'Unsustainable model' threatens golf's future
PGA of America CEO pleads for deal; McIlroy's uneasy focus; Dunne deal? Not a good sign
PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh (Darren Carroll/PGA of America)
Waugh: ‘Best thing for game is a deal’
It takes a lot to get Seth Waugh nervous.
The current CEO of the PGA of America is not one to let problems grow, instead nipping them in the bud and moving on.
As the former CEO of Deutsche Bank of America, Waugh was mostly an optimist, seeing the positive side of things.
But Waugh sees a problem that has and will continue to fester, affecting the PGA of America and potentially golf at all levels if it doesn’t get addressed.
The problem is the negotiations between the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.
Since the framework agreement was announced between the PGA Tour and PIF on June 6, the two sides have been negotiating a final definitive agreement. But to no end thus far, and by next month it will be a year with nothing to show for whatever discussions that have taken place.
While time is known to heal all, the longer a deal is not finalized, the more golf in its current state will be affected.
No one knows this better than Waugh.
Calling professional golf a bit messy, the poor television ratings for PGA Tour events this winter and spring could be just the tip of a very big iceberg.
And while Waugh is unwilling to put all his eggs in the failing television basket, he sees solace in the recreational game, which by all accounts is booming.
“I don’t know if people are deciding to play rather than watch or they become players and then watch, or how that works, but it is a departure,” Waugh said from the traditional model of watching golf on television and then playing.
Waugh still believes the LIV model and the billions they have spent is an “unsustainable business model,” but what Waugh has not factored in is that PIF has committed those billions with more billions available if necessary.
Even with the $1.5 billion the PGA Tour recently raised from the Strategic Sports Group and another $1.5 billion promised if needed, it pales in comparison to the $700-plus billion available to the PIF.
Then Jimmy Dunne, a former PGA Tour Policy Board Member until his resignation on Monday, has shed concern on what he called no meaningful progress in the negotiations since the players have taken majority control of the board.
“Honestly I think it’s a huge loss for the PGA Tour, if they are trying to get this deal done with the PIF and trying to unify the game,” Rory McIlroy said of Dunne’s departure. “Jimmy was basically ‘the’ relationship, the sort of conduit between the PGA Tour and PIF. It’s been really unfortunate that he has not been involved for the last few months, and I think part of the reason that everything is stalling at the minute is because of that.”
Are they stalled, are we misreading the situation?
Either way — good or bad, yes or no — there will or won’t be a deal. But Waugh believes golf is big enough to handle whatever comes.
At the same time, Waugh doesn’t think the game is big enough for two tours, and thinks we are diluting the game in a way that is not healthy.
So here we are on the eve of the 106th PGA Championship and the game of golf seems very strong, 45 million strong. But with television ratings declining, neither side showing any progress and with a player and a former board member expressing concern for the future, what’s next?
When we arrive at Pinehurst next month for the U.S. Open, will progress have been made or will LIV continue to live with no solution in sight?
“I hope there’s urgency because I do think it’s doing damage to the tour, to the game,” Waugh said, “As I said earlier, I hope it’s short-term damage, as opposed to permanent damage. And so I hope there’s some urgency in the timing around it because I just don’t think it’s a healthy situation right now.”
Rory McIlroy presser at Valhalla on Wednesday (Scott Michaux)
McIlroy’s uneasy focus on golf
Rory McIlroy did not come to Valhalla to talk about his home life. He came to play the PGA Championship and try to end a 10-year major drought.
In a short and awkward press conference that respected McIlroy’s request for privacy after the disclosure of his divorce petition filed on Monday in Florida, only one simple question invited McIlroy to open up if he wanted: “Just on a personal level, how are you doing?”
“I’m ready to play this week,” McIlroy said.
Golf is a game that requires compartmentalizing distraction, and McIlroy will be put to the test on that front this week. His form is undoubtedly in peak shape coming back to a golf course where he won the last of his four majors in 2014. He’s fresh off a commanding victory on Sunday at the Wells Fargo Championship on the heels of a feel-good triumph partnering with Shane Lowry at the Zurich Classic in New Orleans.
The Northern Irishmen, who only three days earlier was bouncing around the fairways at Quail Hollow with his trademark buoyancy when his game is firing on all cylinders, was noticeably uncomfortable in front of the media in a brief encounter capped at 10 minutes. The pitch of his voice seemed higher, a rare show of nerves by a man normally so comfortable behind a microphone.
“I feel good,” were his first words, even though his tone suggested anything but.
Yet from a golf perspective, McIlroy should have nothing to worry about. His form is right where it needs to be on a course made for McIlroy’s brand of golf – big and roomy and a little bit soft from days of rain. Valhalla has all the same characteristics of Quail Hollow in Charlotte, where McIlroy has now won four times and loves so much that he took up membership.
