Tiger Woods Now Has a Seat in the PGA Tour Boardroom, What Might He Think?
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For the bulk of his record-setting career, Tiger Woods wore blinders as he blazed a path to glory. There was not much that was ever going to get in his way, certainly not the nuisances associated with PGA Tour life and all of the behind-the-scenes wrangling that a star of his magnitude might find intrusive.
Woods had others to handle any issues, and he went about the business of becoming one of the greatest golfers ever. He stayed out of Tour politics, and if he had an opinion, he expressed it in a way to have the greatest impact while rarely crusading.
His word always carried a lot of weight—when he chose to invoke it. But for the most part, Woods let his clubs do the talking.
That’s what makes his foray into the running of the PGA Tour so interesting. With a 48th birthday looming and a playing career on hold due to another surgery, Woods is stepping up instead of stepping back.
Woods not only accepted a position last week on the PGA Tour Policy Board, he lobbied for it, becoming the sixth player representative on a 12-member board and immediately becoming one with considerable power.
There might be business titans involved in those Zoom calls and boardrooms, but Woods carries a different kind of weight that will be hard to ignore. What he says matters—especially to a player constituency that almost universally respects and looks up to him—and his opinions will be impossible to dismiss, whether it be his colleagues, Tour executives or even the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia.
Already, Woods has affected change. Not only did he get PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan to agree to put him on the board, but it was announced that Tour documents will be amended via the Policy Board so that no major decision can be made without prior involvement and approval from player directors.
In other words, the secret negotiations that led to the "framework agreement" can’t happen again without input from the players. And that framework agreement—one that has a long way to go—won’t be approved without a sign off from the player directors.
So if Tiger doesn’t like the deal, it’s off. Presumably.
All of which leads to: Where does Woods stand on all of this?
He has said nothing publicly since the June 6 bombshell announcement, only the statement released as part of the Tour announcement saying he is joining the board. Woods called this "a critical time" in the game and gave Monahan his vote of confidence.
While he has been outspoken about his dislike of LIV Golf and forcefully backed the PGA Tour in his words and deeds, it is interesting to note that Woods has never said anything negative about the Saudi backing of LIV Golf and hasn’t offered an opinion on how he feels about the PIF getting involved with the PGA Tour.
But there are some interesting clues.
> In late 2019, Phil Mickelson accepted an invite to the Saudi International to be played the following February. Then a European Tour event, the Saudi backing received considerable attention. The fact that Mickelson was skipping a longtime favorite Tour event in Phoenix only added to the intrigue.
Woods was asked about Mickelson’s participation at the Hero World Challenge, a week prior to serving as player-captain at the Presidents Cup.
"Well, I understand the politics behind it, but the game of golf can actually help heal all that, too," Woods said. “It can help grow that. There are also a lot of other top players that are going to be playing that particular week. It's traditionally not a golf hotbed in the Middle East, but it has grown quite a bit.
“I remember going to Dubai (in the United Arab Emirates) for my very first time and seeing, what, maybe two, three buildings on the skyline when you tee off on No. 8 (at Emirates Golf Club). Now there's a New York City skyline back there. The game of golf has grown. There's only been a few courses when I first went to Dubai, now they're everywhere; same with Abu Dhabi and maybe eventually in Saudi Arabia."
> Before Mickelson ever teed off in Saudi, news broke in January 2020 about a potential rival golf circuit called the Premier Golf League. Turns out, the PGL had been operating behind the scenes for several years, gauging player and agent interest. It was offering guaranteed upfront money to the top players in the game, who would be captains of four-man teams. There would be 48 players with $10 million purses (later raised to $20 million) and no cut. Although it had several funding sources, the PIF was among them, with a hefty stake.
If it sounds a lot like LIV Golf, it’s because many of the principals who were with PGL broke off to form LIV Golf when the idea lost momentum due to the pandemic. Mickelson went to Saudi and played in the Wednesday pro-am with Majed Al-Sorour, CEO of the Saudi Golf Federation; Andy Gardiner, a director at Barclays Capital and the CEO of PGL; and Colin Neville, a sports consultant with the Raine Group who was involved with Gardiner in the attempts to launch PGL.
Neville’s name should be familiar to those following closely. He is now a consultant to the PGA Tour players and acting as a liaison between them and negotiators who will seek to get the framework agreement to the finish line.
