PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Starting with Rory McIlroy’s 5-under 31 on his front side Thursday morning, it was refreshing to feel a genuine buzz emitting from The Players Championship.
All the subsequent roars echoing across the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass the past few days gave the golf world a perfect diversion from the Kardashian-level drama swirling around it.
The last thing golf needs, on the 50th anniversary of the Players no less, is division. Fans that care about the sport are fatigued, wondering how much longer the PGA Tour leadership will continue being burdened with strife about its future.
It’s no wonder Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, the players and galleries welcomed getting to the point where they could focus on The Players competition and eventually applaud a champion.
Frankly, the prelude to the Players wasn’t much fun. The media narratives were more about what the Tour business model is going to look like moving forward, and less about actual golf or compelling player story lines.
Sadly, all this chaos about whether the Tour is going to finalize its partnership with LIV, the breakaway golf league, or how all that influx of $1.5 billion cash from Tour partner Strategic Sports Group might be dispersed to the players is no way to grow the game.
It’s an enormous turnoff, so stop this nonsense. Fix it.
Golf observers — be they casual, ardent supporters or on the fence — have little interest in how multi-millionaires are going to add to their bottom line.
Greed never plays well in any sports arena, less so with golf, whose audiences are much smaller than football or basketball. It’s seen a significant drop in TV ratings in 2024, including a 30 percent decrease in the final round of the 2024 Arnold Palmer Invitational, when world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler won by five shots, compared to a year ago.
With Tiger Woods mostly on the sideline, the Tour has picked a bad time to be embroiled in squabbling over how to map out its future — deal or no deal? — with the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF).
Deciding how to funnel more money into the bank accounts of players already assured of lifetime financial security isn’t the water-cooler conversation golf is seeking.
Monahan incurred the wrath of players and the golf world at large last June when he reversed course about doing business with LIV.
The Tour reached a stunning framework agreement with PIF, but those negotiations are still in limbo. It’s a mystery if a deal will come about at all, with the SSG cash input adding to the uncertainty.
“I, for one, as a golf fan, am tired of it,” said Tour player Billy Horschel. “I think this whole bickering and taking shots at each other just needs to go away. If coming together gets that to go away and we get a deal done with PIF, that’s great.
“Now how does that turn into [LIV] players coming back to the PGA Tour? I don’t know.”
Can golf regain momentum?
The game’s popularity and television ratings have often been a fluid situation, especially as a post-Tiger era becomes more of an everyday reality.
Whether it’s the sport being in financial flux, lesser-known names winning most Tour events until Scheffler’s win last week or Tiger being a non-factor on the course, golf has lost some of its juice in 2024.
Maybe a dramatic win by McIlroy, or a big name emerging from a packed leaderboard at the Players or at next month’s Masters, can ignite some momentum.
Wyndham Clark may be a rising star, but the world’s No. 5-ranked player being on top of the Players leaderboard heading to the weekend still isn’t going to send people scurrying for the remote to tune in.
For now, players are reluctant to sugarcoat the present environment. They find it hard to deny, unlike Monahan, that golf feels a bit stagnant.
“If you look at the leaderboards, you look at the ratings, I felt like they really, really worked in 2023,” said McIlroy, who remains one of Monahan’s biggest supporters. “And for whatever reason, they’re not quite capturing the imagination this year compared to last year.
“I think, if I were to put my own perspective on it, I think it’s because fans are fatigued of what’s going on in the game. And I think we need to try to reengage the fan and reengage them in a way that the focus is on the play and not on talking about equity and all the rest of it.”
But so long as the Tour struggles to reach a finish line in its PIF negotiations — plus the sidebar acrimony of Monahan trying to regain players’ trust after last summer’s public relations debacle — off-the-course issues are going to garner headlines almost as much as player accomplishments between the ropes.
