published on May 18, 2024 in celeb

For PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, now is the moment of truth

ATLANTA — Jay Monahan sat down and pushed his shoulders back. Blue suit, subtle pinstripe. Pink tie. A two-term senator’s haircut. He exhaled, then, over the next 40 minutes, proceeded to reshape the PGA Tour for the foreseeable future.

It felt comprehensive and ambitious. Because it was.

It also felt impromptu and do-or-die. Because it was that, too.

This was Monahan’s annual Tour Championship press conference. A year ago, sitting in the same seat at East Lake Golf Club, he addressed the pressing issues of the day. Mostly inane. He fielded multiple questions about Bryson DeChambeau’s controversies. At the end, a single question about “a renegade tour starting in the next year or so.”

Monahan responded: “In life you always have to be cognizant of, No. 1, there should be zero complacency to anything you do and No. 2, someone is always going to compete and take something away from you. I’ve operated that way every day of my life.”

Monahan is in his fifth year as PGA Tour commissioner. It feels much longer. So much has happened. Coming out of 2020, he was hailed as one of the most promising and powerful people in sports. His couriering of the tour through the pandemic was an exemplar for other sports. Having just turned 50, he was at the top of his game. Plenty of voices in the neighborhood murmured that if Major League Baseball should eventually look to move on from commissioner Rob Manfred, it was Monahan who could be pursued by MLB owners.

From there to here. LIV Golf, a nascent competitor aggressively financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has taken a lot from the PGA Tour. It’s taken nine of the 30 players who were in Atlanta at this time last year. It’s taken all available oxygen in the media’s coverage of the sport. It’s taken all the clout Monahan once held.

Last week, with their tour facing an existential crisis, the top players still aligned with the PGA Tour met privately in Delaware. Buoyed by Tiger Woods and captained by Rory McIlroy, they devised a model to increase both their pay and their playing opportunities against one another. They are, in essence, their own most valuable assets, but had never previously formed a united front and landed on the same page. So they made one up and agreed to it.

On Wednesday, Monahan announced the tour’s transformation. For an organization known to initiate change with glacial readiness, it was a staggering shift.

It also amounted to Monahan’s last stand.

Of late, the 52-year-old has come to be an easy mark. There’s an expression, If you’re the one doing the pointing, you know no one is pointing at you. Well, in the last 12 months, with professional golf awash in tumult, Monahan has mostly remained just out of view. He’s purposefully un-public. His constituents — the players, both those leaving and staying — meanwhile, have spoken freely. The media has generated endless takes. And chief nemesis Greg Norman, the CEO of LIV, has been equal parts showman and trash talker. Thus, oftentimes, it’s felt like all fingers have been aimed at Monahan.

His leadership has been questioned. So has his competence, and his aggression, or lack thereof. Having signed a much-celebrated massive TV deal in 2019 and needing to deliver on it, some tour insiders wondered if — in a mostly Tiger-less world where LIV is shading the horizon — the PGA Tour over-promised what it could deliver. Public rumors bubbled last week, unfound of as far as we know, that tour players were considering replacing him. Made for some good Twitter fodder, even though, as one member of the PGA Tour’s 16-man player advisory council recently told The Athletic, “Even if people were wanting him to lose his job, who the f—- are we going to have in charge? Who would even want the job? People might not like how he’s handled all of this, but most guys out here like and trust Jay. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

Monahan is a central figure in the ongoing upheaval in professional golf and is worth exploring and understanding with a degree of depth. That can prove difficult, though, as he’s seemingly allergic to the idea of talking about himself. He often says, “I’m just not that interesting” and doesn’t participate in the narrative that surrounds him. So the public mostly gets the on-stage version. That’s the man who, on Wednesday at East Lake, said of the tour’s battle for survival against LIV, he said, “When you’re dealing with a noneconomic actor, you have to come back to the core of who you are.”

And who is that?

Well, around mid-morning on Thursday, the French doors adorning a side meeting room in the East Lake clubhouse were pushed open. Wearing a Tour Championship polo shirt, he settled into a seat opposite The Athletic and began talking.

