I had the opportunity this week to address a topic with PGA Commissioner Tim Finchem that I wrote about early this summer. When there was speculation about whether or not Rory Sabbatini was going to be suspended by the PGA Tour, I wrote about the tour's policy to not publicize player discipline and penalties, comparing it to other sports that generally announce player suspensions, fines, etc.
The PGA Tour only announces suspensions for performance enhancing drugs, and it has had only one, of a player that alerted the tour that he needed to take certain drugs and had prescriptions for them, and asked for the tour's permission to take them but was denied.
Here is Finchem's response. He's typically long-winded, and is in this answer as well. But it appears the policy will remain unchanged.
The question: Q. Have you given any consideration to making player discipline more public, both behavior issues as well as recreational drug use and performance enhancing drug use?
Finchem's response: Not really. I mean, we've talked about it a lot over the years. A major reason we talk about it is because you guys ask the question from time to time, and it makes us think about it. So we do, and we look at -- we've looked at ourselves and we compare ourselves to other sports. But again, and I've said this many times, a large volume of -- we don't have a raft of conduct issues every week anyway, but the large percentage of what we have during the course of the year are things that happen out on the golf course, maybe a few people witness. We don't see any advantage to informing the whole world about something that, generally speaking, we take care of with an individual player. Most times it's a matter of getting in front of the player. So we don't see any reason to go there.
Now, if we have a situation -- you know, David Stern has a player jump in the stands in a fist fight, then he's got a responsibility probably to tell the fans, okay, here's what we did about that. And if we had a similar situation, I suspect we'd treat it similarly. But most of our situations aren't that. I think that we have -- we also have a unique set of athletes. We have a set of athletes that by and large pride themselves on their conduct. They accept the fact that they're role models. They work hard at that job, and we appreciate their efforts, and it's important to the integrity of the sport.
The things that could be blown out of proportion by putting them on Twitter or Facebook or in the media, we just don't see any upside to it. And frankly, we have never gotten any emails from fans saying, I want to know who said a bad word last week or I want to know who smoked marijuana.
