Q&A: Seth Waugh on selling the Ryder Cup, taking Trump's major and a PGA Tour-PIF deal

Seth Waugh’s six-year tenure as CEO of the PGA of America — overseeing two of the sport’s biggest events, the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup — coincided with the most challenging and divisive period in golf’s history, including the Covid pandemic, the emergence of LIV Golf, and the decision to deny Donald Trump the major championship he had long coveted hosting, made after the January 6 insurrection. At the very hour Trump was inaugurated for a second term on Monday, Waugh—who also served as CEO of Deutsche Bank Americas—sat with Golfweek in a restaurant near his home in Palm Beach, Fla. to offer his forthright views on the state of the game, its uncertain future, and the damage inflicted by greed.

Golfweek: How’s retirement?

Seth Waugh: Busier than I thought I'd be, but with plenty of time to do what I want to do. I've found that people still care about my opinion and me. I tried hard not to engage on what I'm gonna do next for a few months because I wanted to detox. I've started to have those conversations and think I'll figure something out. Committing to the Cabot board was one thing I've done. And I'm finally fulfilling my promise to have a honeymoon. Jane and I are going to New Zealand.

GW: How long has she been waiting for the honeymoon?

SW: Eight years in March.

GW: You were CEO at the PGA of America for six years. What did you leave most proud of? And what did you think was your biggest failing?

SW: I'll give you a few things. The PGA member is a lot better off. The deferred compensation is significant over time. Our biggest problem was supply at first, there wasn't a pipeline of young folks coming in. That's replenished and growing. Average pay is over $100,000, I think. It was probably 75 or something like that. And then what golf looks like — the fact that now 50% of golfers in America are under the age of 35 — is kind of a miracle. No one can tell me the numbers before, but I’d bet that 75% were over 50. Our fastest-growing cohorts are people of color and females. The race is not over but the momentum is extraordinary.

Having lived through a number of crises in my career, you realize the first thing you’ve got to do is survive and the second thing you gotta do is look at disruption and challenge as an opportunity. It’s not like you're trying to take advantage of it, but you might as well come out stronger and I think golf did that.

GW: What about the failing?

SW: What I wish was a lot better is the level of belief and trust among the members in the national and me. It got better, but I don't think it's what it should be. A lot of men and women at the PGA are trying to make everybody's lives better, and that's really why they're doing what they're doing. There’s still a level of skepticism among members that I wish was better. Derek [Sprague, his successor as CEO] has a really good chance to make a difference on that because he's a PGA member and that secret handshake is something real.

GW: Was the decision to leave entirely your choice?

SW: Yeah, absolutely. My contract was up in June. It’s not that I'd tired of it. It was truly the most fulfilling thing I ever did, but I also have five children and I’m of an age. The timing was right and I felt pretty good about leaving it better than we found it. There's no scar tissue at all, if that was your question.

GW: The governance structure of the PGA of America has CEO reporting to its senior officers. The President, Vice-President and Secretary are all hugely influential. Is that model fit for purpose in 2025?

SW: I think it needs to be modernized.

GW: Because the officers usually don't have a great deal of business experience beyond running a golf course or pro shop?

SW: I don't think that's totally fair. Having your leadership change every two years is hard. Each president wants to put their own stamp on it and they all have different perspective and talents. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the frequency of it is a lot. Finding the right balance of oversight as opposed to management on the part of the board is the trick. It's not totally broken on paper, it can be somewhat broken in practice if the CEO overreaches or if the officers overreach.

The CEO's job is to have a strategic plan and guide you through issues. The wisdom of the board is in terms of providing the perspective of members, institutional history and just staying true to the mission. It's a 22-person board, which is big. Those people are rotating all the time too. Every year you're getting five new board members that have to get up to speed. In a perfect world, the board would be smaller but also represent the 31,000 members. Underlying the board, there is a large committee structure. I'm not sure how many committees now, but 20-ish. You have to make it practical or you've got a lot of confusion. In my six years, everything that I thought was really important to get done got done, and nothing that I thought was awful happened. Governance is sort of like democracy. It’s sloppy, but it's still our best system.

GW: On the subject of sloppy democracy, one of your more high-profile decisions was to move the 2022 PGA Championship from Trump Bedminster to Southern Hills in the wake of the January 6th riot at the Capitol. President Trump has made no secret of his desire to seek retribution against those he thinks crossed him. Do you think there's a fear of that at the PGA of America for taking away the major championship he always wanted to host?