Born on May 7, 1970, in Belmont, Massachusetts, a western suburb of Boston, Joseph “Jay” William Monahan IV is a product of Irish stock and Red Sox season tickets. As a kid, he loved golf and hockey. A natural at both. He was the eldest of three and carried the disposition to match. Always mature for his age, maybe oddly so. A friend from college says fraternity buddies looked up to Jay as a mentor, even though he was only a year or two older. Perhaps that’s what comes with the name.

Monahan’s father, Joseph W. Monahan III, was a career criminal defense lawyer in Cambridge and a former Middlesex County prosecutor. A helluva golfer, Mr. Monahan won the 1966 New England Intercollegiate Golf Association Championship, three club championships at Winchester Country Club and the 2001 New England Senior Amateur. They call him “Joe The Pro.” He’s known as a hugely proud father and annually joins Jay at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am, but doesn’t step into the spotlight.

Jay Monahan, right, has regularly played in the Pebble Beach Pro-Am with his father, Joe. (Kyle Terada / USA Today)

Joseph W. Monahan Jr., Jay’s grandfather, was a graduate of Holy Cross and Boston University, and played in the 1947 U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach. He went on to be vice chairman of the Massachusetts Parking Authority, but things went awry. He was a central figure of a 1959 scandal that lived on the front page of the Boston Globe. He was convicted on larceny and conspiracy charges for rigging false contracts that siphoned funds from MPA, and was sentenced to five years in prison.

And the original? Joseph William Monahan, Jay’s namesake, was born in Watertown in 1888. Proper Irish, this one. Mother’s side from Tipperary; father’s side from County Mayo. Both arrived in the mid-1800s. While Joseph’s three sisters entered the convent, he studied law and rose to be president of the 1915 senior class of Boston University Law School. He was described in the Globe as “one of the most popular men in the school” and became an accomplished lawyer. He was elected to a Massachusetts State Senator, eventually rising to minority leader and later served for years as a probate judge in Middlesex County. In 1932, the Cambridge Sentinel wrote: “Broad-minded, broad-shouldered and erect, besides being one of the most smart appearing men in Cambridge, Mr. Monahan is justly a conspicuous citizen.”

That’s the Monahan name.

Some weight there.

His mother, Joanne knew as much. “She felt like the three others were just too much to live up to and thought it was too regal,” Monahan said Thursday. She told the original Joseph William Monahan as much. He was 82 at the time and known as “The Judge,” a nod to his austerity. When the birth rolled around, he was first person to visit Joanne in the hospital. Gazing upon Joanne and his great-grandson, he said, “Young lady, you look as beautiful as always.”

Joanne, then an English teacher in the Concord School District, replied, “Thank you, Judge.”

“And we know,” he followed, “what that young boy’s name is, don’t we?”

That is why Joseph William Monahan IV goes by Jay. It was his mother’s preference. Joanne, who passed in 2007 at age 61, ceded to The Judge’s wishes, but couldn’t totally comply.

Growing up, Jay was raised in “a Kennedy household,” he’s said in the past, while calling JFK his hero. The family grew to three boys, filling a house on Grove Street, near the border of Cambridge. The town of Belmont is split. Up on Belmont Hill, stately mansions line winding roads. The Monahans lived in the neighborhood that surround the hill. Their house was across the street from a cemetery and a short walk from Fresh Pond Golf Course, a nine-hole municipal course, where Monahan played as a child, despite his father being a member at Winchester Country Club, just as Joe Monahan Jr. and Joseph W. Monahan both were.

Jay excelled in school, as expected, and played hockey and golf at Belmont High School while working at his father’s law firm in the summers. After spending a postgraduate year at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, he moved next to Hartford, Conn., enrolling at Trinity College as a two-sport Division III athlete. In the summers, he worked for the union representing the International Brotherhood of Police Officers. He loved it; thought he’d end up being a lawyer, like dad.

Trinity is a highly selective liberal arts college, but takes sports seriously. So, too, did Monahan. A former teammate tells the story of, in the winter of 1993, the Bantams facing rival Central Connecticut in a key NESCAC (New England Small College Athletic Conference) game. Monahan was a senior captain. One of his teammates was a highly touted newcomer. The freshman was skilled, but small, and Central Connecticut bodied him over and over, trying to rattle him. Finally, Monahan had seen enough.

