PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan addresses reporters during his annual press conference ahead of 2025 Players Championship on Tuesday, March 11, 2025. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on March 11, 2025 at 5:32 pm
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PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan believes Strategic Sports Group invested billions of dollars in the PGA Tour last year at least partly because of the tour’s decades-long presence in Ponte Vedra Beach.
The golf commissioner addressed the future of men’s professional golf on Tuesday in his annual press conference prior to the start of The Players Championship.
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When the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia created LIV Golf tour in 2022, it lured some of the game’s biggest names away from the PGA Tour with astronomical sums of money. Since then, there have been fewer instances when the best names in golf competed at the same time.
Since then, the PGA Tour and LIV have expressed a commitment to reunify men’s professional golf. An agreement was supposed to be reached by the end of 2023.
“Our team is fully committed to reunification,” Monahan says. “The only deal that we would regret is one that compromises the essence of what makes the game of golf and the PGA Tour so exceptional.”
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Monahan could not provide a specific timeframe for when the reunification will happen.
Golf Digest reported last month that Monahan as well as former Players winners Tiger Woods and Adam Scott met with President Donald Trump and LIV Golf Chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan at the White House.
In his 25 years as a professional, Scott says he has never been involved in business negotiations that have extended as long as the PGA Tour – PIF conversation.
Monahan said Trump has served as a facilitator between the two tours.
“Disruption has generated momentum, growth and real action,” Monahan said. “We have seen that momentum on television, online at our tournaments and with our partners.”
The 2024 Players Championship reportedly drew 3.5 million viewers during the final round. Sports Media Watch reported that was the lowest Sunday final round viewership for the tour’s flagship tournament in a decade.
Partnerships such as the one the Tour cemented with Mastercard earlier this month allowed coverage of last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational to have reduced commercial interruption.
This week, the PGA Tour will launch its world feed, which will provide customized coverage of international players as well as a dedicated international commentary team.
The feed is possible because of the 165,000 square-foot PGA Tour Studios that opened in Palm Valley in January of this year. While PGA Tour Studios has been based in St. Johns County since 1997 – the previous iteration was inside the World Golf Village – the new facility is four times larger and came with more than $16 million in incentives from St. Johns County government.
St. Johns County officials did not respond to Jacksonville Today’s request for comment about its relationship with the Tour.
Nevertheless, Monahan says the tour is committed to St. Johns County. He says any investments the tour makes with the Strategic Sports Group funding will benefit the county where many of the Tour’s 1,044 employees based in Northeast Florida reside.
The Strategic Sports Group dollars were touted as a way to help the St. Johns County-based organization stave off the challenge from an investment fund with more than $900 billion in assets. It also created PGA Tour Enterprises, a for-profit company that included $1.5 billion investment from Strategic that could expand to $3 billion.
“A lot of these changes take time,” Monahan says. “If you look at PGA Tour Studios, we just opened it on January 1. We’re world feeding this week to markets around the world, which showcase St. Johns County and Ponte Vedra Beach. You’re going to continue to see more innovation in and around this property and around this campus that’s done in a way that celebrates the area that we’re blessed to be a part of and to be residents of.”
Monahan cited this week’s announcement of Delta as the Tour’s Global Airline as well as Anheuser-Busch’s extending its marketing agreement until 2030 as evidence that the PGA Tour is not at in stasis amid the PIF discussions.
Scott said its vital that the PGA Tour is not stuck in limbo.
“There’s an urgency for a result, no matter what,” said Scott, the 2004 Players Champion. I think that would be in everyone’s best interest, to be honest. Whether you’re the PIF, or a player anywhere or the PGA Tour. I think it just doesn’t need to linger.”
“I think there are positive things happening in the game and at the PGA Tour and that can continue to happen. I just think we hopefully will get to an outcome soon. That would be what I would like. I guess that signals urgency,” Scott said.
Another former Players Champion, Justin Thomas, was also asked about the extended negotiations on Tuesday.
Thomas acknowledged a sense of “exhaustion” that this is the third straight year where the PGA Tour-LIV Golf question has been part of the pre-Players Championship conversation.
“Yeah, I think it’s very obvious. We all just want to get it resolved, but this is something that’s pretty serious, so it’s not like you or anybody can say, ‘All right, this is what we’re going to do’ without it being perfect,” Thomas says.
PGA Tour commits to diversity, equity and inclusion
Monahan on Tuesday also expressed his commitment to the Tour’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives amid President Trump’s executive order to eliminate programs that focus on diversity, equity or inclusion at the federal level. Private organizations have also eschewed diversity programs.
Monahan touted the foresight of his predecessor Tim Finchem for helping devise The First Tee program in 1999. The nonprofit aims to empower young people of all backgrounds through the game of golf.
“As a global organization, as a global tour, having diverse backgrounds, diverse experiences in our building … has been and will continue to be a very important part of this organization,” Monahan said.