SW: I hope not. That's the only answer I can give. It was a really hard decision but something we had to do at the time. It would have been a really difficult environment to operate a championship in. I feel good about the process of how we did it and my own personal interaction with the president.

GW: How was that interaction?

SW: I've known him for a very long time. I have a lot of respect for him. I’d talked throughout his presidency about some of it and personally wanted to deal with the aftermath of it. So I went and saw him. We shook hands. On the first day at Southern Hills, I called him on the way to the golf course at 7:30 in the morning. He picked up. He was not happy and expressed that, but at the end of the call, he said, ‘Well, you're a good man.’ And I said, ‘Look, I'm sorry it came to this.’

Sometimes you make your own mess, sometimes you inherit messes, but how you clean them up is what defines you. I didn't make the decision to go there in the first place, my predecessor did. And I'm not criticizing that either. I thought we did the right thing and did our best to make it as clean as we could. But I can't get inside his head.

GW: Timing suggests you were involved in selecting Keegan Bradley as Ryder Cup captain, which was announced a few days after your departure. Why Bradley?

SW: It was my idea, for better or worse. Look, there's no secret that it was Tiger’s if he wanted it. Tiger and I had talked about it three or four years earlier. So I called him after Rome and said, ‘Okay, you ready?’ He said, well, I've got so much going on in my life that I'm not sure I could commit. Tiger and I finally came to the conclusion it was best to move on.

If you think about the Ryder Cup Task Force, it was to create consistency but also to create interesting choices of captaincies. The agent of change, which was the task force, became an agent of non-change because it was the same kind of people. It was Davis [Love III] and then Jim [Furyk] and then Steve [Stricker] and then Zach [Johnson]. They're all the same generation, all sort of the same person. I don’t mean that in a negative way. We put younger people on the Ryder Cup committee, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas, and they said it would be great to have a captain that's more relatable.

I literally wrote down everybody that I thought was a possibility, went into the committee meeting and said a few names, then said my real choice is Keegan Bradley. There was this pregnant pause and then all of a sudden the committee members go, ‘Oh my God! We never would have thought of that, but that's a great idea and he's the right guy.’ And there was immediate consensus.

GW: Keegan said the first time he ever discussed the captaincy was when you called him to offer it. Is that not an enormous risk to not first know how he would go about it?

SW: About accepting it?

GW: About executing it.

SW: These things are kind of feels, right? I've known Keegan for 20 years. The players all know him. He lives and breathes the Ryder Cup. I thought about his connection with Bethpage in New York. He used to sneak over the fence and play it. I thought he could handle that crowd. And the other move we made is Woody [John Wood, who was named U.S. Ryder Cup team manager in May]. He's a very organized guy, he knows everybody. He can be the general manager of the Ryder Cup. His job is to fill in the gaps of whatever captain we choose. If somebody is a great orator but not organized, he can be organized. If somebody is a great organizer, but not as inspirational, he can try to inspire. He gave us a chance for Keegan to be a playing captain. But yeah, the first time that Keegan heard it, he heard it from me. And he was freaked out by it because he was trying to make the team and wasn't sure he was worthy. Tiger talked to him, and others, to give him the confidence that he could do it.

GW: Did you agree with the PGA of America’s recent decision to pay players for the Ryder Cup?

SW: I understand why they did it. I don't think I would have done it.

GW: Why?

SW: Because if you take any lesson in the last few years, the world is tired of talking about money. Golf was supposed to be playing for a higher purpose. That's what the Ryder Cup signifies, you know? And because we give 20% of our television rights to the PGA Tour already, we are paying the players. We’re paying all the players, not just 12. I don't think it's gonna change their lives because it's not a big enough number to matter to them. They can monetize their participation in a way that blows away whatever you can pay them. And I just think for the players to ask to be paid for it is kind of a bad look.

GW: Did you have players ask to get paid?

SW: Not really.

GW: Not really or not at all?

SW: Not really. They asked a lot of questions. A couple of players wanted to understand the finances of Ryder Cup and the PGA of America. Fair enough, there should be transparency there. You know, ‘Why are we growing the game on the back of me?’ kind of thing. Which I understand, but it's on the back of everybody. But no, nobody ever specifically said I want to get paid. There are obviously implications of it. We've been talking about for 25 years about being paid, and now it'll be how much are we getting paid.

GW: Is there a case to be made that the PGA of America could more effectively meet its mission and serve members by selling the Ryder Cup and using the proceeds?

