He has been an outspoken critic of the PGA Tour. Now he is joining its board

Only the most nervous of golf fans know what the acronym PAC stands for, and that’s probably for the best. (It’s the Players Advisory Council, a lowly branch of the PGA Tour government.) The meetings and operations decisions focused on Tour players are only occasionally interesting, but more often they are heavy-handed and conservative.

Honestly, that’s how they are It is assumed to be

Sports leagues with over 50 years of history should have a stable (if not profitable) foundation. And the Tour did a lot. . . until LIV Golf came along. When LIV stole a number of players from the tournament – including some on the Advisory Council! — everything changed, including those PAC meetings.

Golf fans know the story well by now. The tournament immediately began shifting its competitive structures to maintain dominance in the pro-golf ecosystem. Not everyone was happy with the changes. One way to do something about it has always been to take those grievances to the 16-member PAC, an annually changing group that essentially functions as a convention for the PGA Tour.

On 10 separate occasions, Lucas Glover was voted as one of those 16 representatives; he refused every time. On the 11th time, he agreed and soon after was elected chairman of the committee. In 2026, unlike most years, this actually means something.

Glover ran against sitting chairman Adam Scott for that role at the top of the PAC, and the Tour announced this week that he won the race. The main reason it matters is not because Glover will oversee the PAC in 2026, but because the PAC chairman graduates at the end of his term to hold not only a seat on the PGA Tourism Policy Board for 2027-2030, but also on the board of PGA Tour Enterprises, the league’s for-profit tour arm that will shape the league’s future.

Glover may sound reticent in his account of his retreat down south, but in reality he’s one of the Tour’s most outspoken voices and has recently been one of the most vocal critics of the way the Tour is run (ie, fewer members, staged events, no-cut tours, etc.).

In less than a year, Glover will join those boards and own one of their precious votes. On the Enterprises side, he will be one of 13, joining six other player directors (Tiger Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Maverick McNealy, Keith Mitchell, Camilo Villegas and Joe Ogilvie), along with Joe Gorder, Jay Monahan and four investor directors (John Kenne Henry, Art, Blanke, Arthur).

In a sense, Glover, who is 46, is coming to the party a little late because the Tour has already hired a new CEO (who is keen on making changes) and received massive investment from like-minded others. Also, the board has been considering models for a future tour schedule for months, a process that is a locomotive with only a few more stops on its journey.

In another sense, Glover stands as a new voice representing the center of the bell curve. In his career, he has straddled both sides of it, achieving something few will ever achieve – while also grappling with the absolute depths of a freak player. Few players have that kind of range. He has struggled a lot at times, causing him to lose his status, and he has risen above all those challenges to redefine his game and win in his mid-40s. More than anything, Glover will be the only professional golfer this year to win a membership-voted election, and that’s saying something. On the surface, it seems to represent something that many professionals care about.

But it’s also not hard to wonder what mindset Glover will bring to governing the Tour. He sees the pro golf world a certain way – and he’s not afraid to say it, evidenced by his thoughts on his Sirius XM Radio show — and that doesn’t always line up with how other board members see the pro-golf world.

A slight point of criticism is that Glover has, at times, been outspoken in admitting that he did not know all the facts. Sixteen months ago he suggested you needed a “Nobel mathematician” to understand the fall of the FedEx Cup. While we can respect the call for simplicity, you don’t need to master calculus, trigonometry, or anything above Algebra 101 to understand FedEx Cup points, especially if they are relevant to keeping your job.

In August 2023, in an interview with Golf weekGlover called the PAC “useless” and said the Tour’s weakening of his playoff positions was a “fabricated” and “stupid” move. He was open with his opinions and many of his peers loved him for it, but he sometimes showed a lack of commitment to understanding the fine print.

He said the Tour “couldn’t go on” as it was going financially and had to make changes as it tried to compete with the well-banked and “inevitable” LIV Golf. But then, just a few months later, talking to Golf week again, he said, “I still don’t understand what’s so bad here that we’ve had to do all the things we’ve done”; he was referring to Signature Events with limited scope. Glover’s interviews, while revealing, often suggested problems without offering solutions.

A month after investors wrote a $1.5 billion check to the Tour and formed the entity known as PGA Tour Enterprises, immediately giving players like Glover multi-million dollar equity in the future, Glover had yet to watch any of the informational videos the Tour made for players to better understand the program.

At the time (and often since) he downplayed the idea of ​​LIV players returning to the Tour, beginning one such rant with, “Now that we have a second entity, PGA Tour Enterprises or whatever it’s called…”

It was the year 2024, and this is now, when the players of LIV HAVE return, a green-light decision by members of PGA Tour Enterprises. During that time, it would appear that Glover has warmed up, if only slightly, to the new path of the Tour. This week, in another interview with Golf weekGlover said he is now inspired to represent his fellow professionals. He says he’s matured and admitted, “I don’t know how any of this stuff works yet. I’m picking guys’ brains and trying to figure out what it is. Before I form any opinions, I want to get as much information as I can.”

The PAC chairman often gets to survey tour boards in the year before taking a seat, but, in Glover’s case, much of what he stands for has already surfaced in interviews and radio hits in recent years: a love of the Tour’s traditional structures and rituals.

He loves Innisbrook, for example, the course that hosts Valspar, which isn’t exactly a preferred course (or tour) for the upcoming Tour schedule. Glover called it the best tour course in Florida.

Glover’s recent years have allowed him to, at times, plan his playing schedule with certainty months in advance. He knows how valuable that can be and how uncomfortable life can be without those guarantees. A mistake, at this point, would suggest changes in the tournament I won’t guarantee that predictability. Either way, a shortened tour – in terms of membership and events – would duplicate a true PGA and PG(B) tour, creating more predictable schedules for everyone.

Glover’s schedule — and press conferences at the John Deere Classic, for example — suggest he believes in a sense of loyalty between player and tournament, and he clearly believes in the value of winner’s exemptions. This issue is one of the most complicated corners of the future of the Tour. Tournament winners get one LOT of benefits, some lasting for years, regardless of the player’s form. Can these benefits live on forever in a tournament that examines every part of its competitive model? Maybe not at the constant pace.

Then there are the sponsor exemptions that appear to unfairly benefit the same few players, and the case of 62-year-old Vijay Singh, who raised eyebrows when he used a career exemption to compete in the Sony Open – and made the cut. Other sports simply don’t allow a professional twice the age of their core membership to enter when he or she wants to. Pro golf is different, but that doesn’t always make it edge-of-your-seat compelling or commercially viable. Professional players largely respect the tradition, but business minds, including the Tour’s new CEO, rarely relate to it.

Which group will Glover be included in? We’ll find out soon enough. He just has some homework to do first.