Rory McIlroy called it “a slap in the face” for James Hahn to miss Tuesday’s player meeting after Hahn had strongly criticized the PGA Tour’s new format of play announced for 2024.

“Like, you say all this (expletive) and you’re not even in the meeting?” the star from Northern Ireland said to reporters after his news conference Tuesday at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., where both McIlroy and Hahn are competing at the Players Championship this week.

“If you want to get informed and be a part of the process … The fact that he wasn’t even in the room was a slap in the face to everyone there.”

During a phone interview with Golfweek on March 4, Hahn, 41, criticized the plan by the PGA Tour to change to a new Designated Event Model in 2024, which is largely seen as a response to the controversial Saudi-backed LIV circuit having poached some PGA Tour players.

“I hate them,” Hahn told Golfweek of the changes. “I’m gonna say exactly what 99.99 percent of fans said about players leaving for the LIV Tour. If our players just said, ‘We’re doing this for the money,’ I would have a lot more respect for them. But how they’re covering up what they’re doing and trying to make it a thing about sponsors and fans and saving opposite-field events. I think that’s all BS.”

The system of designated events went into play this year, aimed at keeping players on the PGA Tour. The tour raised the minimum purse at each of these events to $20 million.

Now, the PGA Tour has tinkered with the tournaments further. In the 2024 season, each designated event will have a field of between 70 and 80 players, with a guarantee to play all four rounds for purses of $20 million or more.

“Right now, they’re just covering their ass and saying everything that the PGA Tour basically has trained them to say, have taught them to say and try to make it not about money when everyone knows 100 percent it’s about more guaranteed money being funneled to the top players in the world. We’ve been talking about money for the last two years and for them not to say that that’s not the No. 1 reason why they’re making these changes — it’s very, very hypocritical.”

Hahn hasn’t won since the 2016 Wells Fargo Championship and has missed 13 cuts since last year’s Players Championship. He qualified for the Players this year because he finished 113th in the FedEx Cup standings in 2022.

McIlroy, 33, is ranked No. 3 in the world after finishing a shot behind leader Kurt Kitayama last week at the Arnold Palmer Invitational. He could become No. 1 with a victory this week at TPC Sawgrass.

–Field Level Media

Rory McIlroy has spent the past year as the leading voice among the players in the PGA Tour’s battle against the upstart LIV Golf League.

He’s also the first one to admit the threat from its Saudi-backed rival forced the PGA Tour to aggressively address its “antiquated system” in a way that benefits players on all of the top tours.

McIlroy made the comments on Tuesday ahead of his 13th start at The Players Championship, which he won in 2019. The remarks came after the tour’s annual players meeting, which followed last week’s announcement that 2024 will include eight limited field, no-cut events.

This year’s designated events feature $20 million purses, while The Players was increased to $25 million. McIlroy said “a lot” of the changes have been stirred by the threat of LIV Golf.

“I’m not going to sit here and lie; I think the emergence of LIV or the emergence of a competitor to the PGA Tour has benefited everyone that plays elite professional golf,” the 33-year-old from Northern Ireland said. “I think when you’ve been the biggest golf league in the biggest market in the world for the last 60 years, there’s not a lot of incentive to innovate.

“This has caused a ton of innovation at the PGA Tour and what was quite, I would say, an antiquated system is being revamped to try to mirror where we’re at in the world in the 21st century with the media landscape. The PGA Tour isn’t just competing with LIV Golf or other sports. It’s competing with Instagram and TikTok and everything else that’s trying to take eyeballs away from the PGA Tour as a product.”

World No. 1 Jon Rahm echoed McIlroy’s thoughts about the PGA Tour alterations.

“Without LIV Golf, this wouldn’t have happened. So to an extent, like I’ve said before, we should be thankful this threat has made the PGA TOUR want to change things,” Rahm, a 28-year-old from Spain, said. “I think I said it last week, as well; I wish it didn’t come to the PGA TOUR being, you know, under fire from somebody else to make those changes and make things better for the players, but I guess it is what we needed. So, yeah, it is because of LIV Golf, otherwise we wouldn’t have seen any of this.”