SW: People underestimate what putting a for-profit entity into the game is going to mean over time. It's not that one's right and one’s wrong, but you go from mission-based to profit-based. It's a different mindset. It doesn't make Strategic Sports Group [which invested $1.5 billion to create PGA Tour Enterprises in ’24] bad guys. It's just that's what they are, right? That's what they do.

When I was sponsoring [the Deutsche Bank Championship], I thought of four dividends. There was a branding dividend. There was a client entertainment dividend — if I could put one of my big clients with Tiger Woods, that was a game changer for a relationship. I thought about the economic value to the local economy. And then I thought about the charity. We raised three million bucks a year and I felt good about that. A for-profit may not think about metrics in the same way, then you start to threaten the ecosystem of sponsors. It’s important to them to raise charity dollars and to have economic gain. That may not matter so much to shareholders as it does to a mission-based operation. That's the backdrop.

I wouldn't say specifically that they need to sell the Ryder Cup. I would say that every entity in the game has to look at their situation now in a different light because it's no longer five families acting in the best interest of the game. You've got another entity out there and the risk of not doing something is important to consider too. The PGA of America is a perpetual institution, like a university. The job of CEO or president of the university is to make sure it's around another hundred years. What do you do financially to give it the best chance of survival and what is the risk of not doing that? So I won't give you a specific answer on the Ryder Cup as much as saying everybody should be thinking about their strategic alternatives, what their assets are, and what's the best way.

In the case of the PGA of America, it's really important to have a seat at the table because we have 31,000 people that are on the ground every day. That isn't theory, it's reality. Being relevant in the professional game is important. But we only own half of the Ryder Cup. The other half may be owned by a different entity which is for-profit, and you need to think about what that means. But putting your head in the sand is not the right move. Not making a decision is making a decision.

GW: Do you think the organization has its head in the sand?

SW: The initial reaction was not panic, but fear. We've calmed the waters. Disruption is a challenge but it's also an opportunity. They should be excited thinking about how to come out of this stronger. Because it's a big, complicated, somewhat clumsy governance structure it's harder to get full consensus. You're not gonna have 31,000 members all agree that you did the right thing or the wrong thing. Leadership is about making that decision in the best interests of your stakeholders.

GW: You mentioned the golf ecosystem changing with the introduction of a for-profit entity. Do you see a scenario where PGA Tour Enterprises starts to look for more from others? USGA and PGA of America media rights are sold on their players, so will the private equity guys eventually come for a share of everyone else's pie too?

SW: They can try. We all have contracts. We’ve essentially bought the players’ rights for that week, but I think there’ll be a push from the owners to squeeze the lemon.

GW: Did your organization have conversations with the Saudis about working with them?

SW: No. Never. I had one conversation with one of the LIV folks, not about anything. We work in the best interests of the game, but also ourselves. Putting together the best field in golf, we have the least restrictions. We don't have open qualifying, we don't rely on the Official World Golf Ranking, we have an ability to be artistic. Like last year and I'm sure this year putting names in there that aren't on the OWGR but we think are worthy of playing in our championship.

GW: That’s become a refrain of the PGA Championship over the years — “The Best Field in Golf” — but can that really be true if finishing 20th in the club professional championship is enough to qualify?

SW: There's 20 club professionals, some of whom make the cut every year, more or less. Who don't play for a living but a lot of them played on Tour. Compared to amateurs that play in other majors, all three of them, compared to qualifiers that have a really good day in two of them, compared to a very small field in one of them — yeah, I think it is the best field. Would it be better if it was 10 PGA members? I guess, but I don't think that dilutes the field measurably and is a wonderful benefit for our members, which is our job. And it's a great story. Oak Hill wouldn’t have been Oak Hill without Michael Block. That was a moon landing, but it was the only PGA Championship that ever had two winners. It really did. That captured the heart of the world at a time when it needed it.

GW: How do you think the division in golf plays out? What’s your best guess?

