Friday Fragments - Jay Walking Edition

Back in Utah for The Last Dance of 2024.  Of larger import is that I played nine holes on Wednesday.  OK, just took a seven iron and played mostly to temporary greens, but it's all in front of us.

The Players - Some golf was played, although that's of less interest than a couple of other bits from the week.  Funny but it's hard to get a simple game story these days, this being as close as I could get:

Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele card 65s to share early lead at the Players Championship

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — The opening round of the 50th Players Championship turned into a birdie-fest, and no one made more than Rory McIlroy. The Northern Irishman carded 10 birdies in

all but tugged two drives into the water that resulted in a 7-under 65 and dashed his hopes of a course-record tying round at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass on Thursday.

“It would’ve been nice to shoot 62 and not hit two in the water,” McIlroy said.

His score was matched by Xander Schauffele, who managed a few heroics of his own to keep bogey off the card and shoot a 7-under 65 to share the early lead at the PGA Tour’s flagship event.

No hurry to update things at Golfweek, as Wyndham Clark matched those 65's in the afternoon wave.  I guess Golfweek just assumed it was a Signature Event with no afternoon wave....

Rory's round was it's own Rorschach test.  You can either laud that he shot 65 with two water balls, or note that he made ten birdies and only shot 65.

But about those water balls.... Wow, that was interesting.  And maybe just a little concerning....

The first thing to note is that Christian Powers at Golf Digest should be playing the lottery, as on Monday he posted this reminder of an incident from two years ago:

The Breakdown: Daniel Berger's controversial drop at the 2022 Players Championship

Now, if you know Pete Dye, you'll not be surprised that Sawgrass seems to have been designed to exacerbate this very weakness in our game.  The design is all about angles, and when a ball finds the water 300 yards away determining those angles is the crux of the matter, but nothing looks the same when you get out there.

I remember blogging this and thinking the guys had pretty much done what they're supposed to do, but it's the cast of characters that's of interest:

And few of those rules snafus garnered more social media attention than one involving Daniel Berger, Viktor Hovland and Joel Dahmen at the 2022 Players Championship. The back-and-forth, particularly between Berger and Hovland, went mega viral thanks to some well-placed microphones and cameras on PGA Tour Live.  

Actually, my immediate reaction to Powers' piece was, "Great, now do Tiger's 2014 drop on No. 14".  As if....

But Viktor, huh?

Then came McIlroy’s ninth hole of the day, the par-4 18th.

The tee shot at Sawgrass’ par-4 closer, where a lake guards the entirety of the left side of the

fairway, is among the most daunting in golf, even for the game’s most talented driver. McIlroy could have played it safe and hit a 3-wood or even an iron, but he has been swinging the longest club in his bag with such swagger of late that you couldn’t fault him for playing aggressively.

You know where this is going. McIlroy’s blast started on the edge of the lake line and never left it.

Kerplunk.

After seeing the fate of his ball, McIlroy turned to his caddie, Harry Diamond, and said, “Did it cross?”

As in, did his ball cross into the water well up the fairway, or was the point that his ball last covered terra firma just beyond the tee box? The former spot would result in a drop that would allow McIlroy to get home with his third shot; the latter would not. Trouble was, the appropriate drop wasn’t obvious, either to McIlroy or his playing partners, Viktor Hovland and Jordan Spieth. But among them it was their duty to make a call.

As Mark Twain allegedly said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes".

There's video at that link and it's worth watching to see how these three alpha players interact, the exchange between Spieth and Rory verging on the heated.  But I'll give a spoiler and tell you that it's Rory's aggressiveness that has folks reacting, and even he admits to it:

“I think Jordan was just trying to make sure that I was doing the right thing,” McIlroy said. “I mean, I was pretty sure that my ball had crossed where I was sort of dropping it. It’s so hard, right, because there was no TV evidence. I was adamant. But I think, again, he was just trying to make sure that I was going to do the right thing. If anything, I was being conservative with it. I think at the end of the day we’re all trying to protect ourselves, protect the field, as well. I wouldn’t say it was needless. I think he was just trying to make sure that what happened was the right thing.”

Well, yeah, but you kinda stop short of the fundamental issue, the logical implication is that he thought your "right thing" wasn't his "right thing".   

But.... first, this wasn't one awkward drop, but rather two, the first on No. 18 (his ninth hole of the day).  Here's one reaction of note:

Rory’s put his playing partners in tough spots twice today.

For what it’s worth, I was standing right there on 7 and am 99% sure it did not land above the red line.

