Greg Norman and Mollie Marcoux Samaan have been each employed in 2021, and can each depart their respective roles in 2025.
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The previous 12 months had all of it — loopy successful streaks, new main champs, a major-week arrest (!) and extra. With 2025 on the horizon, our writers are trying again on the most memorable moments from 2024.
No. 15 — Charley Hull goes viral
Largest Golf Moments of 2024 No. 14: In wild golf panorama, 2 bosses are on their method out
Not way back, many believed Jay Monahan was within the scorching seat in his function as PGA Tour boss. However as we flip the web page to 2025, Monahan remains to be there, and the Tour remains to be(!) attempting to determine its future within the golf panorama.
However Greg Norman and Mollie Marcoux Samaan are out. Or no less than will likely be quickly.
Norman, the generally controversial CEO behind LIV Golf, confirmed this month he’ll now not be LIV’s CEO, a put up he’s held because the league’s inception in 2021, with a brand new face taking up a while in 2025. His first public feedback because the change got here just some days after Marcoux Samaan unexpectedly introduced she’ll step down because the LPGA commissioner in January. She was employed in Might 2021 and can depart earlier than her contract is up.
The similarities, for probably the most half, finish there. Norman was an important cog in shaking up the pro-golf panorama, getting LIV Golf off the bottom and serving to recruit expertise away from the PGA Tour. Marcoux Samaan wasn’t precisely throwing wrenches in golf’s ecosystem.
Charley Hull went viral in 2024. Is a breakout season subsequent?
They did, nonetheless, share one frequent purpose — increasing their excursions’ attain and making them extra related. You possibly can argue that’s a key responsibility for any CEO in any function, but it surely was very true for this duo.
Norman needed to change minds. His detractors didn’t just like the Saudi PIF funding his league, or the truth that Norman had a hand in diluting males’s professional golf. However Norman did do properly to lure away huge names like Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Bryson DeChambeau and particularly Jon Rahm, whose signing got here lower than a 12 months after he had gained the Masters.
Marcoux Samaan didn’t need to cope with the bags that has include disrupting professional golf’s ecosphere, however she was tasked with getting extra eyeballs on and increasings purses for the ladies’s sport. To Marcoux Samaan’s credit score, prize cash on the LPGA Tour elevated by greater than 90 % underneath her management, and subsequent 12 months the game’s 5 majors will supply a mixed purse of practically $50 million, roughly double what was supplied in 2021, the 12 months she began.
However Norman and LIV by no means secured a big-time TV deal to maximise viewership (and assist credibility), and regardless of Marcoux Samaan serving to gamers put extra money of their pockets, critics questioned if she and the LPGA may have performed extra to make the most of Nelly Korda’s historic season and rise to superstardom in girls’s sports activities. There was additionally the shuttle fiasco on the Solheim Cup and criticism from a essential sponsor.
