ORLANDO — As the Augusta National chairman has a State of the Masters press conference every year, the PGA Tour has a less grand occasion, by which the Tour commissioner makes a grand entrance into the media center and offers a report on all manner of Tour business. Different commissioners, over the years. Deane Beman, Tim Finchem, Jay Monahan, as recently as last year. The commissioner, by charter and mission statement, had one job above all others: increase playing opportunities for PGA Tour players, and increase player paydays. It worked well for a pretty long time, going back to the early 1970s. Those days are so over.
Jay Monahan is in his swan-song year as commissioner. The guy who runs the show now, and who will be front and center at the Wednesday press conference at the Players, will not be the commissioner at all. It will be Brian Rolapp, the Tour’s first CEO. He is not charged with increasing player opportunities and player paydays. The ultimate purpose of his job is to make the PGA Tour profitable. “The goal is not incremental change,” Rolapp said early in his tenure last year. “The goal is significant change.”
Enter Lucas Glover, the newly elected chairman of the Tour’s 16-member Player Advisory Council. Next year, he will start a four-year term on the PGA Tour Policy Board. He’s 46, a former U.S. Open winner and the last man standing in full defense of the Tour’s values from its Beman era, its Finchem era, its Monahan era. Or, to put it another way, in its Tom Watson era, its Greg Norman era and its Tiger Woods era.
“My opinion is different,” Glover said Sunday afternoon. He had signed his fourth-round card at Bay Hill — he finished in 24th place and earned $157000 — and was talking to a foursome of reporters. “The way I look at things is different, and my perspective is mine. You hope that [decision-making] is about the game and not about the bottom line. And the answer to everything [can’t be] ‘Just give them money.’” Glover, who learned his golf under the watchful eye of a grandfather and different members of the Harmon family, despises that approach to problem-solving. He’s out of step with his own times, and it’s unbelievably refreshing.
Glover, who defeated Adam Scott for the PAC chairmanship, is not high-and-mighty about it. It’s not like he’s rejecting the paydays that come from playing in Signature events. He’s on the Atlanta TGL team, the made-for-TV indoor-golf entertainment confection.
The player Glover most brings to mind is . . . Scottie Scheffler, and Glover mentioned him Sunday afternoon.
“Scottie wants to beat the crap out of everybody out here,” Glover said. “That’s all he cares about, playing good golf and winning. And that’s how I was brought up.”
In Glover’s accounting of his professional life, there are four majors, the Players Championship was better in May because the course was firm and fast and the Tour was better when players helped each other on the range, had dinner together and played cards at night. He said his teacher, Dick Harmon, came to one Tour event in all their years together, and that was in “Moline.” Moline, Ill. You have to be old school to refer to the John Deere tournament, aka Quad Cities, as Moline. The only reason Harmon was there at all was to visit his brother Butch. The PGA Tour driving range, Glover said, is now all “orange boxes and protein shakes.”
