by Tiger Woods’s body and golf game may be decrepit, but his press conference game has not changed after watching his Tuesday appearance ahead of his Hero World Challenge. Looked at from 10,000 feet, the whole standard obligation of a show is amusing. Tiger is not ready to play. He does not know when he will be and does not have a timeline. He does not know how often he will be able to play if and when he’s ready. He still loves to and wants to compete but his body can’t do it right now, however he feels so much less pain after the most recent procedure.
We’ve done this song-and-dance for a decade now. The press asked their questions. Tiger checked his boxes with precise ambiguity. Then we all reacted with over-meticulous analysis and assigned overweighted importance. The Euro Press was like a dog with a bone on the Ryder Cup pay issues. Everyone really played their roles to perfection.
One new flavor at this annual customary show was the questions about “the future” of pro golf given Tiger’s role on various boards and committees. Tiger played the same song, just a different verse, and used the Department of Justice as supporting vocals on why he can’t say more. What’s going on with the Saudi PIF negotiations? Some things will get done. At some point. But he’s not yet sure in “what form or shape.”
Separately, it is a bit miserable that Tiger Woods is spending some of the sunset of his days expending mental and emotional energy on trying to repair the shambles of the pro golf world. I am not deluded enough to believe he is crunching all the numbers or the key dealmaker at the table, but he’s certainly involved and these are the questions he’s fielding anytime he appears publicly and probably amongst friends in private. He’s not yet some ceremonial voice like Jack Nicklaus or Gary Player who can come in off the top rope and comment without consequence. He built so much of the modern value that allowed one indistinguishable tour pro after another to make millions. And now he’s spending real time and energy having to work, or at least comment, on the mess created by a group of chucklefuck leaders and players. That sucks for him and feels wrong that this is what pro golf has given back to him in his later pro days. But hey, at least it’s a boon to Tony Finau’s wife’s content creation.
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Finau is the subject of the latest LIV Golf Hot Stove, which really warms up this time each year as the letter jackets get tailored. He withdrew from Tiger’s Hero World Challenge. Then Twitter started doing its thing with rumors he’s going to LIV and more big names are soon to be announced. #Sources have said it’s both very real, and also not true. Some of it is grifter-fueled, some of it is real, as LIV continues its incursion. There are rumors, roster openings, a Thomas Pieters trade, and a hot stove. Unless you’re really into the Hero World Challenge or the Crypto.com Showdown match, it’s not a terrible way to provide fodder to thirsty golf fans in an offseason. Finau does not move a needle, per se. But he would be part of a cumulative talent drain on the PGA Tour that can’t really afford much more, certainly from a quality perspective and possibly even contractually with partners and sponsors who expect a certain collection of talent. But this is why Jay Monahan makes the big bucks.
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A Sportico report on Black Friday disclosing Monahan’s 2023 salary was instant catnip. He made $23 million in 2023, and as another business reporter at Sportico pointed out, that’s less than only one player that year in on-course earnings and bonus money. I do not wish to normalize this as good and sensible, but commissioners, even ones you think are terrible, make a lot of money. A lot of unskilled dolts make a lot of money or fall into it by birth. It seems like an egregiously high amount for a commissioner with such a low approval rating and checkered performance record. As Jack Milko points out, it is high on the sports commissioner scale even. But what I find most damning is how it stacks up against his players’ on-course totals for the year. There are many off-course dollars for those guys, but I still think that looks the most problematic. His players may be furious with him, but at least he still has a job, unlike the LPGA’s recently departed leader.
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan at the Players Championship.
Mollie Marcoux Samaan resigned on Monday after completing just three years as LPGA commissioner. There had been whispers of discontent with her leadership early in her tenure, but few went on record in the same way some of the men’s players you’ve seen blasting Monahan in recent years. Marcoux Samaan, from several accounts, was not very good. But there’s a scapegoating here that may actually overinflate the real impact a commissioner might have. Beth Ann Nichols, the ace of the LPGA beat, posited in her report, “As women’s sports experience an unprecedented amount of success, is the LPGA truly capitalizing on the momentum?” This is a big question that seems to be much more complicated than beyond “this was caused by Marcoux Samaan and will be fixed by her departure.” The LPGA has other product issues and it doesn’t have Caitlin Clark, a generational meteor for growth. The next leader can certainly improve and chart a better course, but there should have been more 1) outspoken critiques of Marcoux Samaan’s leadership if it was truly hapless and recognized as such right away and 2) accounting for how the LPGA can better attach itself to the great women’s sports ascendancy.
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The ascendancy of modern golf media brands and voices was largely borne out of new platforms and mediums, but also the lard and bloat in traditional media platforms that opened a lane for voice. The traditional money has recognized and followed this. Titleist, which has dominated magazine pages and TV networks for years, sometimes attaching a heavy hand to its ad spend, has astutely invested in many of these new media brands, including the latest re-launch of Skratch, the well-funded and PGA Tour-backed outlet, on Tuesday. Titleist is a founding partner, appearing across the website and four times in a quick one-minute re-launch video. This is no critique of Skratch, which now has talented people and I hope does well (rising tides), or any of the others getting Titleist or equipment money — go get it! But merely an observation of their money migration and how ubiquitous it has become across modern, and some smaller independent, golf media.
One brand that never made it was a pitch my former employer, Vox Media, made to the PGA Tour about a decade or so ago. A delegation proposed a new brand to capture then-young (now old) millennials and digital audiences, but the Tour eventually went a different direction and created Skratch. One person in that delegation was Chad Mumm, the skilled founder of Pro Shop, which now oversees Skratch. Chad and Skratch have done lots of different and great work in the intervening years on different roads that have now re-connected to this joint venture taking over the thing they opted to create when they turned down the other Mumm-involved option. But it is an interconnected world that had me wondering if all this probably could have been done quicker, more efficiently, and at a far less cost to the Tour from the outset. But that wouldn’t be the PGA Tour way, would it?
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