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan acknowledged Tuesday that it is “awkward” not to have Australian Cameron Smith in this week’s field, the defending Players champion who now lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, the site of The Players. In fact, four players who finished in the top six last year have since joined LIV Golf.

“Would it be better if the defending champion was here this week? Absolutely,” McIlroy said. “But he made a decision that he felt was the best thing for him, and he knew that decision was going to come with consequences. And one of the consequences is right now not being able to play on the PGA Tour.”

He added that LIV has “definitely had a massive impact on the game.” Beyond the noticeable players missing from the PGA Tour’s “fifth major” this week, the McIlroy previously admitted to fractured relationships with longtime European Ryder Cup teammates, including Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood.

McIlroy also has spent countless hours working as an advocate for the players on the policy board. He said Tuesday that an initial plan during a meeting in Delaware last August called for a schedule featuring 14 designated events.

McIlroy said that plan would have been “self-serving for the 20 players in that room.” The plan announced last week trims that to eight events, with the intention being to spread them out to encourage the top players to enter a handful of full-field events to keep their games sharp.

It also includes “enough jeopardy,” as McIlroy said, where even the top players must continue to secure their spots into those designated events.

“It’s trying to create the best schedule that guarantees that the top players play in the big events,” he said. “But also that it can sort of guarantee the participation in a handful of the full-field events as well. So I think there’s a pretty good balance to it.”

After a seven-hour meeting with the Tour Policy Board last week, the tour presented a pared-down version of the plan during the Tuesday player meeting.

“I think it was good for them to see that and to see what the thinking is behind what we’re really trying to do here,” McIlroy said. “I think the temperature in the room was nowhere near as hot as I anticipated it to be once the information was sort of laid out.”

While serving and as the de facto voice of the PGA Tour players in the ongoing public relations battle with LIV Golf, McIlroy has managed to stay focused on his game. He won three times in a seven-event span to regain the No. 1 world ranking.

That quickly was reclaimed by Scottie Scheffler and then Rahm, with McIlroy slipping to No. 3 entering this week. He’s coming off a tie for second last week in the Arnold Palmer Invitational and is hopeful that he can enjoy a bit more balance in his life now that the plan for 2024 has been made public.

“When I went on the board of the PGA Tour, I didn’t imagine it would take up this much time. But I think it’s been important work, and I’m proud of the steps that we and the PGA Tour have made to try to make everything better for the membership and try to stem the flow of players that have went to LIV,” he said.

“But yeah, hopefully with these new changes that have been announced, hopefully the majority of my time will be spent on concentrating on getting ready for golf tournaments and trying to be the best player that I can be.

“It might give me a bit more free time to do other things that I enjoy, as well.”

–Field Level Media

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan was confidently defiant as he came armed with loads of data and talking points for his annual press conference at The Players Championship on Tuesday.

The Tour’s announcement last week of limited, no-cut fields for eight designated events in 2024 sparked controversy throughout the golf world. While recognizing it might not be the perfect solution out of the gate and that change “can be uncomfortable,” Monahan said all of the tour’s modeling suggested this was the best approach moving forward.

“At the heart of the changes announced is our effort to present the best possible PGA Tour to our fans and provide maximum benefits for every PGA Tour member across the board,” he said. “We’ve looked at all possible competitive models, and it was evident and perhaps obvious that whatever we do differently, we must showcase our top performers competing against one another more often.”

The notion of the tour’s top players competing for larger purses in limited, no-cut fields led LIV Golf defectors Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood to take to social media to stir the debate about how that differs from the Saudi-backed rival league.

PGA Tour veteran James Hahn, ranked 305th in the world, told Golfweek he hates the changes. He accused the tour of being “hypocritical” while hiding what he believes is the true intention of funneling more money to its top players so they won’t leave for LIV.

Monahan’s response is that players still must qualify for the designated events and continue to earn their way into the marquee tournaments.

“I would ask you, do you think we really look the same? The players that are competing in our events in this new format next year will have earned the right to compete in them and they will have earned it through top-50 position in the FedEx Cup this year as well as their performance in the fall and ultimately in these swings,” Monahan said.

