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Hey,
Sorry this week’s edition is a day late.
Players week is a busy one in general for me, but if this fella can carry the bag for a bronze medalist for four days at TPC Sawgrass at the age of 76 then surely I can crank out 2,500 words on pro golf on time.
Onto the news.
Jay Monahan spoke for an hour on Tuesday, and it was at times difficult to watch. Here are three takeaways I had from the morning at TPC Sawgrass.
1. Disposition matters: Jay speaks, what, twice a year to the media and he couldn’t help popping off at least a couple of times about a variety of things. My thought was: Man, Rory spends more time in front of a mic in the heat of competition at every tournament than Jay does across a year and he still couldn’t help himself.
I have no evidence of this, and there is no way to measure demeanor, but Jay definitely does not carry around an “I’ll go to war for that dude” vibe.
There are two types of great communicators in the leadership world.
The first is the hype man, which is especially tough to pull off for a CEO. The guy who makes you want to run through a wall for him. It’s a lot to ask anyone to be this guy.
The second, and more common, is the “I’m in control, and I know things you don’t know” guy. In the golf world, think Fred Ridley or Mike Whan. They mostly interact coyly but with something resembling amusement.
Monahan is none of those. Instead, his voice gets firm when it should be normal. His mannerisms get loose when they should be composed. He just seems to constantly hit all the wrong notes at many of the worst times.
It’s impossible to pick up through a transcript or even a soundbite. But if you watch him for 30 minutes or an hour, the reality that his disposition — how he presents himself and his organization — is poor becomes obvious.
Disposition matters in leadership because it infers trust and belief, and boy, Jay does not have it.
2. Hubris matters: One of the more interesting exchanges came when he was asked about Rahm’s departure and got extremely defensive about it. The posture was one of, We’re good! Everything is going great, our depth is our greatest asset!
Honestly, kind of the “this is fine” meme in real life.
Except, people who actually pay attention know it’s not. The air is out of the balloon. That may or may not be Jay’s fault (it kind of is but it’s mostly not), but it doesn’t change reality.
I think what golf fans like myself would rather hear is, Hey, yeah it sucks that Cam Smith and Jon Rahm aren’t going to be here this week. I hate it as much as you do, and we’re all working to re-unify all of the best players in the world soon so that this championship is again one of the most anticipated throughout the year.
That seems … not that difficult?
And he’s in a tough spot. I sympathize with that. He’s the commissioner of the PGA Tour, not the commissioner of Pro Golf. And most of us watching care a lot more about Pro Golf than we do about the PGA Tour. So that’s difficult. It truly is. But to seemingly not even try to understand that and empathize with fans is tough, as a fan, to see.
3. Majors matter: There were thousands of words uttered in this presser, but the most important tournament in golf was only mentioned once. A reporter asked a question about “Masters” champion Jon Rahm.
Again, Jay Monahan doesn’t run the Masters so this is less a criticism of him and more a point about what is broken in general. Pro sports leagues are contextualized by their pinnacles. We know this, right? The Super Bowl. The World Series. The NBA Finals. Everything that happens throughout the rest of the year points to those things. Everything flows from them.
That the Tour is the most prominent organization in pro golf but doesn’t touch the most important events is not only very normal sport-y, but also quite a problem. The Tour is not incentivized to even acknowledge the events that give it whatever context it has in the professional game.
This is wild!
So when something comes in and disrupts what it had going, the very thing that’s there to lean on or fall back on — a path to the majors or contextualization from the majors — is not something that’s prioritized by the PGA Tour (and rightfully so). It’s all so strange and broken and misaligned, and I wish that wasn’t the case.
But no matter what Monahan says or thinks about the future, I don’t feel the same excitement about this week’s event at TPC Sawgrass as I have in the past. There’s a Rahm-shaped hole1 on the PGA Tour, and I have no idea what’s going to fix that.
1. Every time Jordan Spieth has averaged more than 1.3 strokes gained in the three months leading into the Masters, he has finished in the top 11 (and in seven of the eight instances, he has finished in the top four).
2. Every time Jordan Spieth has averaged less than 1.3 strokes gained in the three months leading into the Masters, he has finished outside the top 20.
Currently: 1.8 SG since January 1.
1. You know … you start to question some things career-wise when you get incessantly tagged into stuff like this. I do have questions, though. A lot of them.
(I can’t believe I’m typing this but …) Here’s more on the incident from the Athletic (whose daily newsletter I’ve really been enjoying recently).
According to an Iditarod rule, if an edible big-game animal is killed during the race under these conditions, the musher is required to gut the animal and report the kill at the next checkpoint. Furthermore, any mushers trailing the incident must help salvage meat, and no teams can pass until the initial team is on its way forward again.
The Athletic
2. We could have gotten a four-player cut at the API. Or five or seven. We ended up with an 11-player cut. Very bizarre stuff.
