Rory McIlroy challenged the absence of a fellow PGA Tour member for missing a playey’s last Tuesday.
Players were invited to discuss recent changes to the PGA Tour. These include many ‘designated’ events which are often criticized by players as favoring the big guns.
James Hahn is one of the most vocal critics. He stated that he believes that media has created more division than was actually possible. He also publicly denied the idea that all players will benefit from the PGA Tour’s changes.
Morning thoughts about the new structure for the PGA Tour. pic.twitter.com/T7nS4VsKEo
James Hahn (@JamesHahnPGA March 5, 2023
Despite having the opportunity to appear at the meeting, Hahn was not present. This was even more than Jon Rahm’s absence, who stated that he wants time with his family.
McIlroy also shared his thoughts about the missing Hahn.
The 2018 API and 2019 Players Championship winners ranted at the pre-event conference:
“Like you said all that s– but you aren’t even there?” It was an insult to all who were there to see that he wasn’t in the room to inform them and participate in the process.
The world number 3 felt that players understood the major changes to the 2024 schedule. He was able to reach 9-under on Sunday.
He said that people who had reservations about the information were made to more aware of it.
I think the tour executives did an excellent job of basically walking them through the slides we saw at the board meeting last Tuesday. However, it wasn’t to the same level of detail.”
We were there for nearly seven hours last Tuesday.”
Despite the murmurings from the sidelines, McIlroy viewed the meeting as a success.
“Obviously, we’re all trying to get ready [the API] for one of our biggest tournaments of this year. We just took — or they took, the most important slides and presented them to the members because of the time crunch.
I think the room temperature was not as high as I expected it to be after the information was laid out.
You can take what you want from the following, but McIlroy believes that the meeting was more “self-serving than” the players meeting in Delaware last July.
“Yeah, I said that in the meeting today. For the 20 players present in Delaware, the presentation was self-serving. We looked at fields of 50-60 players. He explained that only 10 players were dropping out of the top 50 each year. This gave us a retention rate in excess of 80 percent.
“The tour were like, let’s just say that the average retention rate for top 50 companies has been about 60 percent. Let’s get back to that number. The structure that was rolled out here is very different from what we all discussed and the men saw in Delaware. I believe for the betterment and everyone,” he stated, before admitting that:
“I believe if we had gone down that road it wouldn’t have served the members as well as this structure.”
