Jay Monahan opens up on controversial pre-LIV ‘feeder tour’ decision

Before LIV Golf had officially begun its wind-down process, and before it had declared bankruptcy, and before its Saudi backers had withdrawn their funding, when it still represented an existential threat to the established golf world, one question followed PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan around:

Why hadn’t he stopped the Saudis before they got started?

The implication here was that the Saudis — before they’d launched LIV, and as they were exploring the specifics of a new super-charged team-based golf league — had reached out to Monahan, seeking partnership, and that Monahan had ignored their call, and thus golf’s great war began.

Now Monahan has finally offered his side of the story.

Speaking to Eamon Lynch as part of a new Golf Channel show, Eamon Lynch Has Questions, Monahan addressed this particular bit of second-guessing.

“A lot of your critics said at the time that a lot of this could have been avoided had you taken a call from the Saudis at the outset, which doesn’t seem like such a smart piece of advice now that they’ve cut and run from the sport,” Lynch asked. “But why didn’t you take that call at the start?”

Monahan challenged the very premise of the question — that he was approached in good faith at any point — and instead painted the picture of a covert recruiting operation.

“First of all, I’m not aware of the ‘call’ that was made to me,” he said. “I do think anytime you’re gonna be negotiating with someone, you want to understand what their intent is, you want to understand how sincere they are. And if someone’s going to be calling me, or if someone did call me, you have to recognize, depending on what time this ‘call’ happened, that they had been at our tournaments as a team with their lawyers, recruiting our players, meeting with agents, doing all the things that they felt that they needed to do in order to stand up their league.

“I think the most important thing here is that it was their belief that franchise-based team golf was a more successful long-term proposition for the game than golf the way it’s played on the PGA Tour. That that model that is so successful in stick-and-ball sports could immediately translate to men’s professional golf, and that ultimately would win. And they saw us — they were saying this to others — as a feeder tour.”

That last bit felt like the heart of his answer, and one of the most important pieces of the interview: the Tour, which has been the world’s premier golf league for essentially the entirety of its existence, had no interest in engaging with a new tour seeking to exist as its superior. The nuance of the situation is tough to capture in a single sentence — for instance, when LIV first formed, the Premier Golf League was still trying to go live, too, and yes I know this all feels like ancient history — but it paints a clearer picture of Monahan’s perspective.

“So if you’re gonna meet, then I think a couple things have to happen,” he continued. “You either have to agree that you need to become [a feeder tour] or largely become that, or you need to look inside and say, ‘What we’ve created is the right model for our players, for our fans, and for everybody that we serve.’ And that’s what was guiding us during that timeframe.

“It was not a pleasant period,” Monahan concluded. “We were focusing on the things that we could control, knowing what it was that we thought they were trying to do.”

Elsewhere in the interview Monahan acknowledged he’d handle some things differently with the benefit of hindsight. He specifically cited the rollout of the Tour’s framework agreement with LIV which he cited as his “biggest regret”. As for the fact that the PGA Tour endures, while LIV is winding down? Monahan declined the opportunity to take a victory lap.

“I’m extremely proud of where we are and I’m extremely grateful to everyone that contributed to getting us here,” he said. “It’s not about me. You know, I was the leader of the organization during a challenging time. I did the best I could alongside everybody else to get us to the right outcome.”

Based on a quick browse of the interview I’m not sure there’s a place to watch the entire wide-ranging interview — but it will re-air at some point on Golf Channel and clips can be found here.