For the record, I am in favor of the 100- 120-player events with bigger cuts and mid- and postseason relegation. Global tour. Blow it up. Roll it back. I want it all. Apparently, so does the PIF.
3. Spieth playing left-handed at Bay Hill. Possibly playing 17 at TPC Sawgrass with two clubs. He might play Augusta with six drivers. Who can say.
I'm not at the Players this year unfortunately, but if I could get Monahan in a sit down, these are the five questions I would ask him. I wrote them down before his press conference on Tuesday and commented on the ones he was asked.
1. Is everyone on the same page as it relates to moving forward with the PIF? If not, what needs to happen for everyone to get on the same page?
Update: Based on his non-answer about his job being called into question, I don’t know that everyone is on the same page!
2. Why is players having equity in a league and the power to control how that league operates a good idea?
3. What do you believe is the right number of events for a premier golf league in 2024?2
4. What are the reasons fans have to trust you?
Update: Rory said the Tour is in a stronger position than when Jay took over. It definitely has more money than it had when he took over!
5. There is obviously no front-facing vision, but is there at least vision-casting happening behind the scenes? Take me through how that plays out (who’s casting vision, how it’s being received).
Spieth gonna end up with a plaque on every Tour course!
Patrick Cantlay said the following at Bay Hill last week.
“I've met a number or I have a number of friends that really didn't play golf growing up, and they have gotten into it in their late 20s or early 30s and they started playing and they become addicted to the game. Now, they're fans, and now they love playing the game. They're not going and playing football, they're not going and playing basketball, but they love going and playing golf.”
“I think in this new age where people's attention span is less, it's rare to do something in person with your friends for four or five hours. I think the more that we can kind of put our phones down and go out and be outside and do something with people that we enjoy, I think that would be better for everyone.”
There were a number of “when is the last time Cantlay played a four hour round” jokes on Twitter, but I enjoyed this quote a lot.
It gets at why so many of us love golf, and I think in some ways it gets at some of the reasons we love following pro golf through the Tour and the majors. It’s accessible and relatable, which is ironic because most people — like Cantlay alluded to — grow up believing that it is not.
I want to hear more on this and how it would be different than Good Good and its derivatives.
• Imagine this being a real and legitimate first thought. 😆
• Making your own yardage book for an amateur event hosted by a golf magazine definitely indicates you may be headed to the infirmary.
“I’m still undecided on if I think a strict relegation model is what’s best for pro golf, but Golf Relegation Twitter would be absolutely incredible.” -Joseph LaMagna
JT has some of the best meme faces, and this — considering the circumstances and the situation — was an all-timer.
👉️ The Full Swing Thoughts podcast series with Porath and LaMagna is excellent. Good notebook stuff and a great companion to either confirm or refute all the things I was thinking and feeling while watching the series. Here’s the link to episode 1 of the second season.
👉️ I am a sociopath, but I would watch a Stump the Schwab-like game of “whose Data Golf profile is this?” between Justin Ray and anyone who wanted to challenge him. Perhaps SMartin or somebody like that. You would definitely get a few “Oh, it’s Kevin Millwood!” moments.
👉️ Nobody is better at the golf history/Twitter thread combo than Jamie Kennedy. I’d never heard of Maurice Bembridge, but I was fully invested in his magical round at the 1974 Masters almost immediately. Great stuff.
👉️ At least we’re not tennis?! Break Point got canceled recently. As Joe Pomp pointed out here, if Netflix is any indication, golf has a lot more juice right now than tennis does.
This isn’t necessarily a surprise, as the latest available data shows us Season 1 of Break Point was the 617th most popular show on the platform, significantly trailing Drive to Survive (121) and Full Swing (274). The juicier detail, though, is that Netflix and producers Box to Box films feel like they weren’t given enough access to make the show successful. Man, what a miss. Tennis continues to lose fans, and the men’s/women’s governing bodies can’t seem to get out of their own way.
👉️ This story from James Colgan on Brad Faxon’s kindness is really good.
• Can confirm … this is true.
• Can also confirm this is true. I have had a strange and almost overwhelming urge to rotate my hips and hands through the ball specifically while standing during church services on Sundays recently. I don’t know why.
• Seems like a bad swing thought. But amazing artwork!
• Chef’s kiss here.
• Bad poker beats, fantasy football drafts and shot-by-shot recaps of your 84.
• TC screaming for answers outside of Kensington Palace made me howl.
• Boy …
• This is why Twitter was built. Right here. This tweet.
I don’t really have anything to add to this thread about how to build an online business other than that I need to apply more of the principles here to my own. Very interesting if you’re interested in building an online business!
If the King could see them now …
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1 To be clear, Rahm is emblematic of the hole, but the hole is bigger than just Rahm.
2 I would probably not use the term “premier golf league.”
