Tiger Woods is scheduled to holding a meeting this week with some top professional golfers ahead of a tournament to bolster support for the PGA as it battles against the new LIV Golf series.
ESPN reported that the meeting will include approximately 20 top players from around the world and several other “influential” PGA players who have not left for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series.
The meeting will take place in Delaware at Wilmington Country Club ahead of the BMW Championship, which is part of the PGA TOUR’s FedExCup Playoffs.
“I’m hearing tomorrow’s PGA Tour player meeting regarding LIV is going to be a banger,” golf reporter Alan Shipnuck tweeted. “Supposedly everything is on the table, from major championship boycotts to Monahan’s future to a larger compromise. And Tiger M.F. Woods is expected to fly in to provide counsel/bully/cajole.”
Woods has spoken out against LIV Golf and Greg Norman, who leads the new golf tour, saying earlier this summer that it was the right thing for the PGA to disinvite Norman to the 150th British Open at St. Andrews.
“Greg has done some things that I don’t think is in the best interest of our game, and we’re coming back to probably the most historic and traditional place in our sport,” Woods said. “I know Greg tried to do this back in the early ’90s. It didn’t work then, and he’s trying to make it work now. I still don’t see how that’s in the best interests of the game. I know what the PGA Tour stands for and what we have done and what the Tour has given us — the ability to chase after our careers and to earn what we get and the trophies we have been able to play for and the history that has been a part of this game.”
Woods slammed the players who left the PGA Tour for LIV Golf, saying that they have turned their backs on the tours that helped create them.
“The players who have chosen to go to LIV and to play there, I disagree with it,” Woods said. “I think that what they’ve done is they’ve turned their back on what has allowed them to get to this position. Some players have never got a chance to even experience it — they’ve gone right from the amateur ranks right into that organization and never really got a chance to play out here and what it feels like to play a Tour schedule or to play in some big events.”
“And, who knows what’s going to happen in the near future with world-ranking points, the criteria for entering major championships? The governing bodies are going to have to figure that out. Some of these players may not ever get a chance to play in major championships,” Woods continued. “That is a possibility that some players will never, ever get a chance to play in a major championship, never get a chance to experience this right here, walk down the fairways at Augusta National. That, to me, I just don’t understand it.”