With just a month to a promised agreement in golf’s ‘potential alliance’ and reports grow that golf will head into the New Year with Jay Monahan standing down from his role as PGA Tour Commissioner.
Monahan, 53, has been under attack from both sides in the countdown to December 31st when the golf world hopefully will learn of the nature of how the broken bridges in the men’s professional game will be mended. If that should take place, as all golf followers want to see, there’s more than a few who also will be pleased to see him go after seven-years at the helm.
Though in the countdown the much-anticipated details of the ‘agreement’ Monahan has revealed the reasons for him standing down eight days after the June 6th news that rocked golf to its very foundations.
Monahan has been most noticeable for all the wrong reasons in the long period leading-up to that Tuesday ahead of the Canadian Open, and he was even more talked about until returning his job on July 17th
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan (Photo – PGA)
“I think what’s happening to me in my head around that time frame was not too dissimilar to what was happening to me in my head in the months prior to it,” Monahan said in a summit on Tuesday night at the New York Times ‘DealBook Summit’ in New York City.
“This had been an extended conflict. It had affected me, my mental and my physical health.”
Monahan, who has been PGA Tour Commissioner since January 2017, also revealed it was walking along the Ponte Vedra beach five days following that now infamous ‘X’ social message, that he prayed and got back to his residence saying to his wife, “Honey? I think I need help.”
“I knew I’m the first person to run into a fight,” Monahan said. “Anybody that knows me will tell you that. And I knew the perception was that I was running away from a fight, and that was excruciating. That hurt me to my core.
“You’ll hear people talk a lot about ‘I focus on the things I can control.’ I wasn’t doing a good job of that. I was confusing that. I am fully focused on the things I control.
“And so, you have to realize that it’s part of life, it’s part of who I am, it’s my truth. And I am a work in progress. And I’m just every single day trying to improve.”
Monahan used the summit to also reveal he is scheduled to meet with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, next week to continue negotiations on a potential alliance, and Monahan said he hopes to reach a deal with the PIF and at least one other investor before the end of the year.”
“We’re having conversations with multiple parties,” Monahan said. “The deadline for our conversations with PIF, as you know, is a firm target. I’ll be with Yasir next week, and we will continue to advance our conversations. And I think it’s pretty well known that there’s a large number of other interested parties that we’re also pushing to think about.
“When this gets finalized, the PGA Tour is going to be in a position that I talked about earlier, where again, the athletes are owners in their sport, and you’ve got not only the PIF, but you’ve likely got another co-investor, with significant experience in business, in sport and brand that’s going to help take the PGA Tour to another level and help us take share from other sports and even be more competitive.
“What’s most important to our players is that they go from the model of being independent contractors to being owners.”
New Players Advisory Board member, Tiger Woods did not hold back in his thoughts on how Monahan has dealt with this whole saga.
“He (Monahan) understands what happened prior to that can’t happen again and won’t happen again, not with the players that are involved and not with the player directors having the role that we have,” said a defiant-sounding Woods.
