ATLANTA, GEORGIA | When Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and their managers, Mark Steinberg and Sean O’Flaherty, respectively, sat down together in Ireland on July 3, the goal was simple, immense and urgent.
Restructure the PGA Tour, not just to fend off LIV Golf’s enormous purchasing power but to bring the best players together more often while strengthening the organization that was facing an existential threat to its dominance.
Less than two months later, the PGA Tour structure will be different going forward because of what Woods, McIlroy and their managers created with input and insight from others.
Though the moment is still fresh, commissioner Jay Monahan’s announcement last Wednesday that the tour’s top players have agreed to play at least 20 events per season, many of them with smaller fields and bigger purses, may be one of the tour’s most important moments since it spun off from the PGA of America in December 1968.
The impact and execution remain works in progress, but with Woods and McIlroy as the leaders, the PGA Tour is in a significantly stronger place today than it was just weeks ago when LIV’s player signings and aggressive approach had the tour in a reactionary position.
“It’s just going to be in the best place it’s ever been for a long time going forward,” Jordan Spieth said after Monahan’s announcement before the season-ending Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club. “I don’t even know if that leaves there to be much competition down the road.”
Getting to this point – not just talking about change but implementing it on a sweeping scale – happened surprisingly fast. The tour isn’t accustomed to making sudden, sharp turns, but one became necessary this summer.
Not unlike the way better golf clubs often are led by benevolent dictators, the tour needed its vision and action to coalesce around a common, specific course of action. A day after their first meeting in Ireland, where they were competing in the J.P. McManus Pro-Am, Woods and McIlroy convened a small group of top players to begin formulating their plan.
Colin Neville of the Raine Group, who had been involved with the Premier Golf League initiative, was suggested by O’Flaherty as someone who could help mold the movement, providing data, insight and guidance.
After meeting with the small group in Ireland, Woods, McIlroy and their managers went to work on the details. There were regular phone calls, sometimes three times a week and occasionally stretching more than two hours.
They stayed in regular contact with Monahan, seeking his input on what would and wouldn’t work, pushing the idea of creating a series of elevated events that would entice the tour’s top players to stay put and play more.
“What can we do to help put forward the best product possible so that in 50 years’ time the PGA Tour is still thriving and we can safeguard the future of the tour? That was basically what (the Delaware meeting) was about,” McIlroy said.
“It was amazing to have Tiger in the room because of his influence, but all those players in that room bought into the vision that Tiger and I and others have sort of come up with. It’s not as if we did this as a renegade group. We kept Jay privy to all these sort of discussions so he could try to make some moves internally to try to get stuff happening pretty quickly.”
Just days after coming up two strokes short in the Open Championship, McIlroy pulled winner Cameron Smith aside both to congratulate him and to give him a primer on what was coming down the line on the PGA Tour. Smith is expected to join LIV Golf, accepting an enormous nine-figure signing bonus. Though McIlroy said he’s fine with players making their own decisions, he wanted to be sure Smith had a full picture of where things were going.
"It’s impossible to please everybody. They can’t have everybody not pleased, either. You’ve got to please someone.”
ADAM SCOTT
At the Hotel duPont in Delaware on Tuesday night before the BMW Championship, Woods and McIlroy met with 20 other players to lay out their plan. It was essential to put the changes in place as quickly as possible, which means some details are still being worked out.
“To my knowledge, in the history of this organization, there really have been two player-only meetings,” said Monahan, 52, the tour’s commissioner since 2017. “There was one in 1994, and there was one last week. The fact that Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and the best players came together to rally around their tour versus when you look back in history that (1994) meeting was to disrupt, if not destroy the tour, as I said earlier, it’s a remarkable moment.”
Having gotten the buy-in from the top players, Monahan took the changes to the Player Advisory Council, which signed off on them the next day. From there, Monahan spelled it out at a player meeting, shifting the tour into full transformation mode.
“The hardest thing for the tour is it’s trying to be all things to all people,” Adam Scott said. “That’s a very, very hard thing to do. It’s impossible to please everybody. They can’t have everybody not pleased, either. You’ve got to please someone.”
Did Monahan and the tour’s leadership wait too long to react to LIV’s ongoing threat? It may be more accurate to say they underestimated the impact.
Would players who left for LIV still be on the tour had these changes come sooner? It’s fair to assume that some of them would be, but when nine-figure signing bonuses are being offered, someone is going to say yes.
The tour immediately received criticism last week from some who see the changes as imitating the LIV Golf model, essentially guaranteeing big money to the top players, while validating Phil Mickelson’s complaints about how the tour operates.
LIV Golf chimed in on social media, taking credit for being “the best thing to happen to professional golfers” while ignoring the fact it essentially stole its model from what the Premier Golf League wanted to be.
They are not the same things. The tour will continue to play 72-hole events with 36-hole cuts most weeks. There are no shotgun starts, and there is no team element, such as with LIV Golf. It will still be the PGA Tour.
As for Mickelson’s charges, Woods and McIlroy found a way to work within the tour structure to create change. Mickelson went outside for what McIlroy called “some sort of renegade group trying to take some sort of power grab of the PGA Tour.”
If there was validity to some of what Mickelson believed the tour should do in terms of better rewarding players and getting them together more often, the message was overwhelmed by his toxic delivery.
“I don’t think he was the only one who thought that,” Scott said. “You can check with some people in the executive offices at the tour. I’ve also thought that should be a direction the tour goes. I think our product has been diluted, for sure. Top players were spread thin, and that’s changing, hopefully. That’s been identified and hopefully rectified. It will be good if the market responds that that’s actually what they want to see. We really believe it is.”
There still are details to finalize and challenges to confront for the tour. LIV Golf is expected to announce another group of player signings this week, not necessarily a slew of stars beyond Smith but another tug away from the tour.
Sponsors of events that don’t get elevated status are looking at an altered reality. The already hard challenge of landing top players likely became more difficult. If the tour leans too heavily into limited-field, no-cut tournaments, it could risk offsetting the value of keeping its stars together with the perception that the competitive edge has been dulled by all the money.
There are likely to be some unintended consequences, but the larger goal likely has been achieved. The tour hasn’t quashed LIV, but it took needed steps to reposition itself as professional golf’s undisputed leader.
At its core, the tour’s greatest selling point is the competition and history it provides, areas in which LIV falls short.
“Competition, I guess, is always good to help push each other, but I'd rather have the competition just be us against what could possibly be better and better on the PGA Tour,” Spieth said. “Your competition is the best-version-of-yourself kind of thing within the organization.”
That’s much of what Woods has worked to protect.
“I think this for (Woods) is all about what Jack and Arnie created in the ’60s, and everyone that has come before us,” McIlroy said. “And I think for someone like me and my generation, trying to do something to respect the generation that came before me – Tiger being the prime example – and just trying to carry that legacy on, I think that's really what he's trying to do here.”
After winning the Tour Championship and FedEx Cup, McIlroy talked again Sunday evening about what has taken him to the soul of this battle. In the simplest terms, it’s about standing up for something in which he believes strongly.
“I hate what it's doing to the game of golf. I hate it. I really do,” McIlroy said.
“It’s going to be hard for me to stomach going to Wentworth (for the BMW PGA Championship) in a couple of weeks' time and seeing 18 of them (LIV golfers) there. That just doesn't sit right with me.”
At East Lake, McIlroy won the week on and away from the golf course, helping the PGA Tour turn the page on its own story.
The next chapter begins immediately.
Top: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan makes a quick pivot to deliver critical changes before the new season.
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