VIRGINIA WATER, ENGLAND | Last Saturday, a soft afternoon in September when sun streamed through the windows, Keith Pelley sat in his office at Wentworth Club. The executive director of the DP World Tour, a Canadian, wore a dark suit and white shirt, blue spectacles, one of his 12 pairs of eyeglasses, and the obligatory black tie to mark the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Leaning back in his chair and drumming fingers on the table in front of him, he pondered on the week that was ending, the most extraordinary of his life.
On Tuesday, Liz Truss, the third female prime minister of the U.K., marked the start of her term of office by kissing the queen’s hands. On Thursday, after the queen had died, a new king, Charles III, succeeded his mother and play was suspended through Friday in the week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth. The first full week in September was always going to be a high point for professional golf in Europe with that tournament, once known as the flagship event of the European Tour, and 17 players from LIV Golf competing on the course barely a chip shot from Pelley’s office. But the momentous events in the history of the U.K. and the ceremonial rituals commensurate with them dominated the week, pushing the golf into the margins. Pelley, 58, wasn’t sure he could take it all in.
“You were an Elizabethan at the start of the week and you’re a Carolean now,” someone said to him. “What’s that?” he asked, momentarily looking confused.
“Queen Elizabeth’s death ended the second Elizabethan era in this country, and the accession of King Charles marks the start of the third King Charles era. Elizabeth was your queen, too, you know.”
Pelley nodded. He had known that. He reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a $20 Canadian note and laid it on the table beside him. “I found this last night,” he said, pointing at the portrait of the queen on the note. “Look at that. Cool, isn’t it?”
“As a family, we followed and loved the queen long before I came here,” he continued. “I remember at grade school [in Toronto] how after the announcements were read out each morning we sang ‘God Save the Queen.’” Then, he recounted a story that his wife, Joan, had told at dinner the night before. “When Joan was 6 or 7, she and her parents went to watch the royal train with the queen and Prince Philip onboard as it passed through their town two hours north of Toronto. Joan waved her flag at the queen and is convinced that at a particular moment the queen caught her eye and waved back.”
At the start of the week of the BMW PGA, all the talk was of golf’s ongoing civil war with LIV Golf. It rumbled around like distant thunder. This is “the most divisive period in any sport I’ve been involved in,” Pelley said, and last Wednesday he addressed the issue to “… clear it up once and for all.” In the course of a 45-minute speech and press conference, he delivered a stirring defence of those who seek to maintain the status quo in professional golf and an attack that was sometimes scornful on LIV Golf, which appears to want to tear it apart. “He came out swinging,” one observer said.
“They wanted me to come and be firm, tell them what I thought. They wanted leadership.”
KEITH PELLEY
Pelley talked of LIV’s “propaganda machine churning out negative news stories and misinformation.” He poured scorn on the suggestion that his tour was the fifth in the world, pointing out that the combined prize money of the Asian, Korn Ferry, Japanese, Australian and Sunshine tours totalled less than half of the DP World Tour. “How possibly could we ever become No. 5?” he asked.
He said he believed firmly that allowing 10 of his best players to move to the PGA Tour at the end of each season was a good idea. And he emphasized the overall strength of the DP World Tour. “Our members will play for $144 million next year and $162 million by 2027. We have stability for five years and a long-term option to continue after that for another eight years. We have certainty in an uncertain time,” he said.
It was a virtuoso performance, and once he realised that it had gone down well he was glad he had chosen to make it. Glad, also, that it was behind him. “It was not something I enjoyed,” he said on Saturday, stock still in his chair as his hands danced on the table top in front of him. “I don’t enjoy confrontation. I like people, and I want people to like me. But it was time to say what I felt. I was taking a pretty firm, strong position against some of our members and I wish I wasn’t in that position, but after sitting back and watching over the past two or three months the staff needed to hear it. The stakeholders needed to hear it. Our sponsors needed to hear it. Our broadcasters needed to hear it. Maybe I should have come out as firm and resolute before, but …”
Clearly relieved to have got his speech out of the way, Pelley raced to the first tee for what he called the most important act of that day. He wanted to be present when singer Niall Horan met Hope, Pelley’s daughter. He knew there would be cries of “Daddy look at this. Daddy, Daddy.” He knew she would give him and Horan a big hug because she gives hugs the way the reserved British shake hands. “Hope has been excited all week at the prospect of meeting Niall,” Pelley said. “She’s been worrying as to what she should wear.” If Hope was excited then, Pelley was proud now. He pulled out his phone and showed pictures of Hope and Horan. “Everything was about Hope. I brought (PGA Tour commissioner) Jay Monahan down and they got a picture together.”
There was more to this than a father talking about a daughter, and now Pelley revealed it. “Hope was born with spina bifida,” he said, “and I don’t talk about this often – in fact, never.” At this, tears welled in his eyes and he broke down. He waved his right hand as if apologising for doing so. “Give me a minute. This has been an emotional week,” he said. He sniffed, touched his glasses and regained his composure. “I can do this,” he said, continuing, “We adopted Hope when she was 4. So, we have had her for 12 years. My wife was a nurse by trade. Hope has changed my life, our life. She gives me perspective. She was one of the reasons we moved here. She can’t get around in a wheelchair in Toronto in the winter. Coming here has been a blessing for us. She is very special. As bad a day as you can have in the office, when I go home Hope makes me feel good.” He paused and then said firmly: “That’s all.”
One of Pelley’s maxims, one often heard, is that “the name on the jersey is the same,” meaning if one person criticises the DP World Tour, he criticises the entire tour. “If they build up one person, say something positive about the tour, about me they are saying something positive about everybody.” Therein lies one of the keys to his personality. He is family-orientated to an inordinate extent. The word “family” often crops in his conversations, as does the word “perspective.” He regards everyone who works at Wentworth as his family, and just as absent parents write weekly to their children, so each Friday he writes what he calls “Pelley’s Page,” a blog for his staff.
Joan, his wife, Jason, his 19-year-old son who attends Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, and Hope, 16, his daughter, are the inner circle of a large group of people whom he calls family. “Family is everything,” he said. If there is anything he likes more than a weekend walk through the woods on the Wentworth estate with his three dogs, Joan, and Hope, it is spending time with family and friends at a “place” he owns north of Toronto. “Family time is the best,” Pelley said.
Later Saturday evening, he would spend time in talks with tour officials, watching the golf on television while furiously refreshing his phone to keep up to date with Jason’s scoring in a golf tournament in Connecticut. “I love my boy,” he said. “He is sensational, my best friend. We have such a good time together.”
Is Joan the rock of the Pelley family? “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have never met anyone who doesn’t like Joan. She doesn’t have a bad bone in her body. She is very grounded. She is like this.” He drew a horizontal line in the air with his right hand. “I am like this” he said, raising his hand above the line and lowering it slightly below it. “I can get pretty excited, but I don’t get down much.”
The conversation returned to the events of the week. “I think it’s tough to say it’s been a good week when the queen passes. I would say it has been a very emotional week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were emotional for one reason, and the rest of the week will be emotional for another reason. In terms of the message, I am happy that it has been very well received by the players, our staff and the golfing community. I am very pleased with our decision [to play on Saturday] to give people a chance to show their respect.
“I never will be a ‘we won’ type of guy. My job is to do what is right for the membership, and I am going to do what is right for the membership, and right for the membership was coming out and being firm because that’s what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to come and be firm, tell them what I thought. They wanted leadership.”
And, he might have added, though he didn’t, they got it.
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