He ultimately dropped in a fair spot, but very surprised how hard he lobbied Viktor and Jordan.

— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) March 14, 2024

Yeah, I think most of us reacted in a similar fashion....  And, as some politician once noted, when you're explaining, you're losing"

Why Rory McIlroy invoked ‘karma’ and ‘conscience’ after 2 awkward drops

Yeah, next thing he'll be telling us it isn't about the money....

Joel Beall tells us that it shouldn't be this way:

Players 2024: Rory McIlroy's rules controversies could've been avoided

 Do tell:

That doesn’t make McIlroy infallible, but to have McIlroy called out not once but twice for potentially iffy drops was counter to everything we know about McIlroy.

Reputations in golf are a fickle thing, and to compromise them for what may or may not have happened hundreds of yards away is an avoidable gamble. Perhaps McIlroy should have been more open to what his opponents were saying, yet there’s a case that he shouldn’t have had to defend himself in the first place; that should have fallen to a rules official. And the current system isn’t just failing the player whose score is in question. It shouldn’t be on opponents to police the field, for that responsibility can put them in awkward, uncomfortable positions that can simultaneously put them in an unfavorable light.

Much of the conversation this week has been about the tour product, specifically, how it can be enhanced and refined. But the tour’s primary product is its players, and what the tour wants to improve also needs to be protected. In this case, that means protecting them from themselves. As Thursday showed, all it takes is five minutes to make something so valuable so vulnerable.

Just because this is how golf has always done it doesn’t mean this is the way it should be. It’s a change easier said than done, one that requires more rules officials and more cameras, two resources that are not in plentiful supply. But this week the PGA Tour is returning its Every Shot At broadcast option and its new television center opens up a world of possibility for how the tour is watched … and in some cases, reviewed.

Wow!  I wonder if Joel is aware of Rory's tortured history with the rules, including his petulant observation at some Middle East event that he's too busy to read the rulebook.

I guess Joel pictures rules officials lining the course, presumably all in striped shirts.  The message here is that there will always be spots on the course where the combination of cameras and officials can't help...

But Joel's message is one that has Nurse Ratched cackling in the background, at least in your humble blogger's mind.  Finchem, as you'll recall, started the policy of not disclosing Tour disciplinary actions so we would continue to assume that these guys are all gentlemen.  

What Joel is positing is that we can't allow the players to adjudicate their rules issues because they might inadvertently reveal who they are in that process, and that might hurt the product.  Wow!  And you though I was cynical!  Most of us would say that was an extremely interesting video that shows us another side of an actual competition, but heaven forfend that we see something that's actually real.

Good news, Joel, Tiger's simulator league won't have any of these issues....

State of The Jay - Jay gave his first presser since East Lake, and shared about as much as he did then.  You'll note a slightly different takes in these two reports:

Players 2024: Jay Monahan didn't say much, but what he said says a lot

It's Joel Beall again, presumably still under the effects of the Kool-Aid:

Speaking Tuesday at his tour’s flagship event, the Players Championship, there were two things of substance from his remarks, and those comments were notable in who and what they addressed.

The first was the who, as Monahan professed his attention to the group that’s been sidelined during the sport’s existential crisis. “Our business thrives when together we're all laser-focused on delivering for our fans. If we fail on that front, we fail on every front,” Monahan said. “They're tired of hearing about conflict, money and who is getting what. They want to watch the world's best golfers compete in tournaments with history, meaning, and legacies on the line at venues they recognize and love.”

Monahan later said fans are his “most important constituent,” and he’s right. The power does not lie with him or the players, the Strategic Sport Groups or Saudi Arabia. The fans will ultimately decide who “wins” the game's currently existential crisis, but their patience is dwindling. There is palpable fatigue from those inside the game and out regarding professional golf’s hostilities; people just want peace. But that’s not easy to come by; how it is achieved is fraught with hard examinations. It will require selling tour membership on LIV forgiveness, or more specifically, that the consequences the tour promised would come for taking tens of millions of guaranteed money will not be enforced. (Never mind that some LIV players may not wish to return.) There’s also the fallout from partnering with a regime accused of numerous human-rights atrocities. Those are heavy considerations, yet allowing this fight to continue without end is a reality no one wants to accept.

Joel seems to be a little ahead of himself, presuming the outcome of those negotiations.  That said, Joel taking Jay's commitment to the fans as genuine seems a tad credulous to this observer.....

