Finchem, O'Grady Find Common Ground Over "Integration": Empty Buzzword Key To Fending Off Any And All Questions

Rex Hoggard sums up the highlights of George O'Grady and Tim Finchem's numbing Sunday Commissioner's press conference.

Thankfully, they may be dull but the ridiculous idea to further reward the world top 50 with a worldwide exemption appears to be going nowhere:

Those are the kind of rules that we continue to look at. We may be recommending some change. The specific question you raise is about the Top-50, and I take note of the fact that the Top-50 are exempt by definition into a number of tournaments, and I don't know of much interest for expanding that.

But overall, I think as the world of golf grows together, some of the things I mentioned earlier in terms of coming together, doing things together globally, we are all moving more in the direction of more integration, and that obviously, as it evolves, will impact some of these rules and regulations.

Finchem had to fend off questions about spitting's place in the game and the PGA Tour's desire not to report disciplinary actions:

Q. Most sports worldwide, if they discipline players, they are transparent and let people know why they have done it and what the punishment is. What is it that you fear and why is it that you keep everything under wraps?

TIM FINCHEM: Well, we don't always, but as a general rule, we don't announce the details of a disciplinary matter. You know, the biggest reason is that 90 percent-plus of the disciplinary matters we deal with, the public is not aware of them. We see no reason to advise the public of when one of our players does something silly. Why should we do that.

If it's a situation, though, where the facts of the matter are described erroneously, either in the media or by an involved player, we may comment on it. And occasionally, where it's an obviously highly-covered situation, we might comment on it. But as a general rule, we just don't think it's in the interests of the sport to do that, and so we don't.

We are in a little different situation; that if a fight breaks out in the NBA between a couple of players and some fans, the Commissioner pretty much needs to say, this is what I did to protect that from not happening again.

In our case, as I've often said, what I have to deal with on Monday morning typically is a player saying a bad word. It's a very different kind of situation the commissioners of the team sports are dealing with. We don't see any reason to fan the flames and just lay out for the public what a player might have done in front of 15 people, even though we took action on it, and that's most of what we deal with.

And I know it's frustrating to the media, because you want to know, you want to report it; we won't talk about it and that's a frustration. But at the end of the day we think that's in the best interests of the players and the sport.

The other thing I will say, too, in my experience, the disciplinary action that we typically take is taken for the purpose of getting the player to focus on the action. And in the vast majority of cases, that has a mitigating impact on it happening again, or certainly happening frequently. Now, some players have anger issues that go beyond, because they make decisions in anger, and that's a more troubling situation.
But in most cases, it's sufficient, and it works. And that's why 92 percent of Americans think that our players are role models, because the conduct on our tour is very good.

We like where we are and we don't see any overwhelming reason, even though we like to make the media happy, we worry about that, but we are just not prepared to take that step.