PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan Is Back at Work, but for How Long?

His deal with LIV Golf's backer may save the Tour, but its awkward rollout may not save his job with a distrusting membership.

As Jay Monahan returns to work from a health-related absence today, he has the well-wishes of almost everyone in the golf community. He also has a new unofficial title: PGA Tour Commissioner For Now.

Players have openly discussed his need to regain their trust, and it’s not clear that he can do it. After 18 months full of conundrums, Monahan now faces this one:

The framework agreement he signed with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund should lead to a competitive and financial victory for the Tour ... but it has a better chance of getting passed if he resigns.

This does not mean he has to resign. But there is a misperception that Monahan’s future is tied to Monahan’s deal. Mistrust of Monahan runs so deep that I think most players would be more willing to listen to the argument for the PIF deal if it came from someone else. They could absolutely decide to move forward with it and still push Monahan out.

How did Monahan get here? He is easily caricatured these days as foolish, lacking in principles and fundamentally dishonest, but none of those were ever used to describe him two years ago, and they don’t really fit now. Monahan’s intentions all along were pure—not in a moral sense, but by Merriam-Webster’s first definition of the word pure: “unmixed with any other matter.” Monahan kept trying to put the PGA Tour in the strongest possible position, but he made every calculation without proper regard for what came before or what might come after.

Some of Monahan’s decisions and statements made sense at the time—and even make sense in retrospect. Others are less defensible. But he did not form a coherent strategy and stick with it. He did not communicate a clear set of values and principles and hold to them. For all the criticism that Monahan “betrayed” his players with the PIF deal, the last 18 months of his tenure tell a more nuanced and sadder story: Monahan was so desperate to save their Tour that he may have cost himself his job.

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Monahan’s first big mistake, to be fair to him, was one that many people made: He underestimated the threat of a rival golf tour.

Monahan had good reasons to think LIV Golf would never happen. Greg Norman first attempted to create a World Tour for the best players in the early '90s and failed. Norman was highly unpopular with many golfers. By 2022, PGA Tour stars were earning more than ever. A rival tour would provide no clear path for most players to the tournaments that matter most them and everyone else: the majors.

With LIV still a vague, unclear threat, Monahan was looking at three possible outcomes:

1. Allow players to play both the PGA Tour and LIV. This was a non-starter. The Tour’s financial security and reputation depend on it being the primary vehicle for its players. Letting them come and go would be an admission of defeat.

2. Accept billions in investments from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as a way to keep PIF from funding a rival tour. This is, essentially, the heart of the Tour’s current framework agreement with PIF—and an offer the Saudis have said they made, or wanted to make, before launching LIV.

3. Draw a hard line against LIV and keep it from ever getting traction.

Given what we know now, No. 2 seems like the best option. The Tour undoubtedly would have been better off striking a deal with the Saudis in March 2022 rather than in June 2023.

But at the time, that wasn’t clear at all. Accepting PIF money was distasteful to many, it would cause blowback, and it still wouldn’t necessarily quash the threat of a rival tour. A separate group had been trying to fund a different tour, the Premier Golf League, that would cater to stars.

Jay Monahan will have to regain the trust of PGA Tour players while trying to complete the deal to unify the sport :: Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images

Besides, Monahan knew his guys—or thought he did. Unlike his predecessor, autocratic Tim Finchem, Monahan took a collaborative approach. He listened. He formed relationships. Phil Mickelson’s dissatisfaction with Monahan was well-known. But when Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka said publicly they were committed to the Tour, and Bryson DeChambeau said he would stay on the Tour if the best players were there, Monahan apparently believed them. In February, Koepka said of LIV: “Somebody will sell out and go to it.” Two weeks before Koepka left for LIV, Monahan was a guest at his wedding.

A more cynical and detached leader might have not have trusted their word. Business, after all, is business. But Monahan, who is almost universally regarded as one of the nicer people to become a modern commissioner of a sport, seemed to figure players were like him: valuing relationships, their word, and the legacy of the Tour.

Monahan chose the hard-line approach. It was the one that gave him a chance at the best possible outcome: an independent, dominant PGA Tour.

It seemed to work, too. In February 2022, Rory McIlroy called a Saudi-funded tour “dead in the water.”

Monahan and McIlroy did not realize that the Saudi money was just too much for some players to turn down—and once a few started taking it, it became easier for others to do it.

Golf, a historically collegial game in which players are expected to call penalties on themselves, was now a business like any other: Millionaires said one thing, did something else, and justified it with a lie: I want to grow the game … I want to control my schedule. This was not the job Monahan expected to do when he became commissioner in 2017, or the one he did as he brought the Tour back quickly and successfully from its COVID-19 hiatus. It was also not a job for which he was well-suited.

Monahan was a fish in a shark tank. His rhetoric went from corporate (“We’re focused on legacy, not leverage”) to desperate (“Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”) He aligned with families of 9/11 victims to help make his point.

A person who feels betrayed by one person will usually worry about being betrayed by everyone. With players defecting, Monahan proceeded as though every star might leave and the Tour would collapse. In August, top players met in Delaware and discussed ways to restructure the Tour in a way that benefited them more. Monahan wasn’t there, but he let them drive the process. Today’s Tour has elevated events with enormous payouts, and there are plans for some of those events to have smaller fields and no cuts in 2024. The Player Impact Program, which is designed to reward the most popular players, jumped from $40 million in 2021 to $100 million in 2022.

It was hailed as a victory. Stars were happy and said so. Rumors of defections died down. But Monahan had a massive multi-pronged problem.

By allowing stars to reshape the Tour in their own interests, he had alienated the Tour’s non-stars—which describes most players on Tour. The Tour had always prided itself on being a meritocracy, with clear paths up and down the mountain. Guaranteed payments and the lack of cuts, in fact, were primary arguments against LIV Golf—and now the Tour had adopted them.