Shockingly, Eamon Lynch was a more critical observer:

Lynch: Jay Monahan faced the media. What he didn’t say was much more interesting than what he did

 I'll get to his typically amusing framing in a second, but he has this rebuttal to Joel Beall:

The commissioner manages a lengthy list of constituencies, the ranking of their importance changing depending on who is calling. A rough priority list would look something like this: star players, investment partners, rank-and-file members, sponsors, broadcast partners, tournament organizers. Fans fit in there too, somewhere. Tuesday, Monahan was at pains to suggest they’re near the top.

Do they fit in somewhere?  To this observer, we only hear them acknowledge the fans when they use them to justify that which they want to do anyway.  Because I've never heard a fan consumed with the issue of getting Patrick paid.... I must hang with a bad crowd.

But let's let Eamon have his fun:

Had he not expired 40-odd years ago, Will Durant would have enjoyed Jay Monahan’s performance Tuesday at TPC Sawgrass in advance of the 2024 Players Championship. “To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy,” the historian once observed, and the PGA Tour commissioner gave an artful demonstration of that in his first press conference since saying, well, not much, at the Tour Championship more than six months ago.

That's good, especially when this kind of bit follows:

There were, however, a couple questions that Hockey Jay skated around. One involved what a return on investment would look like for Strategic Sports Group, which recently poured $1.5 billion into the Tour’s new for-profit entity. This was Monahan’s response: “The more that we can do to increase fandom, to bring our product forward in a way that is consistent with the way fans want to consume product and a better job and the more steps we can take to dimensionalize our great athletes, those are all steps that we can take to grow fandom. And when you grow fandom, ultimately that drives your commercial success.”

I think we can all agree that that needed to be said....

Shockingly, Eamon had this in his second 'graph:

There’s a subtle difference between not being expansive in one’s answers and being evasive, and Monahan wasn’t the latter.

You sure about that?

How are talks going with the Saudis? “Accelerating,” he said.

Anything more specific? Nope.

How about what happens with LIV players? Nope.

Worried about more players jumping? Next!

All Monahan would acknowledge is that he anticipates a “positive outcome for the PGA Tour” — identical to the language he used during his last press briefing in August. Another thing he didn’t say and didn’t need to: among the Tour’s players, board members and fans, there are irreconcilably competing ideas of what that positive outcome should be. The art of diplomacy, indeed.

I get that you can't be entirely candid in the middle of a negotiation, but how is that word salad not evasive? 

Naturally, folks are curious:

Jay Monahan’s job security has the golf world whispering

When it makes a Golf.com header, it's probably more than whispering....

You know where the preeminent peckers will be on this issue:

And then consider player director Patrick Cantlay’s intentionally indirect tapdance around

offering his support for Monahan.

“I think it’s really important that we’re all rowing in the same direction,” Cantlay said without ever mentioning Monahan’s name. “I think with this PGA Tour Enterprises board, I think it’s really exciting that we do have a chance to kind of start with something new and all move together in the right direction.”

Cantlay’s good buddy and Ryder Cup partner Xander Schauffele — who has been clear about his disaffection for the commissioner — offered a similarly icy reaction on Tuesday afternoon.

“Trust is something that’s pretty tender, so words are words, and I would say in my book he’s got a long way to go,” Schauffele said, reiterating a point he’s made a few times since the PIF blindside of June 6. “He could be the guy, but in my book, he’s got a long way to go to gain the trust of the membership.”

There are some players far more supportive, surprisingly including Rory.  It really remind s me of a classic Casey Stengel line.  Acknowledging that on any baseball team  you'd have five guys that love you and a similar number that hate you, he said that the key to success is keeping those five that hate you away from the fifteen that haven't made up their minds.

The most interesting piece on Jay is this from Keith Van Valkenburg:

The Inexplicable Survival of Jay Monahan

Let's dive in:

When Jay Monahan spoke with the media Tuesday at the Players Championship about the current state of PGA Tour Enterprises and the future of professional golf, something crystallized for me in a way it had not previously. That it took me this long to clearly see the chessboard may be evidence of my own naivete, but at least I got there eventually.

Every faction within the PGA Tour is essentially at war.

Some people are trying to survive, some people are trying to gain territory, and some people are losing territory and desperately trying to protect it. No one wants to be deposed, everyone wants to save face, and everyone wants to stay rich.

The PGA Tour Policy Board can’t agree on how to finalize a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia because they can’t agree on how their own house should be run. The players are locked in a class war with each other. The board of directors and the Tour’s new investors think the players are mostly rubes and naifs in matters of business. The money people want everyone to wake up and start figuring out ways to earn a return on the billions they invested in a flawed product.

