Driving Force

Is there any trepidation about trying to back up the success of 2014 moving forward?

I can’t control what goes on inside the ropes and nor do I spend a lot of time worrying about it either. At the end of the day, I can’t play well enough to compete on this Tour so there’s no point worrying about putts I can’t make or chips I can’t attempt.

What’s really great about what 2014 created was another significant tsunami of interest and my job is to turn that interest into opportunity. It’s about continuing to provide bigger and bigger stages, bigger and bigger platforms for the best in the world to compete on.

I’m not shy, nor am I ignorant to know that we don’t compete on the same size of stage as the men do or that some other sports provide. My job is to make our stage and spotlight bigger and brighter and that’s what we’ll be doing in 2015.

And you have some exciting developments with the Majors this year?

Building security in the Majors is something that used to keep me awake at night. We really wanted to build something that would stand the test of time over the next 10, 15, 25 years. With the women’s Majors, they’ve bounced around a little bit too much and were too prone to change, whether that was sponsor change or venue. So really, the last couple of years have really been about building a Major line up that’s tied to partners that can be with us for the long-term.

ANA [title sponsors for the ANA Inspiration, formerly the Kraft Nabisco] and the PGA of America together with KPMG [sponsors of the new Women’s PGA Championship] really eliminated the biggest weight off our shoulders when we were able to address those two.

Especially in the case of the [former] Kraft Nabisco, that’s not the women’s version of anything. That’s our own, unique, 43-years of history and I’ve said to my staff on many occasions: ‘I’m not going to be the Commissioner that stops playing at Palm Springs’, so we needed to figure that one out.

I feel really good about our Major pillars now and we’re with partners who talk in terms of decades, not in terms of years.