Hoylake, England | Every Wednesday morning of Open Week, the CEO of an R&A faces a grilling not unlike that of a public company president at the company’s annual general meeting, except that those providing the roast are not shareholders but representatives of the global golf media gathered for the fourth major championship of the year.
It’s the CEO’s most general annual speech, the moment he addresses issues in golf and it’s a reminder that R&A rules golf in all parts of the world except for the United States and Mexico. This meeting has been a feature of Open Weeks since Michael Bonallack’s time as R&A Secretary (1983-1999) and possibly Keith Mackenzie before that. In other words, a long time.
So, shortly after 11 a.m. here on Wednesday, Martin Slumbers sat in a tent adjoining the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, where the 151st Open Championship would begin the next day. He was wearing an R&A Open logo windbreaker with a fashionable stand-up collar. His gray hair was slightly matted, the frames of his glasses were dark rather than multicolored as preferred by Keith Bailey, CEO of the DP World Tour, and his pants were navy, not white as worn by Seth Wu, CEO of the PGA of America.
This was not a yard he was born to live in. He spent 30 years in banking, most recently with Deutsche Bank, where Wu was CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas before taking over as PGA of America in 2018. “He was very good and organized in the back office,” a colleague at that bank once said of Sleep. Now he was front and center, more straightforward in his explanation of R&A work than Bonallack though perhaps less charismatic than Peter Dawson, his R&A predecessor.
Slippers almost immediately referred to the civil war in golf, referencing the June 6 agreement between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, saying, “We are not a party to the agreement, and while we absolutely welcome an end to disruption in the men’s professional game, there is still much to be understood. We will await the outcome with interest.”
“That’s what I really care about: ensuring golf thrives in 50 years.” Martin Sleepers
He said he sent his best wishes to Jay Monahan and welcomed him back two days ago to serve as commissioner for the PGA Tour. In their actions regarding the issue of distance, the Sleepers said, he was following through on what USGA CEO Mike Wan once said: Doing nothing is not an option.
Remember, Sleep was a former banker, and so it wasn’t surprising to hear that as a gamekeeper, he was deeply concerned about the impact of the rise in handbags in the professional men’s game. If he mentioned the word “sustainability” once, he mentioned it 10 times. “We have to balance the prize fund at the Open [it was raised to $16.5 million this year] While ensuring appropriate investment in grassroots and new golf initiatives, ensuring pathways from the elite from amateur golf to the professional game…
You could put this another way and say that golf should come up with an approach that is sustainable (that word again) in the long term and not just a short term solution. With genuine focus and great passion, he said, “That’s what I really care about: to ensure golf thrives in 50 years.”
It was announced that R&A opened the African Amateur Championship, a 72-hole stroke-play event for 72 men from that continent for the first time in February at Leopard Creek in South Africa, with the winner receiving an invitation to the 2024 Open Championship. This event will complement the existing amateur championships organized by R&A in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions. It’s all part of R&A’s attempts to grow the game around the world, as well as create a path that will enable gamers from Africa to play at the highest level.
R&A is sometimes criticized for being too masculine, which can sometimes be justified but not always. It may, for example, be the only governing body in golf that has a female vice chair of the tournament committee and another woman on the committee. In announcing the men’s 72 African Amateur, did R&A make a mistake by saying that a women’s-only event for 20 elite players from the region would also be held at the same time as the men’s event at Leopard Creek in South Africa? only 20?
Drowsiness spoke, touching on other issues such as the lack of open coverage by a terrestrial broadcaster. He declined to say much about the model domestic rule proposed jointly by the R&A and the USGA, which might relate to the type of ball used in elite men’s amateur and professional competition. If the feud with the LIV is the golf civil war, then controlling the distance the golf ball travels is the ugly stepchild of the game. The MLR is on suspension through the end of next month and until then, Slumbers said, he doesn’t want to comment on any remarks made by senior players.
Provide a little something new about golf’s official golf score with LIV players, another ongoing discussion. He said he’s glad 30 percent of golfers are women “and that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.” He briefly broached the new par-3 17th hole at Hoylake, realizing that the criticism had already been leveled, but noted that the 12th at Augusta National, the 17th at TPC Sawgrass, and the eighth at Royal Troon were all really good short holes. He even made a joke on a journalist’s account.
Sleep has a reputation for being a safe hand, and this performance didn’t change that impression.
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