Lucas Glover rips PGA Tour leadership: 'Why have a board? Why even have a PAC?'
The Lucas Glover Show quickly is becoming a must-listen on SiriusXM for his willingness to speak his mind. As Johnson Wagner put it, “I like when you rile people too. I’m getting pretty good at that myself."
Wagner became the first guest of the “Get off my lawn” segment, and the two spoke about the decisions that are limiting opportunities for players to emerge. They also got into Wagner’s recent comments on Golf Channel about Rory McIlroy, with Wagner revealing that McIlroy reached out to him after that.
Glover’s beef remains consistent, and he continued to unload on the PGA Tour making decisions that only benefit top players:
“If that's the way we're gonna do it, then why even have a board? Why even have a PAC? Why even have these things? And Wags, I can say that I think your voice and my voice has a little bit of weight because we've been on both sides. We've seen it from the good side. We've seen it from the fighting-to-keep-our-card side. And I feel like if you have those perspectives, those opinions, you're a little bit more open-minded to the greater good for the membership, not just the top 10, 20, or 30 even,” Glover said. “And that's the biggest reason I've been so adamant against this losing cards and shorter fields and all that, because it hurts the bottom and it doesn't give the bottom a chance to climb that ladder.”
Glover said the problem is top players are climbing the ladder and pulling it up behind them.
Wagner argued the Tour is losing great stories by limiting playing opportunities.
“The beauty of golf is that you have the people that you beat up on. Rory is good because, I mean, I don't know how many tournaments we played together, the same event, but he probably beat me 95 percent of the time. He's clearly better. But you've gotta have those people you're beating or else like, what's the point? I don't wanna watch the same 60 guys play all the time. I wanna watch Jake Knapp win in Mexico. I wanna watch Aldrich Potgieter win this week in Mexico. I like those stories, and those guys become stars. Those guys become stars from winning those smaller events,” Wagner said. “And then like Jake Knapp, the week after he won Mexico last year, he got paired with Rory the first two rounds at the Cognizant. Like, I think that's cool. Those are these embedded storylines, and if it's all just these great golfers playing against each other, I think you lose the nuances of what I personally love about the professional game of golf.”
Wagner also addressed comments he made on Golf Channel that apparently didn’t sit well with McIlroy or his team. Asked by host Taylor Zarzour if he had spoke with McIlroy, Wagner said,“I'm gonna say no comment on that. I have not physically spoken to him. Actually I can't say no comment if I'm commenting. He emailed me Thursday night and we've traded a couple of correspondences, but I have not heard back from him since the first one,” Wagner said. “I think his agent reached out to someone higher up at Golf Channel. And like, you know, I guess I'm – the thing I said at the end of my rant was that, ‘He's angering me,’ and that's the only thing that I'm sorry for. The rest of it, I stand by completely. Because I guess in this position, I need to take the emotions out of it a little better. And I'm going to try to do that going forward.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Lucas Glover rips PGA Tour leadership: 'Why even have a PAC?'