Lining up for a faceoff, Monahan raised his voice. He alerted the entire Central Connecticut team that if anyone touched the freshman again, there’d be a problem. The temperature rose in the rink. Central Connecticut players raised their eyes. “Oh really?”

The puck dropped. Bench-clearing brawl, immediately. Monahan right in the middle.

Sam Kennedy, one of Monahan’s closest friends then and now, remembers this as an early sign of Monahan’s dualities. Kennedy (no relation to JFK) was roommates with Jay’s younger brother, Brendan, and played baseball. He knew the Monahan name as one deeply tied to New England golf. He knew they were longtime members at Winchester, an old private Donald Ross-designed track dating back to the early 1900s. Such a background paints a very certain picture. It’s one that, all these years later, Kennedy pushes back on.

“Any impression you could have of a prominent New England golf family is someone of great privilege and great wealth and, in reality, that is not the Monahan family,” Kennedy said in a recent phone conversation. “They’re amazing people, but regular people. His dad was a defense lawyer in the city and his mom was the most kind, loving, compassionate person you’d ever meet.”

Monahan attended UMass Amherst for graduate school and took an internship at Woolf Associates, a sports management company in Boston, after graduation. The agency, founded by pioneering sports agent, Bob Woolf, primarily represented hockey players, including the interests of Bobby Orr. Young Monahan would go on to help agent Jay Fee grow the company’s golf arm. He repped the likes of Billy Andrade, Brad Faxon and Gil Morgan.

“He was a sharp kid who could play golf, knew the landscape of the business, all the ins and outs — detailed, thorough,” Andrade said. “He wasn’t 25. He was well beyond his years.”

Monahan moved next to EMC, a technology company (since acquired by Dell) that sponsored the World Cup of Golf. Soon after, he landed at IMG Worldwide, hired there by Mark Steinberg, the power broker behind Tiger Woods. Monahan helped develop the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston and served as the tournament’s first director at age 32.

Next, Monahan was tabbed by Fenway Sports Group, the ownership body of the Red Sox. There he reconnected with Kennedy. The two were senior VPs, “chasing corporate advertising dollars all over the place,” Kennedy remembers. Fenway’s holdings included ownership stakes in the Sox, New England Sports Network and Roush Fenway Racing. It’s since acquired Liverpool FC and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Monahan was on the ground floor and could very well have risen to a major position within his beloved hometown team.

Instead, it ended up being Kennedy who climbed to president and CEO of the Red Sox. He is, all these years later, unsurprised by their divergent paths. In those early days, Kennedy saw Monahan’s time at FSG as a stepping stone. “In the back of my mind, I knew he’d return full-time to his true calling, and that’s golf.”

Seth Waugh, then the CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas, ID’d Monahan as someone to watch. He passed along a recommendation to PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem in 2008 that the young man should fill the role as executive director of The Players Championship. Monahan jumped at it. Waugh, today the CEO of the PGA of America, also told Finchem he might be hiring his eventual successor.

While some others inside tour headquarters thought they were contenders to replace Finchem, Monahan cleared the deck. He rose from senior vice president for business development, to executive VP and chief marketing officer, to deputy commissioner, to chief operating officer. “He was groomed for this job and it’s shown,” Andrade said.

Monahan rose to the commissionership in 2017. At 46, he was only the fourth man to hold the job, following Joe Dey, Deane Beman and Finchem, and his ascent was, in hindsight, mostly self-made.

Jay Monahan navigated the PGA Tour through COVID-19, temporarily not taking a paycheck while keeping tournament purses the same. (Adam Hagy / USA Today)

“I’ll just say this, I take a lot of pride in that and I take a lot of pride in the kids I grew up with and the families I learned from and the grit I saw every day,” he said Thursday. “When you have that experience, that doesn’t go away from you, unless you’re detached from reality.”

Monahan said he’s anything but. He’s a father of two girls and intensely loyal to his family. It’s worth knowing, though, that if he’d had a son, he wasn’t going to pass along the name. He’ll be the last.

