Report: Tour player directors ‘strongly encouraged’ to meet with Saudis
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Negotiations that PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said were “accelerating significantly” are poised to expand to include the player directors on the policy board next week, according to a Golfweek.com report.
The six player directors — Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Jordan Spieth, Adam Scott, Peter Malnati and Webb Simpson — are being “strongly encouraged” to meet with the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund at a private residence in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, on Monday, the report stated.
Monahan offered few details this week when asked about the Tour’s ongoing negotiations with the PIF, and the meeting between Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the player directors was described as a potential “ice-breaker” in an attempt to move the negotiations along.
“You always have to be open to not doing something while you’re trying to do something,” Monahan said this week. “In this case, it’s trying to negotiate a deal. If we don’t negotiate a deal [with PIF], then I think ultimately we’re back in the same posture that we’re in [now] and we haven’t unified our game and taken advantage of this unique point in time.”
The board of directors for PGA Tour Enterprises, the Tour’s new for-profit arm, was announced last week and includes the six policy board player directors, Monahan and Joe Ogilvie, the former Tour player who was named director liaison last week. The Enterprises board is scheduled to meet Tuesday in Ponte Vedra Beach, according to the report. Only Woods is not playing this week’s Players Championship.
“Honestly, we probably should have talked to them [PIF] already,” Simpson said last week. “The idea was to focus in December and January on SSG [the private equity group that invested an initial $1.5 billion into PGA Tour Enterprises], to get that deal done and then we were really going to start discussing what it was really going to look like with PIF, either joining or not joining. We probably should have talked to them sooner.”