“I think this is a golf course that allows you to play with freedom because it’s a big golf course,” he said. “The corridors are wide, not too dissimilar to last week at Quail Hollow, so you can open your shoulders up off the tee and try to take your chances from there.”
Rory McIlroy’s team finds solace inside the ropes (Maddie Meyer/PGA of America)
With his family distractions, McIlroy is fortunate to have his game at the moment on autopilot.
“It doesn’t seem like that long ago that my game has felt this good,” he said. “But I would say from a technical standpoint, some of the shots that I hit last week, some of the three-quarter shots, some of the wedge shots, some of the iron shots, combined with, you know, how good I feel with the driver at the minute, you know, when I can see those three-quarter shots and those wedge shots going and starting on the right line, you know, that obviously gives me a lot of confidence.
“I think it’s all about confidence and momentum, and I have a lot of confidence and quite a bit of momentum coming into this week. So, as I said at the start, it’s just about trying to keep that going.”
McIlroy had not been back to Valhalla since his victory in the darkness 10 years ago. The course he found on Wednesday is a little longer with a few changes but is largely recognizable from what he remembers in 2014. He played all 18 holes once through on Wednesday morning after doing a little range work after arriving Tuesday afternoon.
For the moment, the golf course is McIlroy’s sanctuary from his personal life and any prying questions.
Stray Shot: Can we just focus on the PGA?
By Peter Kaufman
Can’t we all be focused on golf during a major week?
Apparently not.
Jimmy Dunne has left the building. Roy Hobbs in “The Natural” said: “I guess some mistakes you never stop paying for.” Jay Monahan’s numerous mistakes have directly related to Dunne exiting the PGA Tour Policy Board, stage left.
Monahan failed to perceive a threat from LIV, then failed to understand he was fighting a war he could not win, then submarined his chief advocate, Rory McIlroy, by letting the latter pontificate regularly for over a year about how awful LIV was, how awful defectors were, etc. Then McIlroy and the world found out that Monahan had clandestinely tasked Dunne and Ed Herlihy with negotiating a “framework agreement” with the Saudis.
Monahan amazingly still has his job as PGA Tour commissioner. But the full trust of his players he lost and cannot be regained. Dunne has taken the fall here, as the players have made sure he felt “utterly superflouous” for the past year since that framework agreement was announced.
No one is indispensable. That includes Dunne. He is the ultimate golf insider, and a sophisticated businessman. It’s a shame his skills are not being utilized here to try to pull the merger discussions out of the ditch. McIlroy, for one is disheartened by his exit.
“Yeah, honestly I think it’s a huge loss for the PGA Tour, if they are trying to get this deal done with the PIF and trying to unify the game,” McIlroy said. “Jimmy was basically ‘the’ relationship, the sort of conduit between the PGA Tour and PIF. It’s been really unfortunate that he has not been involved for the last few months, and I think part of the reason that everything is stalling at the minute is because of that.
“So it is, it's really, really disappointing, and you know, I think the tour is in a worse place because of it. We’ll see. We’ll see where it goes from here and we’ll see what happens. But you know, I would say my confidence level on something getting done before last week was, you know, as low as it had been and then with this news of Jimmy resigning and knowing the relationship he has with the other side, and how much warmth there is from the other side, it’s concerning.”
Dunne, however, was not without his baggage. For more than 20 years he pilloried the Saudis as being involved in the 9/11 attacks which resulted in him losing the lives of almost all of his firm. The 9/11 families loved him.
Then came the framework announcement and suddenly Dunne sang a different tune about the Saudis. My favorite quote of his was, “I am quite certain and have had conversations with a lot of knowledgeable people that the people that I’m dealing with [from the PIF] had nothing to do with [the Sept. 11 attacks]. And if someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill him myself. We don’t have to wait around.”
In any event, Dunne has resigned, quite publicly, from the PGA Tour Policy Board, citing no progress being made on reunification negotiations. Dunne leaves behind a steaming mess.
One can be dismissive and think Dunne was just another tour hypocrite, detesting the Saudis on one hand and then negotiating the “framework agreement” with the other.
But there is a much bigger picture here. The tour still thinks it has hand in negotiations, and some there believe they have no need for a LIV deal (looking at you, Jordan Spieth) and that no one who went to LIV can return without huge penalties.
They are just wrong.
It’s possible because Dunne was elbowed out of negotiations that his ego required him to exit and so publicly. But there is little question that the state of reunification efforts is listing in the water, and that Jimmy Dunne was a voice of reason about why it has to happen and probably how it could happen. And he is now gone.
The tour is still the weak sister here financially compared to the Saudis (unless my math is off and $3 billion investment from the Strategic Sports Group outflanks $700 billion in the PIF coffers.)
