Commissioner Jay Monahan: Now is not the time to think of a PGA Tour without Tiger Woods
BRADENTON, Fla. – PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan from time to time has given thought to what the PGA Tour would be like without Tiger Woods.
Now, however, is not the time to give thought to such matters.
“I think that the only thing that really matters now is his well-being, his recovery, his family, the level of support that we provide to him,” Monahan said Wednesday from The Concession Golf Club, home to this week’s World Golf Championships-Workday Champion, which has attracted 48 of the top 50 players in the world.
“When Tiger wants to talk about golf, we’ll talk about golf, but I think right now the entirety of our efforts needs to be around the support,” Monahan continued. “When you’re going to overcome what he needs to overcome, I think the love of all of our players and everybody out here, it’s going to come forward in a big way and across the entire sporting world.
“I think he’ll feel that energy and I think that’s what we should all focus on. We’ll all be talking about (the PGA Tour without Woods) at some point down the road, but right now that’s not what we should be talking about.”
Woods was involved in a single-car rollover crash early Tuesday morning in the Los Angeles area. Woods was transported by ambulance to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where surgery was performed in the afternoon.
Woods shattered the tibia and fibula in his right leg and suffered significant injuries to his right foot and ankle. A rod was inserted to stabilize his tibia and a combination of screws and pins were used to stabilize the ankle and foot.
Woods, 45, was awake and responsive following the surgery, his team said in a statement Tuesday night.
Monahan was in his office Tuesday in the organization’s spanking new headquarters in northeast Florida when his video conference was interrupted by a phone call. It wasn’t good news, for the other end of the line told him about the crash. All his other duties took a back seat.
“I was shocked,” Monahan said. “I kind of had to sit down and ask the same question I had asked a second time because I wasn’t sure I completely heard what I was being told.
“I was up all night last night and I couldn’t really focus on anything else.”
Monahan, 50, said he talked with members of Woods’ team, including his agent Mark Steinberg.
Tiger Woods and the United States Presidents Cup team pose with PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan after the 2019 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne. (Daniel Pockett/Getty Images)
“It was early on in the process when there was still a lot of unknowns,” Monahan said. “All I knew was that he had had a really bad car accident, which the time frame from that to when we started to understand that, No. 1, most important, he was going to be OK and it was non-life‑threatening, and two, he had serious injuries that needed to be attended to.
“That’s where for me and I think for a lot of us there was a period where we didn’t know; you’re thinking a lot of different things and some of them are pretty scary to think about. His life was in jeopardy. That was a hard. You never want to see anybody in that spot obviously.”
Monahan’s relationship goes back some 30 years and really took hold when he was the tournament director of the Deutsche Bank Championship at TPC Boston, which benefited Woods’ foundation. Monahan joined the PGA Tour in 2008 and became commissioner on Jan. 1, 2017.
“I think that experience of building an event for his foundation with Tiger, with Greg McLaughlin, with Mark Steinberg, with the whole team there, I was the Bostonian, was an awesome experience,” Monahan said. “And it was awesome not just because of the event, but you start to really understand that foundation and what Tiger puts into it personally both in terms of his time, his treasure. It’s extraordinary. And sometimes it’s hard to articulate how impactful someone’s work is or how you see their work impacting young people.
“You just go to the Learning Center in Anaheim and it will blow your mind to think that he’s accomplished everything he’s accomplished in the field of play and then he’s accomplishing everything like that in life.”