“That’s what this organization has always stood for. The PGA Tour has always had limited-field, no-cut 72-hole stroke play events. In fact, Jack Nicklaus won 17 times in that format. Arnold Palmer won 23. Tiger Woods won 26. To me, those wins, those, the format did not diminish those accomplishments as we sit here today.

“I think as we look out to 2024, 2025, 2026, the same will hold true.”

When the PGA Tour responded to the LIV Golf threat by creating designated events with full fields competing for $20 and $25 million purses for the 2022-23 season, the collateral damage has proved to be the regular tour stops in between.

With the top players in the world building their schedules around the designated events, last month’s Honda Classic didn’t have a single top-15 player in the field as it sat between the Genesis Invitational and the Arnold Palmer Invitational. Next week’s Valspar Championship faces a similar dilemma as it follows the Arnold Palmer and The Players.

Peter Malnati is one of five players on the PGA Tour’s Advisory Board. After initially being adamantly opposed to the proposed changes, he admitted last week that he now believes they will help the full membership.

As the 220th-ranked player in the world, Malnati held the concern shared by many of the tour “grinders” that the changes would only benefit the cream of the crop. But following a seven-hour meeting at Bay Hill during which the tour presented data on the percentage of players on average move in and out of the top 50, he came away convinced that limited, no-cut fields will only strengthen the full-field events.

“I just couldn’t believe how much I had transformed my view on what we were doing,” Malnati told Golfweek. “I think everyone thinks that we’re screwing up and I really actually don’t think we are.

“It was the only way to protect the little guys. … When I saw the numbers, you couldn’t ignore it.”

And that’s the point Monahan attempted to drive home on Tuesday.

“When you look to the future, being able to balance our entire schedule between designated and full-field events is absolutely critical,” he said. “By keeping these field sizes at 70 to 80 players, that allows us to make the field sizes at all of our full-field events as strong if not stronger going forward.

“All of our modeling suggests that.”

One of Monahan’s “data points” was a look at the number of top 30 players in the world rankings who competed against each other at non-majors. According to the tour’s data, that number was less than 40 percent, compared to 95 percent at the majors.

While acknowledging this transition year has led to some difficulties for regular tour stops, Monahan also pointed out the storylines they have generated. The most recent was Chris Kirk earning his first win in seven years following a well-documented battle with alcoholism. He outlasted Eric Cole, a journeyman pro with 54 mini-tour victories on his resume.

Monahan believes these types of storylines will continue to be created under the new model. Meanwhile, unheralded players like Kurt Kitayama will have opportunities to qualify for designated events and pull off remarkable feats such as his win at Bay Hill last week.

“The analogy that I’ve been playing around with, one great chapter does not make a great book,” Monahan said. “A few great chapters cannot stand alone. It is the whole story, the ebbs and the flows, the transitions, the connectivity between each. That’s what makes a book great, and that’s what you need to do to deliver a bestseller.

“That’s what we’re attempting to do with our new competitive model. I’m confident our fans, partners and players will get what they’re looking for – the most competitive compelling consequential Tour in the world.”

Monahan acknowledged the “awkward” element of reigning champion Cam Smith – who lives in the area – not being in the field to defend his Players title this week. He’s one of four players who finished in the top six last year who have since joined LIV Golf.

However, the 144-player field does include the top three players in the world rankings, which has changed hands several times between Jon Rahm, Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy already this year. Rahm arrived at The Players ranked No. 1 for the second consecutive year, but Scheffler and McIlroy again have an opportunity to wrest it away from him this week.

Woods won the second of his two Players titles in 2013, and there has been a first-time winner every year since.

“When you have top players competing together more often, as we’ve said we’re going to do, those same storylines are going to come through and the connectivity over the course of the season I think is something that right now we don’t fully understand, but when we get into it I think it’s going to be extremely compelling and is going to help all of our events grow and succeed,” Monahan said.

“I’m going to say this: It’s a great time to be a PGA Tour fan and a PGA Tour player.”

–Field Level Media