In the middle of that war is Monahan, a man who — despite making a litany of mistakes over the last several years, which he again copped to on Tuesday — still somehow managed to earn a promotion amidst all this.

Yeah, it is quite the hot mess, no?  Though the guys that matter don't seem to need to worry about staying rich, they also don't seem especially happy about being so wealthy.

But Keith is definitely on to something here:

If you’re a consumer of pop culture (as I am), it might sound like a season of Succession. But everything we’ve gathered, after talking to dozens of people, suggests the boardroom squabbling on Tour has far more in common with the plotlines on Veep. Much like with modern politics, the clash of egos and everyone’s thirst for power ultimately creates a stalemate, and in turn protects the status quo. Monahan hasn’t needed to be successful to keep his job, he’s just needed to keep players divided into various factions, insulating himself from being removed.

 Can't even imagine what that succession battle could look like...

This was a particularly bad moment for Jay in the presser:

When Monahan was asked by Adam Schupak of Golfweek how he felt about Jon Rahm saying he’d lost some faith in leadership, and that was part of what led to his departure to LIV, Monahan was both curt and dismissive, refusing to even say Rahm’s name.

“I'm focused on every single member of the PGA Tour,” Monahan said. “I'm focused on The PLAYERS Championship this week. I'm focused on the great season that we have ahead, and we have made tremendous progress with the SSG agreement that we have, putting ourselves in a position to invest back in our Tour, invest back in our fans, and I'm going to focus on the things that I control and we are as an organization and we are as a leadership team and we are as a board, so that's when I'm focused on.”

When Schupak tried to follow up, asking for clarification, Monahan was noticeably annoyed.

“I just answered your question about what my focus is,” he said.

It was the most tense moment of the morning and left the most pressing question unanswered: What is stopping other players from joining LIV? It’s certainly not their confidence in the commissioner.

The answer to that last bit hasn't really changed, except that the stigma has been removed.  Though I think Keith falls into the same trap as many here:

It’s hard to talk about Monahan’s job performance without acknowledging the tangled web of relationships that exist at the corporate level of the PGA Tour.

SSG, the new investor in PGA Tour Enterprises, is fronted by The Fenway Sports Group. Monahan was an executive vice president at The Fenway Sports Group before he was named commissioner of the PGA Tour in 2017. (He’d also worked at the Tour in various capacities, including as the executive director of The Players Championship.) He was recommended for the job by Seth Waugh, who was at the time the CEO of Deutsche Bank, but is now the CEO of the PGA of America. He went to Trinity College with Sam Kennedy, the CEO of The Fenway Sports Group and president of the Boston Red Sox. The PGA Tour’s vice president ranks are also rife with various Fenway Sports Group alums.

Without seeking player input, Monahan worked with Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy to negotiate a framework agreement with Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the PIF, and Dunne and Herlihy, in addition to being PGA Tour Policy Board members, are two extremely influential members at Augusta National. Some players have been starting to wonder: What are Dunne’s and Herlihy’s motivations in all this?

Even if every decision made during the past year was done in the best interests of the PGA Tour membership, it’s hard not to wonder about the conflicts of interest, and what role they play.

Anytime anyone speaks of the Tour membership as some kind of unified group, alarms should go off.   Especially, since above he noted that everyone is at war, in this case what's being benefits a handful of elite players, pitting Rabbits v. Studs.

The player directors may have wanted different leadership. All signs, public and private, indicate that they did. But they couldn’t outmaneuver him, and now they have to find a way to work with him. Monahan’s one unquestionable strength — cultivating relationships with other powerful people — means he’s going to be in charge for the foreseeable future. If this mess is going to get cleaned up, he’s ultimately going to be the guy who has to do it.

“I am the right person to lead us forward,” Monahan said. “I know that. I believe that in my heart, and I'm determined to do exactly that.”

Judging by how the past two years have gone, it’s difficult to feel optimistic.

I'm certainly nodding my head at that last bit.  But since I characterize the last two years as a coup by the elite players, I think they're at this point comfortable that they can get what they want from a figurehead Jay.  So, why take the heat for ousting him?

Favorite Tour Wife -  All you need to see is the header:

Adam Hadwin tomahawks club into water left of 18th hole at Players Championship, wife approves

And here's why Jessica Hadwin is my favorite WAG:

I have seen the moment in question. If I’m going simply on the aesthetic of the toss….10/10

— Jessica Hadwin (@jessicahadwin) March 14, 2024

It's simple, she makes me laugh.

Enjoy The Players and we'll wrap it on Monday.