What Happened Inside The Players' Meeting?

On Tuesday afternoon at Oakdale Golf and Country Club around 100 members of the PGA Tour met with their commissioner Jay Monahan to discuss how exactly their Tour had now, of sorts, merged with the Saudi Public Investment Fund and the DP World Tour.

LIV Golf has been, for the past year and a bit, the sworn enemy of the PGA Tour and now the future is with them despite all that's been said by Monahan. One of the most popular summaries of the news was that Monahan is a hypocrite, something that he himself acknowledged.

Monahan described the 75-minute meeting as 'intense, certainly heated' but that appears to only scratch the surface.

Reportedly 30 guys spoke, among them Harry Higgs, Mac Hughes, Maverick McNealy, Brandt Snedeker, Ben Crane, Aaron Baddeley, Shane Lowry and Doc Redman. The latter supposedly received a standing ovation for his observation that Monahan had previously told them that the Tour was in a strong position.

One of the more heated moments came when Grayson Murray reportedly told Rory McIlroy to 'f*** off' after the Northern Irishman had told him to 'Just play better, Grayson' which went down badly. This after Murray had, according to an anonymous player, been calling for Monahan to resign.

Another anonymous player added: “Most of the players were very, very angry. The sentiment in the room was pretty somber, and Jay was definitely getting attacked. He handled it OK, but there were times where he could’ve been more accepting and put himself in our shoes more. He was like, ‘I’m doing this for the betterment of the Tour, guys, can’t you see this?’

“And a lot of guys were like, ‘We don’t trust you!’ Everyone was asking how much PIF was investing, and he wouldn’t give us an amount. What’s the point of having a player advisory council?. The players just have no say really, even though Jay loves to say that we do have a say. It’s bulls***. The players just want a voice and want transparency.

“People would be more open to it if it were this conversation two years ago before all the s*** started. The Tour messed up in the beginning and took such a hard stance. I think LIV was going to be perfectly fine dragging out the court case.”

Geoff Ogilvy is one of the game's sounder thinkers and he told the Golf Channel that everyone was feeling too far removed from the Tour that they play on every week.

"I’m glad I wasn’t Jay," the Aussie said. "There's some grumpy players in there. The Tour has sort of changed its position quickly and dropped it on us really fast. So, maybe there's a feeling of a lack of trust a little bit in the leadership. It just feels like nobody really knows what's happening and the players are out of the loop. But no-one really ever likes being out of a loop. You know, everyone likes bit of information, and especially when it's your livelihood and your job and the sport that you love."

Former player and now Golf Channel analyst Johnson Wagner had an audio stream of the meeting and he was a bit of a lone voice in seeing some positives for Monahan.

"If it’s possible, I gained even more respect for Jay because he was taking it from every single angle," Wagner said. "Players were mad, players are calling for resignation, and Jay sat there and took it like a champ."