By dramatically increasing purses and other payment mechanisms to stars, Monahan started to do what he himself said was not feasible: compete, economically, with LIV Golf. He did not get all the way there. But he put The Tour in a more precarious financial state—which made a potential deal with the Saudis more appealing.

The problem with that was that Monahan had spent much of 2022 talking about how gross a deal with the Saudis would be. He sounded like he meant it and convinced a lot of people, including some of his players. Some of them surely lost or damaged friendships with LIV players over it.

Unaccustomed to this kind of fight, Monahan had desperately grabbed for every weapon he could reach, without thinking through all the consequences.

He did it because the Tour appeared in danger of collapsing.

But was it, really?

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Most of the best players stayed with the Tour—and were highly likely to stay even if Monahan had not catered to them to the degree he did. Tiger Woods, who remains the biggest star in the sport, was never going to bail on the PGA Tour to play in a league organized by Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson.

McIlroy, who has a strong personal and business relationship with Woods, publicly mocked the idea of a Saudi-run tour from the beginning. Justin Thomas is the son and grandson of PGA of America teaching professionals and also a close friend of Woods. He was never leaving. Thomas’s buddy Jordan Spieth takes a long view of his career, and always understood that both his aspirations and marketability were best served by staying on Tour. Collin Morikawa has similar makeup to Spieth in that regard, and is a client of the same agency, Excel, as Thomas and Woods. Excel has firmly advised clients to stay with the PGA Tour.

Jon Rahm, despite his close ties to the Mickelson family, called the defections a “betrayal.” He is too focused on being the best player in the world to bail on the Tour for money. Same for Scottie Scheffler, who is not nearly as fiery as Rahm but seems patently uninterested in anything LIV would have to offer.

There are also logical explanations for why certain individuals left. Mickelson has spent his whole professional life manipulating his image and using every possible angle to make more money. This is probably why he was so angry about the PGA Tour underpaying its stars relative to other sports—the Tour turned that equation against him.

Koepka was injured and feared his career was ending. He had just gotten married and was about to start a family. He never obsessed over PGA Tour events, and the inevitable criticism over leaving was unlikely to faze him because Koepka is drawn to conflict.

Johnson is a man of simple motivations, very little concern for public fanfare and limited marketing ability. His stated explanation for leaving—he wanted to get paid more to work less—is exactly how we should have expected him to feel. DeChambeau is not known for having close friends on Tour, and his professional ego and motivations are both tied to upsetting convention. Patrick Reed and Sergio Garcia are perpetually convinced they are being treated unfairly, which made them vulnerable to big promises of a better, easier life. When has Jordan Spieth ever acted like he wanted to do what Patrick Reed did? They had a successful partnership in the Ryder Cup and Spieth lobbied to ditch Reed for Thomas anyway.

Is all of this easy to say in hindsight? Absolutely. But Monahan’s job was to read the room. When he misread it the first time, he panicked.

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Even with all of those missteps, Monahan would be on more solid footing today if he had simply shown up at the Tour players’ meeting on June 6 in Toronto and said this:

“Gentlemen, I have some surprising news, and I wanted you all to hear it first.

“First of all, all of LIV Golf’s lawsuits have been dismissed and cannot be brought back.

“Second: The Saudi Arabian government would like to give us full control over the future of LIV Golf—and invest billions in our Tour instead of our rival. We would, of course, retain control of the PGA Tour and our business operations as well. All they want is one seat on our Policy Board and a minority stake in our business.

“Don’t worry—I didn’t commit to anything. I didn’t even get into too many specifics with them. I wanted to talk to you first, let you digest the possibility, and then we can choose whether to proceed. But whatever we decide, we are in a better position now than we were a month ago, because those lawsuits are history.”

***

That all would have been true—and probably would have been well-received.

But of course, that is not what Monahan did.

Instead, while the vast majority of his players had no idea their Tour was talking to the Saudis, Monahan appeared on CNBC alongside PIF chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan and willingly let CNBC describe the deal as a “merger.” The Tour’s own press release made the deal sound inevitable; it did not use the word “framework,” and only mentioned the need to “finalize terms of the agreement” in the final sentence of the release.

The rollout was a disaster, but it probably wasn’t an accident: In exchange for favorable terms, the PGA and DP World Tours let Al-Rumayyan take a victory lap.

Monahan started 2022 as a commissioner who prided himself on relationships and honesty. By June of 2023, he was acting like the truth didn’t matter as long as the business deal was good.

Monahan had miscalculated again. Players were so livid at the messaging that the terms almost seemed beside the point—and if they decide they like the terms, that doesn’t mean they like the messenger. Trust is broken, possibly for good. When a Golfweek column ripped the increasingly influential Patrick Cantlay for allegedly flirting with LIV Golf, Adam Scott defended Cantlay in an Instagram post, which fellow stars Thomas, Rickie Fowler and Will Zalatoris all shared. Whether the column was fair or accurate is not really the point. After Monahan’s about-face and secret dealings, stars have no patience for anybody painting them as the bad guys. Monahan may have lost the constituency he worked so hard to save.

Monahan said he knew people would see him as a “hypocrite.” They saw him as that and worse. A sellout. Duplicitous. Soulless. He earned that.

But the Jay Monahan who sat next to Yasir Al-Rumayyan was the same Jay Monahan who trusted Brooks Koepka to keep his word and who listened to what his stars decided in Delaware: A nice guy who was determined to please the nearest person who could help him save the PGA Tour. As Monahan returns to work today, he can reasonably argue that he succeeded. But who will believe him?