Last year, Neville was part of the player meeting initiated by Woods and Rory McIlroy in Delaware that led to the creation of the designated events that are carrying big purses and next year will see several no-cut events.
In February 2020, when the idea of a potential rival was generating headlines, Woods was asked at the Genesis Invitational if he had been approached by PGL.
"Yes, and my team's been aware of it and we've delved into the details of it and trying to figure it out just like everyone else," he said. “And we've been down this road before with World Golf Championships and other events being started, or other tours want to evolve and started. There's a lot of information that we're still looking at and whether it's reality or not, but just like everybody else, we're looking into it."
Clearly, Woods knew—and so did his agent, Mark Steinberg—that PGL was something separate from the PGA Tour and a potential disruptor. And it had Saudi backing. But it’s good to have leverage, and so Woods didn’t dismiss PGL, comparing it to the WGCs and the desire to get the top players together more often. PGL’s initial ambitious goal was to get as many of the top 48 players in the world as possible and play 18 events. Undoubtedly Woods and his team were approached about an equity stake in a team, the basis of the business model that LIV Golf extolls today.
"So this is a natural evolution," Woods said. "Whether or not things like this are going to happen, but ideas like this are going to happen going forward, whether its now or any other time in the future."
> The pandemic hit shortly after Woods’s comments at the Genesis. Talk of a rival tour died down for more than a year, until spring 2021. Soon it was learned that there was a split among the principals at PGL and that a new entity, LIV Golf Investments, was formed. By fall 2021, LIV Golf had named Greg Norman its commissioner, with full backing of the PIF.
There were rumblings that a roster of player signees was imminent by the time Woods's event at Riviera Country Club began in 2022. A few weeks earlier, Mickelson had set off fireworks at the Saudi International when he accused the PGA Tour of "obnoxious greed" in a Golf Digest interview and, among other things, complained about not having the ability to profit off his own media rights. (The PGA Tour, like all sports leagues, controls a player’s rights.)
Woods, while likely not in favor of the way Mickelson went about it, nonetheless expressed his own concerns about media rights. He didn’t criticize Mickelson publicly or anything he said.
"Media rights is a big thing," Woods said. "A lot of us are concerned about what is the direction where we're going and how can we have more control over that. There's been a lot of talk from whether it's the PAC (Player Advisory Council) or the board or from players internally. Everyone has their opinion about it, but we need to come to a collective decision. Jay has taken it all in to try and figure out what's best for each and every individual player because we're all independent contractors, but again, what is best for the Tour as a brand as well."
When LIV Golf launched a few months later, Woods's first opportunity to speak about it came at the British Open, where he was playing at St. Andrews. He said what Norman was doing was "not in the best interests of the game."
And when asked about the players who jumped to LIV Golf, Woods said: "I disagree with it. I think that what they’ve done is they’ve turned their back on what has allowed them to get to this position."
He expressed similar sentiments later in the year at the Hero World Challenge, where he was asked if the PGA Tour and LIV Golf could coexist.
"Right now as it is, not right now, not with their leadership, not with Greg there and his animosity towards the Tour itself," Woods said. "I don't see that happening. As Rory said and I said it as well, I think Greg's got to leave and then we can eventually, hopefully, have a stay between the two lawsuits and figure something out."
The lawsuits were dropped as part of the framework agreement and among the requests made by the PGA Tour in its initial asks—that were disclosed in advance of the U.S. Senate hearings last month—was that Norman be dropped.
All of this makes for some interesting fodder. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF and self-admitted golf lover, can’t dismiss the presence of Woods. Does he want to be on Woods's side, sitting across from him in board meetings? And what would that mean?
If Tiger says LIV has to go, what does Al-Rumayyan do? Does he walk away from the biggest name in the game and push LIV Golf forward? Or does he work to come up with some sort of palatable alternative, perhaps a team format devised with Neville’s help that resurrects the PGL idea and is staged as part of NewCo—the for-profit LLC proposed as part of the framework agreement?
Who knows how it might all play out?
But Woods, whose term on the board was not disclosed, clearly has something else to keep his mind occupied outside his injury rehab. And it’s likely he will have plenty to say about how professional golf will look in the future.