First surprising fact about Keith Pelley, the Canadian who on Friday concluded nearly nine years as chief executive of the DP World Tour: some of his favourite reading is the British Romantic poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.
Second and less surprising fact about Pelley, who on Tuesday will start as president and chief executive officer of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, a Canadian sports conglomerate in Toronto: he quickly got people’s attention by wearing brightly coloured spectacles. He has 12 pairs, of which the blue might be his favourite.
“It should come as a surprise to nobody that he’s going to the Toronto Maple Leafs [whose uniform contains a lot of blue] given the fact that he’s been wearing those blue glasses for the past nine years,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said at the Players Championship last month.
In time, Monahan and Pelley formed a “strategic alliance” between their tours, the two most powerful such golf bodies in the world. Thus, they are aligned with the Strategic Sports Group in the U.S. in dealing with the uproar following the arrival of LIV Golf backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has caused enormous disruption in professional golf. The PIF is said to manage more than $700 billion and is headed by Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
Through working together, Monahan and Pelley formed a close personal friendship.
“Keith is a peer, a partner, a friend,” Monahan said at the Players Championship, where he presented Pelley with a “potpourri” of presents on behalf of his tour. He also flew to the UK to attend a farewell dinner at the Fairmont hotel near Windsor on Sunday, March 24, the evening before Pelley’s last board meeting.
“Jay has more integrity than any man I have met,” Pelley said recently.
The most difficult thing for Pelley to say is “no.” Nor is he troubled by the need for brevity. Some of his sentences stretch from Wentworth to Toronto and back again – twice.
Pelley, 60, became chief executive of the European Tour in April 2015. Monahan, 53, started as PGA Tour commissioner in January 2017. Both are strong family men with two children each, and both talk openly, volubly and often about their fathers. Pelley has been known to cry at the memory of his father. Monahan, full of Irish charm, while not particularly tall, is sturdy. He could have played ice hockey, field hockey, American football and rugby football. Physically dwarfing Pelley, Monahan looks as though he could toss the Canadian over his shoulder without so much as a “by your leave.”
Pelley’s strong characteristics are his overt enthusiasm, a smile that is rarely far from his face and that he is an excellent communicator who wrote – often very early on a Friday morning – newsletters for his staff called “Pelley’s Papers” and also insisted on regular no-holds-barred town hall meetings with his staff. The most difficult thing for Pelley to say is “no.” Nor is he troubled by the need for brevity. Some of his sentences stretch from Wentworth to Toronto and back again – twice.
Being head of the DP World Tour – or the PGA Tour, for that matter – is a little like being a trade union leader. You have as many masters as you have members, and in his tenure, Pelley certainly felt the rough end of some of his members’ tongues.
“His legacy will be that he dropped the ball with the world at his feet,” one golf insider said on condition of remaining anonymous.
Sergio García, the former DP World Tour and Ryder Cup player from Spain who has joined LIV, suggested that the DP World Tour had plummeted to the fifth-best in the world as a result of the strategic alliance.
Several voices were raised on hearing that annually the 10 leading DP World Tour players who had not otherwise qualified would receive playing rights on the PGA Tour.
“How is giving away your 10 most promising prospects to a rival good for business?” golf writer Alistair Tait asked in one of his online posts.
GGP recently invited Ken Schofield, who in 1975-2004 was chief executive of the European Tour, as it was then known, to consider Pelley’s time at Wentworth.
“I regret that in that time the European Tour lost its independence,” Schofield said quietly and calmly.
When it was pointed out that in return the DP World Tour had gained the security of an alliance with the largest and richest tour in the world, Schofield replied: “That’s factual. But I still regret that having sold 40 percent of European Tour Productions to the PGA Tour, we can no longer act independently.”
But the credit column is heavily in Pelley’s favour. He was ardent in favour of experimentation, even if two such ventures – GolfSixes and the Shot Clock Masters – did not last.
He introduced the Rolex Series of five premium tournaments; approved the awarding of the 2023 Ryder Cup to Italy; bought the International Management Group out of control of European Tour Productions and sold 40 percent of it to the PGA Tour to bolster the DP World Tour’s finances; obtained the considerable sponsorship of DP World and renamed the European Tour after the Dubai-based logistics company; kept professional golf going for his members during COVID; set up Golf for Good and the Golf for the Disabled Tour, known as G4D; and the tour's social-media department won many awards for imaginative posts that often were seen by millions.
“When I arrived, the governance [of the tour] was shocking,” said David Williams, the tour’s chairman from 2014 to 2022. “So, I set about putting proper governance in place. This meant directors had terms of three years, and you could do no more than three terms. I did my three terms of three years. I brought Eric Nicoli in as a senior independent director and then deputy chair about two or three years before I left, and Eric has now taken over as chair.
“I genuinely think he [Keith] has transformed the tour and provided playing opportunities for the members. I don’t think there is any doubt about that, but if you look at the naysayers, there are plenty who say, ‘What are you doing letting 10 people go to the States?’ The answer is Matthieu Pavon, who went from Europe to the PGA Tour as one of those 10 players and whose life was transformed [by victory in the Farmers Insurance Open in the U.S. in January].
“When Keith arrived, he had a very clear and outstanding plan,” Williams said. “He walked into a business that was rightly proud of its past but had no real plan for its future. I remember saying to the team that I want you to be as good outside the ropes as you are inside. When he arrived, the management team was male and not the slightest bit diverse. When Keith left, both the board and the management team were extremely diverse.
“As an individual, the more you threw at him [Keith], the stronger he came back. He was unconventional in some ways, with an incredibly strong work ethic. He has always been an outstanding communicator.
“All you ask of your CEO is that he leaves the business in a better place than he found it, and that’s what he did.”
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Top: The pluses outweigh the minuses on Canadian Keith Pelley's nine-year helm of the European circuit.
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