JOLLAN, Scotland — PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan is back in action next week, and some high-profile players think he has to win back their trust after members were left in the dark by a backdoor deal with the Saudi wealth fund behind LIV Golf.
“I would say he has a lot of tough questions to answer on his comeback,” Xander Schauffele said Wednesday at the Scottish Open, where he is defending his title. “And yes, I don’t trust people easily. He used to have my trust and he has a lot of it now.
“So I don’t stand alone when I say that.”
A week after Monahan announced a business partnership with the Public Investment Fund, the tour said the “medical situation” had prompted Monahan to hand over the day-to-day operations of the tour to two executives.
He sent a note to players last week saying he would resume his role on July 17th. Monahan did not participate in Tuesday’s Senate hearing in which documents outlined some of the conversations that led to the framework agreement.
The players were sent a 275-page dossier of documents obtained by Congress prior to the three-hour hearing. While some have seen part of it or read some excerpts from the documents, Jordan Spieth chose to play golf at North Berwick instead.
Spieth was also asked if Monahan had trust issues with the players.
“A little bit, just based on the conversations I’ve had with the guys. And I think he realizes that,” said Speth. “I’m sure he’s preparing a plan to try to rebuild it.”
Scotty Scheffler said he watched part of the session and didn’t learn much. Then again, the #1 player in the world isn’t sure how much he knows in the first place.
Monahan and two members of the board — Jamie Dunn and Chairman Ed Herlihy — negotiated the agreement announced June 6 with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.
“As a player on tour, we still don’t have a lot of clarity as to what’s going on, and that’s a little worrying,” Scheffler said. “They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we really don’t have the information we need. I watched a part of it yesterday that didn’t learn anything.”
Rory McIlroy chose not to say anything.
McIlroy was seen as the strongest voice in the PGA Tour’s battle against Saudi-funded LIV Golf. He said he felt like “a sacrificial lamb” when he spoke to the media the day after the deal was announced, during the Canadian Open.
McIlroy gave two televised interviews ahead of the Scottish Open, which starts on Thursday at the Renaissance Club. Then he passed in front of dozens of reporters. When asked if he had time to speak, his manager stepped in to say McIlroy would not be speaking about the hearing.
McIlroy’s name appeared in a Dec. 8 email sent to Dunn from Roger Devlin, a British businessman who got on the PIF side to help repair the golf’s failing state. Devlin said he arranged for McIlroy to meet Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, last November in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Devlin described the meeting as “very cordial and constructive”.
Rory explained that in accepting the meeting he was only speaking for himself, though he believed his views were widely shared by Tiger. [Woods] “He also stressed that he was not seeking personal financial gain, he was simply trying to standardize the game,” Devlin wrote.
McIlroy briefly mentioned the meeting after the first round of the Canadian Open when he said he met Al-Rumayyan.
“I played a supporting role with Yasir in Dubai a few years ago,” McIlroy said last month. “I was with him at a random Formula 1 race a couple of years ago in Austin. I saw him in Dubai at the end of last year. So obviously he’s been in and around the golf world and he’s obviously been in the wider sporting world… He runs in the same circles as a lot of The people I know.”
Schavelli said he glanced at some documents and started watching a link to the session until he decided sleep was more important.
He referred to this as “one of the rough times” on the PGA Tour but said it would be less of a concern if the players stayed together. But his most important thing was more transparency and more player participation.
“There is not much communication at the moment and things are a bit worrying and there is a kind of division between the management and the players, if you want to call it that,” he said. “And I hope the positive thing that comes out of that is more communication, more transparency and a kind of understanding of where the tour is going with us kind of being ambassadors for it.”
Meanwhile, the Scottish Open is about to start and the Open Championship next week, the main final of the year, with the FedEx Cup qualifiers a month after that.
“I just try to keep my head down and play golf,” Scheffler said. “I don’t get much into that stuff. I love playing golf on the PGA Tour, and that’s where it’s at for me. I hope this has been around for a long time. I felt like we were doing a good job before and then it was agreed and now we have to handle the whole deal.”
He said that while he appreciated the private nature of the negotiations, “I hope our players’ representatives definitely need more involvement in the process.”