And what does this version amount to? Those who know Monahan say onlookers don’t actually know what’s there. This is, they say, a man of two distinct sides.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said this to him,” said Mike Whan, the former LPGA commissioner who now leads the USGA as CEO, “but I’ve definitely said this about Jay to people in our industry — sometimes you get the hockey player and sometimes you get the golfer. They’re both in there. He’s certainly capable of a full-scale body check. He’s tough. He’s a fighter. If you push Jay to the point where he doesn’t want to be pushed anymore, you’ll experience the hockey player. But then he can turn it on, be the country club GM, be very comfortable in the polite golf setting.

“He’s got both personalities in him and he brings out which one he needs at any moment.”

It was about seven months ago or so when Monahan pulled aside Davis Love III. He needed help. A threat from the flank was now coming head-on. LIV was building momentum and Monahan knew of a particular player seriously considering an offer. He needed a counter pitch. Love, an elder statesman fresh off a vice-captaincy with the winning U.S. Ryder Cup team, had a direct line to this player. Monahan asked him to intercede.

“I told Jay he was panicking,” Love recently recalled. “I told him, (LIV) wasn’t going to work, wasn’t going to happen. Turns out, I was wrong, he was right.”

Monahan’s job is inherently manifold. He technically works for the card-carrying members who comprise the tour. But he also answers to a multi-prong board of directors made up of five independent directors from corporate America and four (soon to be five) player representatives, along with a 16-man player advisory council.

Yet, still, when it comes to public perception of the leadership in the PGA Tour, he’s the boss.

There’s power in his position. But there are also limits. Any potential changes go through what’s typically a lengthy board approval process.

The common refrain out there is Monahan didn’t do enough early on to stave off LIV’s rise. Some believe that he didn’t enact bold initiatives like those announced Wednesday sooner; that he didn’t show strength publicly, instead allowing McIlroy and Woods to do so; that Monahan got caught thinking LIV would simply go away; that he hasn’t improved the tour’s product for fans.

Then came a June press conference at The Travelers Championship that was left ripe for interpretation. As Monahan sat down to begin speaking, LIV announced the addition of Brooks Koepka, leading a reporter to inform Monahan in real time of the news. A man known for the kind of stoicism that gets passed down by generations looked frazzled at times. He called LIV an “irrational threat” because of its endless money and lack of an immediate need to turn a profit.

“He was nervous,” Love remembered. “He turned his head sideways at one point. I mean, it’s been a hard situation and there’s been no right answers. What do you do?”

Many of those who’ve left the tour for LIV have skewered Monahan and the tour as being hypocrites and unwilling to budge on long-held norms. Stemming from accusations by Norman and a lawsuit filed against the tour by Phil Mickelson and other players, the U.S. Justice Department is presently investigating the tour for possible anticompetitive behavior.

Cameron Smith, left, won the 2022 Players Championship. He may also be the latest defection to LIV Golf. (Kyle Terada / USA Today)

Criticisms of Monahan aren’t unjust. Some of the heat is absolutely warranted and he’s paid to take it. A review of the tour’s tax return filed for 2020 shows Monahan is credited with earning $14.1 million. Yes, other professional league commissioners typically pull down more, but the tour takes care of Monahan. His compensation is determined by the Management Development and Compensation Committee of the PGA Tour Policy Board, The Athletic’s Dan Kaplan wrote last month.

So, if anyone wants to Monday Morning Quarterback the commissioner and the tour’s moves, they can indeed do so.

However, Love’s question does resonate. What was Monahan supposed to do differently? And what was he supposed to say that could legally be said? This is where the job often seems misunderstood.

“Jay is trying to keep too many people happy right now,” Love said prior to last week’s players-only meeting. “It’s hard for him. The sponsors are thinking one thing. Legal is thinking one thing. The top players are thinking one thing, other players thinking other things. He’s worried about who’s the next guy? And going and talking to that guy. Then there’s other (general tour business). Look at what he walked into. Covid and then this.”

While Whan and many others are limited in what they can say, due to potential litigation, the USGA leader gasped when asked the question.

“Somebody said to me the other day — when is the PGA Tour going to do something? I said, do something?” Whan said recently. “To me, this looks like six years’ worth of change put together in six months. It’s never going to be enough, or fast enough, or different enough for everyone sitting in their Easy Chair, but personally I think there’s been a nimbleness in their willingness to respond.”

