Inside the latest PGA Tour PAC meeting, where ‘fan-first’ was the message from a special guest speaker

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. – On Tuesday at the latest PGA Tour Player Advisory Council meeting, Theo Epstein talked and the players listened.

Epstein who guided both the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs to their first World Series titles in forever as general manager of those baseball franchises, recently re-joined Fenway Sports Group, owner of the Red Sox, in a more far-reaching role. Fenway Sports Group owns Boston Common, a franchise in TGL, which is expected to debut in January with Rory McIlroy as the captain of the Ball Frogs. FSG also is part owner of the private equity partnership known as Strategic Sports Group, which agreed to invest up to $3 billion into the PGA Tour’s new for-profit business.

Epstein presented at the PAC meeting about the challenges baseball faced to change the game on and off the field to connect with the next generation of fans. That included using fan feedback, experimentation and data to change a game steeped in tradition and culture. Before taking on his new role, Epstein headed up MLB’s effort to fundamentally alter the pace and action of the game through rules changes. Epstein explained how baseball got over the hump to introduce modernizations without destroying the traditions of the game.

“The connections to where we are in golf were loose and vague, but not irrelevant,” said one player who was part of the meeting. “He touched on lots of things and made some good points, but at the end of the day the message was simple: change is hard, it takes time, but you’ve got to show all constituents how the change is for the better and eventually you got to critical mass and you can make something happen.”

Another individual who was privy to the meeting but didn’t participate said that PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan and the FSG folks thought the players might gain from Epstein’s perspective.

“Very smart to start to show the players (and all golf constituents, especially fans) the chops SSG brings to the table,” a source said.

Max Homa, a member of the PAC, didn’t mention Epstein’s presentation but spoke about the fan-centric emphasis of the meeting.

“We had a really great PAC meeting yesterday,” he said during his Wednesday press conference ahead of the RBC Heritage, the fifth Signature event of the season. “I was really inspired by the hope and plan to make it better for the fans. I think we hit this year-and-a-half- or two-year rut as both golfers and golf leagues that was just about making the players happy, and unfortunately and quite obviously the fans were not benefitted by that.”

Of fan fatigue, he added, “They probably should have fatigue. I don’t know why they’d want to care about how much money we’re making and how much more money we want to make. It’s quite nauseating.”

Of viewership numbers for the Masters and PGA Tour events this season being down considerably, he said, “I’m very hopeful that at some point here soon, we’ve been shown that we are nothing without those watching us, and they can stop watching us whenever they’d like. Hopefully more innovation will go into making their viewing process a lot more engaging and fun because that’s why we get to do this.”

Asked for his biggest takeaway from the PAC meeting, Homa declared, “There’s light at the end of this tunnel for the golf fan. There’s innovation, possibilities. It’s not nearly that this is just what golf looks like and we need to hope people like it. There’s ways we can manipulate it a little bit in a good way to gain fan engagement, make it more fun for them to watch. It was truly all about just what we need to do better as a Tour for golf fans to be more inclined to watched. I think at times it’s easy to say this is just what golf looks like, and I think it was nice to see that people have other out looks on that that are a lot more optimistic.”

Said another player who attended the meeting: “Theo’s point (about baseball) was very much that the genesis of the changes was fan-centered and that effective fan-centered changes mean the game wins which means the players win, too. So Max’s takeaway is accurate.”