During several media sessions before the Players, there were continuous did-you-hear-what-he-said questions to players about somebody else’s take, whether it’s about PIF negotiations, the right field number for Tour signature events or Monahan’s job performance.
Monahan was evasive on a question about whether any player directors on the Tour’s policy board asked him to resign, saying: “I don’t think that would be a surprise to anybody, given the events of last summer. But we are a unified front.”
Disingenuous or not, all this just fuels more drama and controversy for the TMZ appetite of social media, which, in turn, influences the attention mainstream media gives to a tiresome topic.
Like when Xander Schauffele renewed his previous stance Wednesday of expressing reservations about Monahan’s leadership, saying he still “has a long way to go” to earn back player trust. That generated headlines despite the nothing-new-here element to it.
Monahan, who admittedly mishandled the rollout in last year’s pivot with PIF, understands the urgency of putting all this conflict in the past. But the secretive nature of the negotiations isn’t helping golf to engage fans or make a positive connection.
“We’ve made and continue to make real progress in our negotiations and discussions with the PIF,” said Monahan. “I recognize that this is frustrating for all of you, but it really is not in the best interest of the PGA Tour and our membership, and for PIF, for me to be talking about where we are with specific elements of our discussions.”
Then again, progress is a relative term without transparency.
Golf always wants to highlight its best features, but that’s a challenge when tense business negotiations are hush-hush, and an ongoing Justice Department investigation about antitrust concerns over the tentative Tour-LIV agreement continues to fester.
Finding unity elusive
It’s hard to argue against golf being a diminished product when a signature event like the Players is missing the likes of 2022 champion Cam Smith, 2023 Masters champ Jon Rahm, five-time major champion Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Tyrell Hatton.
By no means did the Tour’s signature event lack for interesting stories, especially when a McIlroy or Scheffler made their way up the leaderboard on the first day.
Still, an overwhelming majority of golf fans prefer seeing all the best players competing at the same venue, which now only happens at the four majors.
Peter Malnati, one of the Tour’s player directors, sounded off on that topic Saturday after shooting a third-round 66 at the Players.
“I want to see a unified game where, when we have events like The Players Championship, that we have all the best players in the world and we’re proud to call ’em PGA Tour members,” said Malnati. “That’s what I want. I don’t know how we get there, but that’s what I want.”
The world’s best player, Scheffler, minces no words about where the blame for golf’s division squarely lies.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell guys not to take hundreds of millions of dollars [to join LIV],” said Scheffler. “If that’s what they think is best for their life, then go do it. I’m not going to sit here and force guys to stay on our Tour.
“If the fans are upset, then look at the guys that left. We had a Tour, we were all together, and the people that left are no longer here. At the end of the day, that’s where the splintering comes from.”
Like it or not, that division isn’t going away any time soon. That makes it a Tour problem because Monahan’s kingdom is rightfully viewed as having the sport’s biggest impact.
But even the membership has grown weary of the lengthy uncertainty about the Tour’s future. Viktor Hovland, the world’s No. 4-ranked player, had this explanation for why he didn’t go out of his way to find out more information about the ongoing drama.
“I’m just not that interested in spending my free time in trying to figure out every single nuance in the situation,” said Hovland.
If somebody with heavy financial stakes in a resolution isn’t interested, how do you think golf fans feel? Eyes are on the Tour, more than any other golf entity, to find a way to somehow unify the game.
That would include the awkward issue of possibly creating a penalty-filled path back for any prodigal-son LIV players, providing some even want to return.
“The sooner that this is resolved, I think it’s going to be better for everyone, the fans and the players,” said McIlroy.
It’s clear the golf landscape is headed for some kind of makeover, but it’s hard to gauge what that might look like.
“There’s going to be a lot of changes made to the Tour over the next three or four years,” Horschel said. “Some guys won’t like them, some will.”
By whatever reasonable means necessary, golf better fix this mess. It won’t be easy. Not without Tiger in his prime readily available to clean things up.
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