This is, it’s worth noting, still the same commissioner who a year ago this time was praised endlessly for leading the tour through Covid. Player purses remained intact, while he went without a salary and dipped into a reserve of cash that he helped build. Those reserves have since been replenished to more than pre-pandemic numbers.

Some players do believe that there’s only so much Monahan could’ve done against LIV. If there was going to be a legitimate counter, it had to come from the players themselves, which is exactly what’s now occurred.

“Yes, it’s a player-run meritocracy, but we have not flexed our power, at least not over the last few years,” said one current member of the advisory board, speaking under the condition of anonymity. “I think it’s more player-influenced than player-run. But it’s not that we don’t have the ability to do so. It’s just that we have not piped up and been like, hey, we are fed up with this.

“I don’t think that anyone has been so frustrated, so fed up with anything at any point in recent years that we as players have truly tested our power. There hasn’t before been anything like, Hey, Jay, we do not want this, so do this, and we want this, this, this, and this.”

Once LIV took off, Monahan began appearing at weekly tour stops. He sat in meeting rooms and afforded an open-door policy for players to come in and speak to him. Should it have been done, sooner? Yes, probably, Xander Schauffele says, but it did end up happening.

Schauffele, a tour star who admitted to having been extended a staggering LIV offer, regularly scheduled 15-minute conversations with Monahan at this time.

“There’s a lot that goes into it, in terms of changing something, but we’d talk about what can be done,” Schauffele said this week. “He’s taken a lot of accountability and put his best foot forward when talking to us in private space. I don’t think we have any reason to doubt his ability in helping us do what needs to be done.”

The point is, despite those rumors, it remains seriously unlikely that Monahan will be out as commissioner any time soon. Considering how things have gone against LIV, the fact that he’s already survived this long speaks to that.

But that doesn’t eliminate the question of if he can successfully lead the tour through its most tumultuous time since the Great Recession. LIV’s attack is not a turf war, for that descriptor implies two sides pressing into each other, fighting for every inch. Instead, this has been a six-month surge, the tour’s beaches receding by the day. Now that the tour’s top players are united, he at least has a chance. He’s going to remain, though, as Schauffele noted, stuck in the middle.

For a guy willing to drop the gloves, it’s a position requiring restraint. Not easy.

Yes, Monahan doesn’t like speaking of himself, but this is where he got going on Thursday.

“I think that I try not to think of the immediacy of the moment, but looking out over the horizon,” Monahan said. “While things can seem one way in the immediate (moment), I think I’m highly, highly competitive, but also think I’m …”

He stopped. A long pause. He looked down at his hands, fiddled, picking at his cuticles.

“I don’t know how to put it.”

Another pause.

“I hope I have the ability to compartmentalize things and keep them in the right place. Things are not won in soundbites. Things are not won in individual moves. You win over the long haul. You win by keeping people inspired, learning every step of the way, and understanding you don’t have every answer.

“I try … I feel like … ,” another pause. Monahan narrowed his eyes, offering a stare.

“It’s a necessary trait when you’re a leader.”

Waugh once called Monahan “a total glass-is-half-full” kind of guy. It’s accurate. But such a temperament has been admittedly difficult throughout this. Known for being widely well-liked, Monahan now finds that friends and others often speak to him as if his dog died. They struggle not to talk about LIV or Norman or which player might defect next.

Monahan shook his head, said he tries to see this as an opportunity.

And it is one.

Monahan could lead the most revolutionary moment in modern professional golf history.

Or Monahan, a man who’s spent his whole life trying to live up to his name, could end up overseeing the most dramatic overthrow in the sport’s history.

Thinking over this, Monahan swept his hand across the table. He went back to who he is.

“It’s not about me,” he said. “Literally, it’s not about me. Yes, I’m in a position that people are going to make it about me and the decisions we make, and there will be criticism. That goes with the territory. But it’s about the PGA Tour and everyone who has built it. There’s not enough time in the day to worry about me.”

He paused, and then …

“You know, I’m going to operate with integrity and be impeccable with my word. I’m going to do my best. So long as I live up to that, you know, things are going to be just fine.”

One way or another, this is what Jay Monahan will forever be known for.

(Illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; Photos: Ben Jared, Stuart Franklin, Michael Wade, Matthew Lewis and Cliff Hawkins / via Getty Images)

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