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PGA Tour players are “done” by their commissioner, Guy Monahan, Hunter Mahan says.
via a tweet posted this weekComments came from six-time Tour winner and three-time Tour winner Ryder Cooper After the Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund agreed a deal that would create a new for-profit foundation and end pending litigation between the two sides. In the weeks since the announcement in early June between Tours and the fund backing year-old LIV Golf, players said they had received little information about the details of the deal, with Jordan Spieth, Xander Schavelli, Rory McIlroy, Tom Kim and Scottie Scheffler being questioned about the deal. Operation this week at the Scottish Open.
To Mahan’s attention, Spieth’s answer on Wednesday was to a question about possible “trust issues” Monahan would have to contend with. Below is Speth’s answer, which was Shared by Twitter NUCLR GOLFMahan’s comment came in response.
“Yeah, kind of, just based on the conversations I’ve had with the guys, and I think he realizes that,” Speth said. “I’m sure he’s preparing a plan to try to rebuild it.”
To which Mahan wrote:
“The players are done with him, except I’m not what the process is to eliminate him. Great time for the players to find real representation.”
Mahan’s comment came a day after Ron Price, the tour’s chief operating officer, and Jamie Dunn, an independent director on the tour’s policy council, were grilled about the Saudi deal at a Senate subcommittee hearing. There, GOLF’s Alan Bastable reported, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) at one point asked Price how many players had been notified of a potential Tour-PIF before it was announced to the public on June 6.
“I don’t think any players were notified,” Price said.
“no one?” Blumenthal said.
“No sir.”
“Not a single player has been notified?” Blumenthal continued. “You are a membership organization, your members are the players, and it does not exist without the players, but you did not tell any of them about the negotiations, much less the outcome, before announcing it publicly?”
“It was a binding litigation settlement,” Price said. “And then we told the players that we’re going to go through a process to get them to be fully involved in whatever we’re doing in terms of the final agreement, which is what we’re going to do.”
At the Scottish Open, the hearing raised a series of questions for the players. On Wednesday, Scheffler was asked if there was anything he was “concerned about going forward.”
“They kept saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t have the information we need,” Scheffler said Wednesday. I watched part of it [the hearing] Yesterday and I did not learn anything. So I really don’t know what to say.”
Scheffler was asked, should the players have been involved in helping craft the Tour-Saudi Arabia deal?
“Should I have been?” Scheffler said. “Probably not. But I’m sure a few members of our players may have participated.”
Notably, the agreement was negotiated by just four people — Monahan, Policy Board members Ed Herlihy and Jimmy Dunn, and Yasser Al-Rumayyan, PIF governor. Monahan took a leave of absence from office in mid-June to treat an undisclosed illness, but in the weeks leading up to Monahan’s departure, Schavelli said, the commissioner was more communicative.
“If you want to call it one of the more exciting times on the tour, the guy was supposed to be there for us, he wasn’t,” said Schavelli. “He obviously had some health issues. I’m glad he said he was feeling so much better. But yeah, I would say he had a lot of tough questions to answer on his comeback, and yeah, I don’t trust people easily. He had my confidence, and he didn’t He has more of them now, so I’m not alone in saying that.
“Yeah, he’ll just have to answer our questions when he gets back.”