US Open champion Gary Woodland recently felt something different in professional golf.
The players were empowered and encouraged. Executives listened. The PGA Tour was changing. LIV Golf, a multi-billion dollar start-up from Saudi sovereign wealth funds, is challenging its dominance on the circuit, making the tour more of a co-op than a cold-blooded giant of professional sports. I felt it.
Then came the surprise announcement on June 6 that the PGA Tour and the Wealth Fund have partnered against the Tour, which has been lobbying players to give up Saudi money implicated in human rights abuses. None of the five players on tour officials were aware of the deal more than hours before it became public.
“Over the past year, there’s been a shift towards making players heard,” Woodland, who turned pro in 2007, said at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the US Open ends Sunday. On June 6th, he said, he found that tour players’ voices suddenly “got a little bit outside.”
Woodland is no outlier. In interviews and press conferences at the British Open, top players recently said their faith in the PGA Tour, which they believed had given them more meaningful agency and greater influence, had been shaken. Whether the tour can defuse the turbulent atmosphere could affect whether the deal, which faces a great deal of skepticism on the tour and in Washington, progresses in the coming months.
A tax-exempt, non-profit organization, the PGA Tour has an unusual structure when compared to other prominent professional sports leagues in the United States.
Unlike the NBA or NFL, for example, there are no team owners and no labor unions. Instead, the player is an independent contractor who qualifies for his membership on the PGA Tour. Tour members usually have no financial guarantees, but they do receive a tour salary depending on their on-course performance, although they can earn income through various sponsorships. (When Victor Hovland won this month’s Memorial Tournament, he took his $3.6 million out of the event’s $20 million prize pool. Good enough to secure a spot in his final two rounds.) Golfers who didn’t play didn’t collect anything.)
In exchange for access to Tour Events and funds, the Player authorizes the Circuit to negotiate, among other terms, television broadcast rights agreements on its behalf. Even without unions, in theory, players have a say in running the tour. The 11-member board includes five seats for players, and there is also a 16-member player council that “advises and consults” board members and tour commissioner Jay Monaghan. .
But when tour leaders negotiated a framework agreement to reshape the sport in the most significant way since the founding of the modern tour in the 1960s, the players weren’t there. Rory McIlroy, the world’s No. 3 ranked golfer and tour director, learned of the deal a week after it was signed privately at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
The turmoil deepens, and little is known about the future in this interim agreement, largely because lawyers and executives are still in the nitty-gritty of making many decisions about how the sport is organized, funded and operated. because they are in negotiations.
“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of a betrayal from management,” said this year’s Masters tournament winner Jon Rahm.
“As a player who’s been involved, like many other players, it’s not easy to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” he added. “That’s why we’re all at a loss because we don’t know what’s going on, how far it’s been finalized, how far we can talk.”
Some players suggested the sense of duplicity might not have been so acute had they not been confident in the idea that they would be increasingly central to charting the course of the tour for the next few years.
Woodland observed that as Tiger Woods moved away from the golfing spotlight, players were looking for someone who could help set the tone and direction of the game.
“When I first started, you were just going out and playing, and nobody knows what happened,” said Woodland, who is still close with Woods. “Almost everyone jumped on Tiger’s tail and we were just going.” Recently, Mr. Woodland said, “People are starting to have a little more voice of their own and start to see different opinions.”
Faced with the rise of LIV golf, the players helped devise changes to the format and schedule of the Tour. At a closed-door meeting in Delaware last summer, they scrambled to put together adjustments that could help curb the outflow to the LIV. Monaghan then declared that the Delaware meeting “is a remarkable moment for the PGA Tour and shows the essence of what a membership organization is all about.”
By the middle of last month, however, Monaghan was in Venice for a confidential meeting with Saudi Wealth Fund head Yasir Al-Rumayyan. Two non-player directors were on a trip to Italy. The men then gathered in San Francisco on Memorial Day to finalize the Framework Agreement. Since then, the circle of people who have learned about the planned partnership has grown, but none of the players were included until June 6, when Tour and Saudi officials announced the deal. Some players found out about this on Twitter.
The deal was signed in absolute secrecy and it became clear that player representatives on the board were barred from negotiations, and the atmosphere on the tour only worsened.
Joel Damen, who has been playing professionally since 2010 and rose to prominence this year after starring in the Netflix documentary series Full Swing, said he had the impression that they were being heard. rice field.
A self-described “midfielder”, Damen said he recognizes that opinions like his are not given much weight in the Tour’s strategic deliberations. However, despite some of my colleagues saying that many golfers understand that it is unrealistic to expect tour officials to consult all members in advance, the most I was appalled that even the great headliners were kept out of negotiations.
“If you have to ask every player, probably nothing will happen. That’s the balance for any organization,” said the 2013 Masters winner and former world No. Adam Scott, chairman of the Athletes Advisory Council, said. “It’s like the golf club at home. We have a membership committee, and some of those committees can influence decisions.”
“This is a player-centric tour,” added Scott. “But it depends on where you sit and how you look at things.”
Officials on the PGA Tour are scrambling to defuse anger, citing dissatisfaction with the organization as the LIV is laying the groundwork for alienating players from America’s main men’s golf circuit. Senior officials are at the U.S. Open and Monaghan, who went on leave last week after what the tour described only as a “medical condition,” sparked controversy with players hours after the deal was announced. held a meeting.
Players closest to Mr. Monaghan and other executives said they received an unremembered barrage of feedback. 2012 U.S. Open-winning board member Webb Simpson said, perhaps with some exaggeration, that he’s heard more from players since June 6 than he’s probably done in 15 years as a tour golfer.
“We want unity, but we also want to trust our coaches,” Simpson said, adding that he’s been calling players to hear their concerns and frustrations. “Overall, I think they’re struggling with these decisions.”
McIlroy has expressed support for the deal, but other players with board seats have not publicly taken their positions.
“I told myself I wouldn’t agree or disagree until I knew everything, but I still don’t know everything,” Simpson said.
His remark echoed that of another board member, Patrick Cantley, who said, “It seems too early to have enough information to have a proper picture of the situation.”
The board is scheduled to meet later this month, but it’s unclear if the deal will be ready for a vote by then. At least board members are looking forward to a briefing that might answer more detailed questions about the future of the tour.
At this point, many say, all players can do is imagine what the Tour might look like and where they fit into the changed ecosystem.
“What I think, and what many other players think, is that you’re going to the biggest and best event with tee times, the one that pays the most money. I hang out until I’m told I can’t attend the event, then I go find another one,” Damen said.
They are also settling into a protracted period of uncertainty, grappling with the possibility of another year or more of disruption to their tour. The Tour has been the unquestioned destination of choice for many of the world’s top golfers for many years, and while the business model has been familiar, it is an unfamiliar road to many of them.
“I’ve never faced anything like this before, either as a member or as a player,” Scott said.
