PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan stays mum on Saudi deal

It’s been 25 years since Tom Wolfe published “A Man in Full,” the novel in which an Atlanta good ol’ boy, Charlie Croker, sees the high times grind to a halt as the reserves of cash and goodwill so long extended to him finally run dry. Eventually, even his allies turn. “His botching things was malfeasance. It made them look so goddamned bad!” Wolfe wrote of Croker’s fleeing friends. “Half a billion! Now his heedless deadbeat squandering was making them all look like fools! Suckers! Patsies!”

For a time this summer, it seemed Jay Monahan was destined for his own “Cap’m Charlie” reckoning as the PGA Tour commissioner’s issues mirrored those of Wolfe’s character. There was the apparent need for a cash infusion to meet bills, laid bare in the announcement of a Framework Agreement with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. There were the legal headaches, LIV’s withdrawn litigation having been replaced with a Justice Department antitrust probe and U.S. Senate subcommittee theatrics. There were the people who thrived in the good times who began to sour when the going got tougher, in Monahan’s case the players, whose anger at the secrecy around the Saudi deal — and the associated moral backflip, but mostly the secrecy — threatened his future.

In retrospect, the least surprising moment of Monahan’s long, hot summer was his taking a month-long leave of absence to address his mental health.

The Monahan of ’23 is markedly different from what we saw twelve months ago at the Tour Championship, when he announced plans for designated events, increased purses and bonuses, and rookie subsidies. He was laying out a vision. Sure, it wasn’t his — it was largely the creation of Colin Neville, the Raine Group partner brought in to advise players by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy — but it was an actionable concept. There were specifics.

This year, there were none.

He relied on boilerplate remarks and repeatedly stiff-armed inquiries about the ongoing negotiations with the Saudis. “We continue to reinforce the fact that the framework agreement ultimately is the path that we’re on and when we’re able to share more information, we will,” he said.

Even when Monahan touted figures highlighting the robustness of the PGA Tour’s business — viewership, engagement, revenue, demographics — it felt like a perfunctory concession to metrics that only matter in a rational business environment, a conventional standard by which he…