Monahan’s mission

A week into his job as the fourth PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan is looking to broaden golf’s appeal.

Whether that means a new schedule is too early to tell.

Monahan said Saturday he was awake from 2 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. thinking about various challenges facing golf, though that was more a product of jet lag after getting to Hawaii for the PGA Tour’s opening two events of the year.

He took over Jan. 1 for Tim Finchem, who oversaw two decades of international growth and exponential increases in prize money during a generation driven by Tiger Woods. The tour already is working on new television deals that expire in 2021, along with renewing the title sponsorship of the FedEx Cup that ends this year.

What got his attention, however, was a trip to Silicon Valley last summer to meet with executives of Google, Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and Apple.

“As much progress as we’ve made with our platforms, we weren’t moving fast enough. We’re not producing enough video content,” Monahan said. “Our players are their own networks and have their own profiles. We had and I’ll take full responsibility for this a tendency to think about what we didn’t want to have happen at our tournaments . ... We’re taking away from our ability to grow.”

He cited restrictions on players using smartphones during pro-ams as one example.

As for the schedule, the PGA Tour has been exploring whether it can end its season at the Tour Championship before the NFL season starts. A simple plan on paper, there are so many moving parts that Monahan said it was so early in the process that the tour hasn’t even decided what it would do.