Jack Nicklaus criticizes direction of PGA Tour: ‘Not exactly in favor’

This week will see the 50th playing of the Memorial Tournament, one of the PGA Tour’s most prestigious events. While little has changed at the Memorial in decades, just as host Jack Nicklaus intended, the same cannot be said of the Tour.

The PGA Tour’s leadership is planning a schedule overhaul for the near future, with a goal of compressing the season into six months.

Nicklaus is not “in favor” of the PGA Tour’s plan, and the 18-time major winner used part of his pre-Memorial press conference on Tuesday to criticize the proposed changes and detail why he thinks they will be a problem “if we don’t address it.”

Nicklaus on compressed PGA Tour schedule: ‘That’s a problem’

When he was asked to share his thoughts on the Tour’s schedule changes, Nicklaus didn’t want to speak on the topic at first, beyond confirming he wasn’t in favor of them. He also expressed his desire to talk with PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp and outgoing PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan to discuss his opinion.

“Well, I don’t want to comment on the [PGA] Tour’s schedule because I’m not exactly in favor of what they’re doing right now. But I really haven’t had a conversation. I want to sit down with Brian [Rolapp] and Jay [Monahan] and have that conversation,” Nicklaus said on Tuesday at Muirfield Village.

But then the 86-year-old golf legend decided to detail his issues with the new schedule anyway. His primary argument is that a compressed schedule would put “too many big tournaments too close together.”

“I mean, I hate to see tournaments bunched too much together with too many big tournaments too close together. That’s a problem, I think,” Nicklaus said. “And I think that’s going to be a problem for the Tour in the future.”

After joking that he’d “get chastised” later for sharing his criticism of the PGA Tour’s future direction, Nicklaus provided more specifics on the problems a compressed schedule causes, pointing to this year’s Cognizant Classic as an example. In the future, he argued, smaller Tour events “don’t have a chance.”

“But anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up here. I’ll get chastised for that later. Anyway, I think it’s harder for your tournaments to stand out. I mean, if you looked at the schedule, we’re involved in the Cognizant down in Florida, and, you know, we have Pebble Beach and Los Angeles, Tiger’s event, and then Cognizant, and then we had Bay Hill and the Players,” Nicklaus said. “I mean, what chance does that tournament have? I mean, it sits right in the middle of those. They don’t have a chance.”

Nicklaus fears that fields at smaller events will suffer because it’s difficult for top players to compete more than three weeks in a row.

“The other tournaments also say, you know, I got four out of five. It’s hard for guys to play that. See, the problem is not so much from the standpoint of players, it’s hard for the players to really be focused to play that much and be on top of their game. And that, to me, is — I look at it from the way I was as a player. I could play a couple weeks in a row, maybe three weeks in a row, but I needed some time off to be able to recharge the batteries. And I think everybody needs to recharge their batteries,” Nicklaus explained.

He added: “To jam it all in in one period of time, and then leave the rest of the year open, I think it’s tough. I don’t know whether that answers your question or not. But I mean, I think that’s — I don’t think it’s a problem yet, but I think it will be if we don’t address it.

Nicklaus reveals impact he hopes to still have on golf’s future

Due to his enormous stature in the game, Nicklaus opinions still hold significant sway, and he’s not afraid to share them. In addition to critiquing the Tour’s schedule changes, Nicklaus also shared his thoughts on the proposed golf ball rollback during his Memorial press conference.

Ultimately, though, Nicklaus revealed that, given his advanced age, he’s “not really trying to impact the game any.” Instead, he simply wants to do what is “right for the game.”

“Well, I’m not really trying to impact the game any, I’m trying to make sure that just what we do here is right for the game,” Nicklaus said on Tuesday. “Anything that the Tour or anybody wants to sit down and ask me and talk about, I hope that I can, through the experience that I’ve had, be of some influence or what do you call it? Something to bounce off of, something to bounce, somebody to bounce off things.”

He then described his desire to uphold “the great traditions of the game” rather than “worry about trying to create new stuff.”

“And I’m too old to worry about trying to create new stuff, I’m just trying to make sure that the game of golf — the game of golf’s a great game, it gave me everything that I had the opportunity to do. Most of these, most of the people out there, same thing, the players. And a lot of you are in here writing because of golf and it’s given you the ability — I know most of you write other sports too — but it’s a great game. It’s a game that I love and it’s a game that I want to see the traditions of the game being upheld,” Nicklaus said. “I think that the golf has been in its recent years has been a big, big, big benefit to charity. Charity’s been a big part of the game of golf and bigger than any other sport. I would like to see that continue. I just think that to be able to show and demonstrate to people that how to sort of kind of, not tell one how to live their life, but I think most of these golfers out here, they play the round of golf, they finish the round, they take their hat off, they shake each other’s hand, and they say, Well done, or they say, Oh, you played like crap today — I don’t know what they’re going to say. But it’s always a nice salutation.”

Nicklaus used his relationship with Arnold Palmer as a model for how civil the game should be, describing them as respectful rivals on the course and friends off it.

“Arnold and I, we had as much of a competition as any two guys could ever have. And we walked off the 18th green, shook hands and shook hands and, you know, it’s, ‘Where are you going to dinner tonight? Well, go grab Winnie, I’ll grab Barbara, we’ll go to dinner.’ That’s the kind of thing that you make the friendships through the game those are the kind of influences I have.”

In closing, he expressed his hope that those values in golf will always beat out “confrontation” and “bad blood.”

“I don’t like to see confrontation. I don’t like to see bad blood. I don’t like to see those kind of things happen. I don’t think you have a lot of that in golf. I think we’re very blessed by the nature that the game has is a civil game.”