"I'm Not Aware of the Call": Monahan Finally Answers the Question That Haunted the LIV War

For years, one question followed Jay Monahan everywhere he went, and it was always asked the same way: why didn't you take the call?

The implication was simple and damning. Before LIV Golf launched, the Saudis had supposedly reached out to the PGA Tour commissioner seeking partnership. Monahan, the story went, ignored them — and so the golf war began.

Now, with weeks left in his ten-year tenure as commissioner, Monahan has finally offered his side of the story. Speaking to Eamon Lynch for a new Golf Channel show, he challenged the very premise of the question.

"First of all, I'm not aware of the 'call' that was made to me," he said. "I do think anytime you're gonna be negotiating with someone, you want to understand what their intent is, you want to understand how sincere they are. And if someone's going to be calling me, or if someone did call me, you have to recognize, depending on what time this 'call' happened, that they had been at our tournaments as a team with their lawyers, recruiting our players, meeting with agents, doing all the things that they felt that they needed to do in order to stand up their league."

It was, in other words, a recruiting operation running in plain sight, not a partnership approach — and the reason he refused a meeting is the belief at the heart of the whole interview: that franchise-based team golf would replace the PGA Tour's model, and the Tour would become a feeder system for something bigger.

"I think the most important thing here is that it was their belief that franchise-based team golf was a more successful long-term proposition for the game than golf the way it's played on the PGA Tour," Monahan said. "That that model that is so successful in stick-and-ball sports could immediately translate to men's professional golf, and that ultimately would win. And they saw us — they were saying this to others — as a feeder tour."

That was the line the Tour could not cross. "So if you're gonna meet, then I think a couple things have to happen," Monahan continued. "You either have to agree that you need to become [a feeder tour] or largely become that, or you need to look inside and say, 'What we've created is the right model for our players, for our fans, and for everybody that we serve.' And that's what was guiding us during that timeframe."

Monahan also called the rollout of the Tour's June 2023 framework agreement with the Saudis his "biggest regret." But when Lynch offered him a victory lap now that LIV is winding down, its backers having withdrawn their funding and its relaunch abandoned, Monahan declined it.

"I'm extremely proud of where we are and I'm extremely grateful to everyone that contributed to getting us here," he said. "It's not about me. You know, I was the leader of the organization during a challenging time. I did the best I could alongside everybody else to get us to the right outcome."

Monahan steps down on December 31, ten years to the day after he took the job. The war he spent the second half of his tenure fighting is, for practical purposes, over. Whether history judges him kindly for how he fought it will be argued for years — but at least now, on the record, we know what he says happened, and what he says never did.