Patrick Cantlay feels sympathy for golf fans, but the member of the PGA Tour policy board had no big news for them on the eve of the Sentry, the opening event of the 2024 season of the American Circuit. Negotiations involving the board began after the announcement last June of a framework merger agreement to unite the PGA and the DP World Tour with the Saudi sponsors of the LIV, but no final pact has yet been produced.
With the future of golf in limbo as the PGA season begins in Hawaii and LIV plans a launch in Mexico in four weeks, Cantlay identifies with followers who seek to end the uncertainty. “I feel sorry for the fan,” said Cantlay. “There has been a lot of confusion not only for the players who have been on tour in the last year or two, but I can also imagine it for the fans at home. I think they are asking for attention to return directly to golf and the tournaments that are being played and to forget all this political talk unrelated to golf, which has consumed a lot of energy in the last two years,” he stressed.
For now, the only places for PGA and LIV stars to compete are the Majors. but Cantlay hopes that the PGA Tour’s flagship tournaments, with larger purses and smaller fields, will help until the negotiation process concludes. “I hope that by having more of the best players playing the same weeks they know exactly which weeks are important to us, the players, and they can see many more tournaments in which the best players on the circuit compete against each other in the final stretch of Sunday,” pointed out the world number five.
Cantlay, who got married after the American defeat in the Ryder Cup and has rested for several weeks before starting the preseason, does not interpret that the lack of preparation was the cause of the setback in Rome: “We could have gone out, played really well and won, and everyone would have written articles about how well rested the American players were and how the European players had played the playoffs on the PGA Tour, then they all competed in tournaments in Europe and were simply exhausted in the most important week of the year. At the end of the day, the Europeans played better than us that week in general,” he explained.
Cantlay did not want to assess the choice of Scottie Scheffler as PGA Tour Player of the Year in 2023 or whether it was unfair that Jon Rahm had not won it, but he did tell a curious anecdote from when he won this award in 2021, at the expense of the Spanish golfer: “I went to Tiger’s house, I think to talk about the Ryder Cup after having won the Player of the Year, and at that moment it seemed very important to me to have that award. We were in the basement of Tiger’s house and he had like 11 awards like mine lined up next to each other, all in the corner of the basement… boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and I said: ‘Hey, I’m catching up’, and he looked at me and replied: ‘You have a lot of work to do,” he concluded with laughter.
