Sentry Insurance signage is displayed between the Kapalua Plantation Course’s 10th and 13th fairways during the Sentry Tournament of Champions on Jan. 6. The event is set to open the 2024 PGA Tour season in early January. The Maui News / MATTHEW THAYER photo
The future of professional golf was thrown into complete flux with Tuesday’s announcement from the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the Public Investment Fund — the Saudi Arabian government’s investment arm — that “a landmark agreement to unify the game of golf on a global basis” had been reached, leaving nearly all in the golf world stunned.
While there are still many questions to be answered for all, the Sentry Tournament of Champions appears to be well situated in its current position as the presumed opener of the 2024 PGA Tour season at the Kapalua Plantation Course in seven months.
Pete McPartland, the Sentry Insurance chairman of the board, president and CEO, said in a text message to The Maui News on Wednesday: “We are still digesting things, however, I don’t anticipate anything that changes the positive path that the Sentry Tournament of Champions is on. We are very well positioned for the future of professional golf.”
Sentry TOC Executive Director Max Novena referred inquiries from The Maui News to Tuesday’s news release from the three entities announcing the merger.
Maui resident Mark Rolfing, a veteran analyst for The Golf Channel and NBC Sports, said he is still waiting for answers as well.
McPartland
“I really am concerned about really how little information we have,” Rolfing said in a phone interview from his home in Kapalua on Wednesday. “People are making judgments and saying things really without much information at all. Now, that is a problem in itself.”
Jay Monahan began his role as PGA Tour commissioner at the 2017 TOC. During his tenure, the event on Maui has grown to one of the most significant in the world outside of the majors.
After guiding the Tour through the COVID-19 pandemic, Monahan then took on the threat of top players defecting, sometimes for nine-figure deals, to LIV Golf, the upstart league that was funded by the Saudis and started in 2021.
Monahan said for the last two years that the PGA Tour would not ever join forces with LIV Golf, but Tuesday’s announcement has been viewed by some as a complete turnaround from that stance.
“The commissioner had promised early on in his tenure, he had promised more transparency,” Rolfing said. “And there has been no transparency in this at all. The reason he has said there hasn’t been any is because he had to have total confidentiality, you know, in order to get it done.
Rofling
“I have a lot of questions — it really puts the Sentry Tournament of Champions in a difficult spot from a timing standpoint — but the reality is something has dramatically changed and Monahan said it yesterday, ‘yes, there has been a change,’ because a year ago he had a completely different position on this.”
Monahan held a press conference Tuesday after a meeting with players who are in the field at this week’s Canadian Open.
“I would describe the meeting as intense, certainly heated,” Monahan said. “This is a very complex — obviously it’s been a very dynamic and complex couple of years, and for players, I’m not surprised that — this is an awful lot to ask them to digest, and this is a significant change for us in the direction that we were going down.
“But as I’m trying to explain and I will continue to explain as we go forward, this ultimately is a decision that I think is in the best interest of all of the members of the PGA Tour, puts us in a position of control, allows us to partner with the PIF in a constructive and productive way, to have them invest with us, again, running the PGA Tour, having these three entities under one for-profit LLC.”
Monahan has been under intense scrutiny from media across the globe since Tuesday’s announcement.
Rory McIlroy speaks to the media about the deal merging the PGA Tour and European tour with Saudi Arabia’s golf interests at the Canadian Open on Wednesday. The Canadian Press via AP Nathan Denette photo
“In terms of how did we get to this point and how did we go from a confrontation to now being partners?” he said. “We just realized that we were better off together than we were fighting or apart, and by thinking about the game at large and eliminating a lot of the friction that’s been out there and doing this in a way where we can move forward, we can move forward and grow the PGA Tour, and I’m excited about the changes that we’re going to make coming into 2024, go through the process, ultimately, of evaluating LIV and figuring out the direction for team golf going forward, it put us in a position where, again, we’re in control, we have an investor, and ultimately for the game, we’re moving forward constructively.”
Rory McIlroy has been a staunch supporter of the PGA Tour and he stood by Monahan when he sat down for his presser in Canada on Wednesday.
“I think with the headlines being, ‘merges with LIV,’ like that’s not the — I mean, if you look at the structure of how it’s structured now, this new company sits above everything,” McIlroy said. “Jay’s the CEO of that. So technically anyone that is involved with LIV now would answer to Jay. So the PGA Tour will have control of everything. And one thing as well is, whether you like it or not, the PIF were going to keep spending the money in golf.
“At least the PGA Tour now controls how that money is spent. So, you know, if you’re thinking about one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy? At the end of the day, money talks and you would rather have them as a partner.”
McIlroy has had highly noted confrontations with the LIV Golf crowd and has not ever minced his words.
“I still hate LIV. Like, I hate LIV. Like, I hope it goes away. And I would fully expect that it does,” he said during Wednesday’s press conference. “And I think that’s where the distinction here is. This is the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the PIF. Very different from LIV.”
Rolfing noted that the stunning announcement caught the entire golf world by nearly complete surprise.
“It seems to be a fairly closed discussion with only a few people that the players were not involved in,” Rolfing said. “Rory said that he only found out yesterday morning about it. People don’t seem to know much and there are a lot of people that are quite unhappy.”
Rolfing noted he feels this is far from a done deal.
“Keep in mind that this is only a preliminary deal, this is a memo of understanding and it still would need approval from the PGA Tour policy board and after that it’s going to come into intense scrutiny by the Justice Department because the whole LIV Golf argument for the past couple years has been that the PGA Tour was a monopoly and was keeping a rival tour out,” Rolfing said. “Well, if that was the claim before, this is way worse than that — this is three entities getting together to create a monopoly to keep somebody else out.
“So, I would think this is going to take a long time to get settled. I don’t mean a matter of weeks, I would think a long time. So the question then becomes what happens in the meantime?”
The bottom line for Rolfing on the startling announcement was “there has to be a financial reason that the commissioner of the PGA Tour felt the kind of pressure he felt to do this so quickly. There had to be a financial pressure.”
Rolfing pointed to the money needed from the PGA Tour’s reserves to help struggling tournaments coming out of the pandemic and then again it had to find money to compete with LIV Golf.
“The Sentry purse went up $7 million, that did not come from the title sponsor,” Rolfing said. “I’m sure the PGA Tour has taken a huge financial hit last year coming up with all the money that they had to have to have all these designated events. Then if you pile on a looming legal battle, which was going to cost them tens of millions of dollars and to me it all adds up to where was all this money going to come from? Because they don’t have a partner like the Public Investment Fund.”
The ramifications for the Sentry Tournament of Champions is also a big unknown. The event has already been announced as the 2024 season opener and the precise dates in early January will be announced in a couple weeks.
“We don’t know, that tournament was supposed to be the first tournament of the new world order,” Rolfing said. “It was supposed to be the first tournament of the designated event series, there were so many details to be worked out: What the tournament’s actual name was, how the exact field was qualified.
“We had gotten to a point where we were pretty certain that we knew what was going to happen with that and there was going to be some time here to get ready and get organized. But with this now and with the discussion, for example, that there are going to be after this season a path for players to get back onto the PGA Tour, I’m not sure you could even say right now who would or who wouldn’t be in the field. And if they did it on a case-by-case basis, that would be difficult at best. I just don’t know that all this can get settled.”
Rolfing added: “We’ve got two issues: One is, we’re the first tournament and have to set the bar and the second is we’re on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. … Just all sorts of things that have to get settled pretty quickly.”
* Robert Collias is at rcollias@mauinews.com.
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