It remains axiomatic in distressed situations that the target needs to develop compelling options to escape the grasping clutches of a wealthy acquisition source. Where are those options? Absent any, the tour and its fearless player on the policy board are tilting at windmills and simply don’t get it. Would you ask Patrick Cantlay for advice on how to cut a 6-iron 190 yards to a back right pin placement? You bet. Do you want his advice about how to navigate successfully a complicated geopolitical economic contretemps when the foe has resources dwarfing yours? Not me.
Defending champion Brooks Koepka on 17 at Valhalla (Maddie Meyer/PGA of America)
PGA Championship notes
Courtesy PGA of America pool reporter Jeff Babineau
Brooks Koepka already owns three PGA Championships, having won his third a year ago at Oak Hill, but he remains thirsty for more. For Koepka, 33, it’s just part of his big-game mindset. He lives for the majors, and longs to keep adding to his career major victory total, which stands at five.
Koepka just finds a different gear at the game’s biggest stops, and on Wednesday, he seemed ready to go at Valhalla and the 106th PGA Championship. At majors, those around Koepka say that he turns into somebody different than the guy they see most weeks.
“I don’t know. I mean, I’ve heard from just kind of the people around me, it’s just different,” he said Wednesday. “Like my demeanor and focus is just different. I can’t explain it. I don’t really know how or what I really do different. But everybody on the team can kind of see it and they kind of know ... I can walk right past them and I don’t even know that they are there sometimes.”
This week marks Koepka’s 12th start in the PGA Championship, dating to 2013 at Oak Hill, when he was just finding his way. He loves the fact that a player needs to focus intensely for four straight days to have any kind of chance, and cannot afford to let his guard down.
“It's just it's a grinding week. You've got to be fully locked in,” Koepka said. “I feel like you can't take one shot off. I love that. It's always, you're one shot away from making a double-bogey, and that's what I love.”
Koepka also won PGA Championship titles at Bellerive in 2018 and Bethpage Black in 2019 to go along with a pair of U.S. Open titles at Erin Hills and Shinnecock.
Captain, my Captain?
PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh was asked on Wednesday at Valhalla about who will captain the U.S. Ryder Cup team at the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black.
It would appear the job could go to Tiger Woods if he opts to accept it, but thus far, the two parties only remain in talks about it. Wednesday, there was no news to report on the captain front.
“We have had conversations for months,” Waugh said. “We have also had conversations at the Ryder Cup Committee, multiple conversations about potential captains and a list of potential captains.
“You know, Tiger, he's been pretty clear. I think we all know that he can be pretty focused, and that's one of his many superpowers is that ability to sort of tunnel and decide. And he doesn't do anything that he's not fully committed to, and we totally respect that. And he's got a lot on his plate right now.”
Woods is heavily involved in representing the PGA Tour and his fellow PGA Tour players in negotiations toward trying to unify the Tour and the upstart LIV Tour, which signed some of the PGA Tour’s top players. Woods said on Tuesday that his discussions with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund consume a good deal of his time.
“You know, everybody sort of has a timeline for this,” Waugh said, “and I realize it's a news day and you guys want news, but we have picked captains later than this. We've picked captains earlier than this. Luke Donald (Europe’s captain) was named a year out a year ago (prior to the Ryder Cup in Italy) and they had a pretty good performance, for instance.
“We think there's plenty of time, and putting an artificial date on it is not something we need to do.”
Assessing Valhalla’s PGA/Ryder Cup future
Valhalla Golf Club is hosting its fourth PGA Championship this week, hosted a pair of KitchenAid PGA Senior Championships, and also was home to the 2008 Ryder Cup, which resulted in a U.S. victory over Europe. (It is where Paul Azinger introduced the four-man “pod” system.)
But what of Valhalla’s future moving forward? As of a year and a half ago, the PGA of America no longer holds an ownership in the club, so PGA of America President John Lindert was asked if that means Valhalla could get left out of getting a big PGA event in the future.
“From my perspective, having had this as the fourth PGA Championship here, every single one of them has been extremely successful,” Lindert said. “I've talked to other venues about it. Part of is this is a community effort. The ownership group here is fabulous. The golf course is fabulous. The players love it.
“So as far as — the location, May date, it's beautiful out, more or less, if you'd like a little bit of weather here and there. I don't see why this facility wouldn't continue to be considered.”
Valhalla continues to receive great local support from the Louisville community. Tickets for the week are sold out and hospitality sales, according to Lindert, “has been off the charts.”
“Two of the three PGA Championships we've had here have resulted in a playoff,” Lindert continued. “So it's a wonderful, wonderful venue. ... From that perspective, and for me, I would say it would continue to be considered.”