PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan will return to work on July 17, giving him more than a month’s absence due to an undisclosed medical condition.
The news was first broken on Friday in a report by Eamon Lynch posted Friday on golfweek.com, citing multiple sources. Later in the day, the timetable for his return was confirmed by pgatour.com.
Monahan, 53, took a leave of absence on June 14. Tour chief operating officer, Ron Price, and Tour president Tyler Dennis have shared the day-to-day operational duties at the tour. He left only eight days after the Tour announced a joint venture with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, the DP World Tour and LIV Golf, after more than a year of worldwide strife, angry words, lawsuits and countersuits.
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All legal action on both sides was dropped with the agreement. Monahan will be the CEO of the new company and Yassir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF, will be the chairman, with the PIF pumping billions of dollars of capital into the new world order of professional golf — provided it survives scrutiny in the US from Congress and the Justice Department.
Since becoming the Tour’s fourth commissioner in 2017, Monahan has had to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic that suspended sports worldwide in the spring and early summer of 2020, then the formation of LIV Golf, which used front money of as much as $100 million each to lure players such as Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, Bryson DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka.
In a note Monahan sent to the PGA Tour Policy Board he said:
“I am deeply sorry that I haven’t been able to be with you during this time. The last two years have been grueling for us all. I experienced that toll personally in the days following the announcement of our framework agreement and encountered adverse impacts on my health. With the support of my family and thanks to world-class medical care, my health has improved dramatically.”
Price and Policy Board member Jimmy Dunne is due to testify on July 11 before the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan will return to work on July 17