Jay Monahan showed that blood money is more important than loyalty
"They're scary motherfuckers to get involved with. We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay.”~Phil Mickelson
And yet it didn’t stop Phil from taking their money…Two hundred million dollars of blood money. It didn’t stop others either. Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka took more than one hundred million bucks each from the Saudis to be the faces of the LIV Tour.
Obviously in their case money was more important than human rights. Not surprising.
But, for the last two years, we’ve heard the opposite from the management of the PGA Tour. The tour commissioner, Jay Monahan preached to his players that there were more important things than money. Integrity and respect trumped big dollars. He had the backing of Tiger Woods, who turned down a reported offer of eight hundred million dollars and Rory McIlroy who passed on an offer of five hundred million.
All this suddenly changed and it was done in secrecy behind closed doors. Monahan worked on a deal to merge the two golf entities without telling anyone. He didn’t involve the players, he didn’t involve the broadcast partners, he didn’t involve any of the sponsors. Monahan didn’t even involve Greg Norman, who was instrumental in the start of the LIV Tour. Some of the PGA players found out through Twitter. No wonder they were angry and bitter when they held a meeting with Monahan yesterday afternoon.
The sad thing is this didn’t have to happen. The LIV Tour was bleeding money without getting much from their investment. Their tv deal was minuscule. Good luck finding one of their broadcasts…and if you did, you might have seen how their network left a tournament during a playoff for local programming. Apparently, the ratings were better for a rerun of Family Feud.
All the PGA Tour needed to do was wait a bit longer until the Saudis pulled the plug. But Monahan got greedy. He saw people making money and wanted his cut. He got his yesterday. He didn’t care where it came from and he didn’t care who he pissed off. Monahan has said that you’ll never be embarrassed to be a member of the PGA Tour. I’m sure there are a lot of members that are embarrassed today.
For the last two years, Jay Monahan preached loyalty to his players. Yesterday, he showed them that money, no matter how red it is, rules all.