite well for three or four weeks last summer. I had a career round, a 67, out in Colorado. I played 36 holes that day, shot 83 in the morning and 67 in the afternoon. How do you figure that out? It’s all between your ears.
“That round was totally out of character. I think I’ve only broken 70 three or four times ever. So I have this strange score and I kept thinking about it and I kept not thinking about my score in the morning. This is the new me. Then I go off to play in this thing and I play dreadfully. I shot 84, 85.”
He started laughing at the incongruity of it all, shaking his head. “I don’t know about this game. I just don’t know.”
Peter Dawson, chief executive of the R&A from 1999 to 2015, knew Finchem well during their respective tenures. “His golf was very steady,” Dawson said. “He was a competent single-figure golfer. His golf was a metaphor for his life. That is not to say he was a slow player because he wasn’t but his course management was as good as you would have expected it to be.”
Peter Dawson and Tim Finchem
Early one Saturday morning he took me to play golf with him at Pablo Creek, his club in Jacksonville. Finchem hit a lot of shots from the middle of his club. His swing looked repetitive. He liked to play fast and was good at helping to search for lost balls. More than once he ran across a fairway in a high knee-stepping action that made him look as though he had been a runner when he was young. “Nope,” he replied when I asked if he had been. “No good.”
After our round we sat with two club members at a small table, drinks near to hand, and as the conversation ricocheted around the room I realised that this was somewhere Tim Finchem could relax completely. At that moment he was no more than the equal of his fellow members, who accorded him no more respect than they would to any other member.
Another time we were walking back to our respective offices after lunch when he asked: “How’s your game?” I explained that I was trying to stop taking my club back on the inside which often resulted in it pointing to the right of my target at the top of the backswing which in turn led to erratic shots. In turn Finchem told 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.
For a few minutes on a concrete path beneath a warm Florida sun, Finchem and I were a pair of awestruck golfers, two old duffers, seeking as golfers do the techniques that would help us unravel the mysteries of an ancient game.
And that is my main memory of our meetings. To me Tim Finchem, the commissioner, was not Master of the Golf Universe but one who was in thrall to the old game. One of us in other words.
Top: Tim Finchem in 2010
Stan Badz, PGA TOUR