SW: I'm surprised it's taken as long as it has. It's complicated, but I've done a lot of complicated things that haven't taken this long. That part of it is sort of indefensible. I think there will be a deal for a couple fundamental reasons. You and I have had this conversation, but LIV is a failed economic experiment. Disruption needs one of two things, hopefully both: you need a better product or you need better pricing. No way you can say they're a superior product and they have no pricing because there's no economics. It's not sustainable. I don’t care how much money you have, burning it doesn’t feel very good. And I don't see any way out for them. I don't see light at the end of the tunnel where it's gonna transform that league. So they need a deal. And then the Tour needs one as well. SSG, the new owners, need one. There's no question fandom is shrinking and sponsors are getting edgy because they're being asked to pay more for something that's less. It's not a crisis, but every week that goes by is like a dull ache. Both sides need a deal and I think now you have a new administration that’s gonna be much more deal friendly than the last. And a president who likes the game and wouldn't mind being the guy that fixed golf. That would be something he'd like to say he did.

There are lessons from LIV though. The F1 model of better players playing more often against each other has created changes in the Tour that are helpful. And the broadcast needs to get modernized. I don't mean LIV broadcasts are the model because they’re unwatchable. The third thing is that we need to create an audience globally. Making some of the signature events international makes sense. What does the Tour look like? They’ll co-exist for a year or two because you have to wind things down. But it has to merge and the DP World Tour has to be a part of that. And because of the Saudi’s belief in team golf, you’ll probably have some experimental team golf stuff. You see if it works.

GW: You said it’s a game changer to have a for-profit entity in golf’s ecosystem. Is it a matter of concern to have an authoritarian government in the game too?

SW: Depends what their role is. For-profit is the world I came from so it doesn't scare me as much. You have to be aware of it, right? The authoritarian government as a passive investor in the game doesn't concern me as a sponsor. Again, moral issues aside, from an operational standpoint does it put the game at risk? I don't think so. But it depends what the structure of the deal is. If they were taking a majority of the game, I'd be nervous.

GW: Do you think Jay Monahan has done a good job?

SW: I think he did an amazing job during Covid. He's done a really good job of understanding players, being part of the ecosystem and being a partner. I think he was put in a very tough position. It’s not just Jay but the board — they made some mistakes which turned a really hard situation a lot worse.

GW: Are you a candidate for the job of CEO of PGA Tour Enterprises?

SW: You should ask them.

GW: I’m asking you.

SW: I don't know. I’m not sure they're looking for a 66-year-old guy. There's no expiration date on caring about the game and wanting to add something to the game. I'm happy to help in any way I can.

GW: What would you tell them they need to do?

SW: Get a deal done. Make the game more efficient, make it sustainable. Focus on the sponsors. Be respectful and understand the ecosystem. Evolve it but don't break all the eggs. It doesn't have the same currency that you’re used to. If you were designing golf right now, would you have international and U.S. rules bodies? Would you have a Tour that didn't own its playoffs or World Series? Would you have an entity of 31,000 own one-and-a-half of the five waterfront properties in the game? Would you have a private club be arguably the most influential entity in the game? It makes no sense, right? You're not gonna change that overnight. Being part of that is going to serve you better over time, figuring out alliances and partnerships. Don't come in and think you're going to change something that's been in place for a really long time.

GW: I know you don't do social media, but a perception clearly exists out there of rampant greed among players. Justified?

SW: There’s agent greed. They're trying to represent their players and some of that is understandable. As a professional athlete, you know you have a limited window and once it's over, it's over. I understand why they want to harvest as much as they can. I don't think they have taken enough perspective on what long-term greed means. Short-term greed is ugly. Long-term greed is smart. What is your brand? How do I perpetuate the game because that's where I'm gonna make my money? When you’re asked to play a pro-am it’s not just four hours of your time, it’s an investment in your future. You’re playing with somebody that could do something for you. The conversation has been way too much about money. The Tour lost the trust of the players and then the players got selfish because they lost their trusted benefactors.

GW: There seems to be an assumption that strikes me as generous, the idea that if a deal is done and the game is reunited then all the fans who became disaffected by the money talk and the selfishness …

SW: Will come pouring back.

GW: Do you buy that? Or has longer-term damage been done to the fan base that isn't even clear yet how bad it is?

SW: I think it's closer to the latter. I don't think it's been fatal damage. The game will survive, but you gotta bring fans back. Baseball had strikes, lost a lot of fans and never quite got them back. We build a city every year to have the PGA Championship. It's insanely inefficient, right? The only reason that exists is because people watch it. And if you don't take care of that … that's what I meant about private equity. Don't kill the goose. The goose is the fans, it's not a financial model that tells you what you should be doing. That’s just not how it works.

(Editor's note: This conversation has been edited for length.)

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Outgoing PGA of America CEO Seth Waugh on taking Donald Trump's major