PGA/PIF close to a deal & Pace of Play

🗣️ Hello Friends,

Most of my audience are Philadelphia Eagles fans. What a dominant performance from the entire Eagles team, top to bottom, to win its second ever Super Bowl. 

You couldn’t have scripted a better game out of the Eagles offense and defense against the best quarterback/head coach tandem in the league. 

The city of Philadelphia will be partying for a while, but it’s time to put together another golf newsletter. 

This week in the golf universe had a couple of storylines that caught my attention and will shape the future of the professional golf landscape. 

In today’s newsletter we will cover:

• Is the PGA Tour and PIF closer to a deal?

• Pace of play issue 

• Kutlida Woods passes away 

PGA Tour & PIF Nearing a Deal?

We had a couple notable headlines that seem to suggest that maybe a deal merger between the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund (PIF) is closing soon? There are three interesting headlines that were released over the last week. 

Last Thursday, the PGA Tour released a statement that player director and current PGA Tour member Adam Scott alongside PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan met with President Trump earlier that week to discuss the ongoing discussions with PIF. 

Here is the statement:

Additionally, Tiger Woods and his son Charlie were seen playing with President Trump at his course in Palm Springs, Florida Here is a video of the group on the range:

I believe it’s quite notable that the PGA Tour representation met with President Trump this week. Rory McIIroy has been on the record stating that if Trump was re-elected for President, it would be great for getting a deal done with PIF. 

This is because the Department of Justice (DOJ) has the jurisdiction to step in and state that this would be a monopoly. President Trump is allowed to intervene on the DOJ’s investigation and help expedite the approval process. 

It is still unclear what a potential merger between the PGA Tour and PIF would look like. LIV Golf has made a lot of substantial business moves like hiring a new CEO in Scott O’Neil, inking a broadcast deal with Fox Sports and a couple of its franchises signing apparel deals. 

It looks like LIV Golf particularly won’t be going anywhere in the foreseeable future, and it will be interesting to see what the framework of the deal would look like if the parties can reach an agreement.

Pace of Play Issue

The PGA Tour and its players have been harshly criticized for the slow pace of play to start the 2025 season. In all honesty, it has been well warranted. This topic created headlines after the final group at the Farmers Insurance Open a couple weeks ago was playing extremely slow. 

Pace of play has always been an issue in professional golf, however, the PGA Tour has not enforced any punishments. So why would players change their routine?  

The PGA Tour has been answering many questions. Apparently, the PGA Tour has years of data on who are the slowest and fastest players on tour.

With this data, the PGA Tour has admitted that they use this data to try and optimize Thursday and Friday tee times. 

The PGA Tour has some very loose rules regarding pace of play but it seems like they have now enforced them.

So the question is, how do you solve this problem?

Just recently, the LPGA announced their new pace of place guidelines, which players followed last weekend. Here are the rules:

As a result, the average pace of play time at the LPGA Founders Tournament was 3 hours and 42 mins. Compared to last year’s tournament numbers, there was a substantial difference this year. 

Should the PGA Tour implement these same rules?

A number of golf analysts have stated that the PGA Tour pulled some of them aside to go over some of solutions to the problem. Some discussion topics have been releasing the data they have collected to the public or use some sort of technology to help. 

I don’t have the perfect answer to this question, but the PGA Tour needs to actually enforce a punishment to help pace of play.

Kultida Woods Passes Away 

On February 4th, Tiger announced that his mother Kultida passed away in the early morning. Here is the statement he released last week:

It has been well documented throughout Tiger’s golf career of the influence that his dad Earl had on him. On the other hand, Tiger has always credited Kultida with many sacrifices she made when he was a kid, driving him to all his junior golf tournaments. Tiger spoke very highly of Kultida at his Hall of Fame speech. Here is a snippet:

Some pretty powerful and motivational stuff from Tiger in his speech. 

Talk soon!