Camilo Villegas Q&A: On changes coming to PGA Tour, why he wanted PAC role and more

Camilo Villegas was an inspired choice to be the chairman of the PGA Tour’s Player Advisory Council this year and to be the man who will join the Tour’s board at a critical time in January, replacing Jordan Spieth (who completed the term of Rory McIlroy after he stepped down a year ago).

Villegas, 42, is a rare creature (Spiderman) among players, a five-time Tour winner who reached as high as seventh in the world, someone who can truly say they understand what it is like to be a superstar, a top 50 player, a past champion, a journeyman, a 125 bubble player as well as a guy who bounced between the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour with conditional status. He has lived at least two years at each of those tiers and as his two-year term as board member is set to get under way, he has to make decisions that are best for the Tour at the expense of certain tiers with each decision.

Ahead of his title defense this week at the Butterfield Bermuda Championship, Villegas sat down on a comfortable white sofa inside the media center at the World Wide Technology Championship last week in Los Cabos, Mexico, where he missed the cut to continue a disappointing season, and discussed why he wanted to be involved in Tour politics, which tier of player he most relates to and what he hopes for the future of golf.

GWK: In your career, you've experienced just about every tier as a player. Which tier do you relate to most?

CV: I relate to all of them. But when I get to being a PAC chairman and a future board member, I can't relate to or focus on my individual moments in my career. Those are the past. We need to understand, one, why we are where we are, right? I don't need to tell you why the game of golf is where it is and why. And focus on the present. How can we make our product better and why? And I think it was interesting when I got elected as the PAC chairman, somebody that's very close to me called me and said, ‘You really want to do this?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely,’ the game ago has been very good to me. Very fortunate to come from Colombia and play so many years on the PGA Tour, and the game is going through an interesting moment. So I feel like I can give back to the game by just being objective and try to do what's right for the game of golf in the future. That's my way of giving back to the game. So I know it's a long answer, so yes, I've been through stages in my career, but right now, the focus is why are we here, and how can we make the game about that for the future?

GWK: What is your big takeaway from the changes being proposed?

CV: My advice to anybody that got the 23-page memo, which I wish it would have been 50 or 80 pages long because that's how much thinking was done throughout the year. I wish we could give our membership even more information for them to read, think, analyze, digest, and then come with their own conclusions. I understand the emotions, understand the emotions flowing through different guys. Things are getting tighter. It's getting tougher, PGA Tour is tough. Once again, we need to understand why we're there. And then I invite everybody to look at those 23 pages and ask themselves, is there anything in the 23 pages that is making our product weaker?

I can be the first one affected by these changes, the way I've been playing the last few years. That doesn't matter. It's not about me. It's about the game of golf. We cannot start thinking about individuals. Yes, somebody's going to be affected, and somebody’s going to gain from the decisions. But do I truly believe all the changes are making our product better? Absolutely.

GWK: Do you think the people at the board level are thinking the same way as you?

CV: It's impossible to get everybody thinking the same the same way, especially when the PAC is 16 players, and we all have different goals in life, everybody has different interests. It's very hard to get everybody on the same page. It's impossible to get everybody thinking the same way. I just hope we can kind of remove ourselves from the equation and think about the game long term, because things have been shaken up in the last few years, and a lot of people might see it as something negative, but I truly believe the game of golf will win, and at the end of the day, everything should be fine.

Going back to the changes, just to give you a little bit of background on why I like them, because we got into a big discussion. The question was posed, what does having a Tour really mean? And we got to a point where, man, I mean it just, I think the Tour a little bit kind of over-promised a bit and under-delivered when it came to playing opportunities, just because things got a little bit out of whack.

We were at our max having miserable experiences on the golf course with fields of 156. Twenty-eight percent of the tournaments didn't finish Thursday or Friday. That's unacceptable. Sixty-something percent or more of tournaments were warming up in complete darkness. First three groups teeing off at first light and then finishing five minutes from dark. Having 156 players on a range sucks. You cannot enforce pace of play.

I played Korn Ferry last year. In Oklahoma, I was first off and I walked into player dining at the turn and ordered an omelette because there's two groups that still have to tee off. I told (KFT President) Alex Baldwin that 156 players fields absolutely suck, it’s the worst experience. If you ask players, depending on what tier they’re at, they’re gonna say, Oh, I don't care. don't care about playing three hours and 20 minute back nines. I don't care about warming up in the freaking dark. We need to remove ourselves from the situation. The ‘I don't care’ doesn't count. That is not a better product.

We needed to deeply analyze who the best performers are and who the worst performers are and going by history. We needed to cut back and we needed to reshuffle a little bit the order of rankings to provide better playing opportunities and a little more equitable schedule for those pathways, in this case, Korn Ferry Tour, especially coming in, and then tweaking a little bit the point system in some of the signature events. I think it's going to make it more fair. It's going to open a little bit more the lanes in and out from the retention rates in the top 50. Again, I think the changes are positive. I think we come from our baseline of giving opportunities to those players that just earned their Tour card is very important. I try to focus on that area big time. I think we will accomplish our goal by doing these changes and, yeah, it will definitely strengthen our product.

GWK: Why was the size of the signature events unchanged?

CV: We talked about it and, in my opinion, I want to keep asking questions when it comes to that. I'm not 100 percent set when it comes to playing 72. I understand the 72-player fields are very appealing for tee times, and they're very appealing selling to the sponsors. Everybody seems to show up to those events. You're going to get the best players in the world playing together but I still have my questions. I don't want to get ahead of myself before asking a lot more questions, not only to the management team on the PGA Tour, but also to different sponsors and different tournament directors, keep the mind thinking and seeing where we can end up.

GWK: What do you envision the next couple of years being like once you're on the board?

CV: Could be a challenge, a challenge that I'm looking forward to from a selfish point just to learn – I get a chance to sit right next to some very interesting, smart people, and I want to learn and give back, as I told you, I want to be a thinker out there. I want to be as objective as I can. I want to take myself out of the equation when it comes to making decisions. And I want to think about the game.

GWK: Have you thought about how LIV players could be integrated back in to the Tour?

CV: I'm not on the transaction committee. I don't know where the negotiations are at. I know there's been a lot going on. I try to ask questions, but I understand that the process is delicate when we're dealing with a negotiation that big, confidentiality is very important. But I do know the boys are working on how to bring LIV players back. I've thought more in a broad sense, bigger picture, and it's more about unifying the game. We got smart people out there. We can figure out how they come, if they come, when they come, who comes? But again, if we can put our egos aside, we can just think about the benefit of the game long term, I think we’ll be all right.

GWK: What is the feedback that you've received from players been like?

CV: Mixed. Once again, it's very hard for the player to put themselves aside. That's why I encourage them to read the 23 pages about it and just ask themselves if there's anything in that proposed document that is not making the product stronger. I am very happy to sit down with them. Are there other ways to make our products stronger? Probably. We will continue to brainstorm and try to evolve. But I understand. There's been a lot of positives, there's been some negative, and I think you talk about tiers, you can kind of make your own conclusion on where things are coming from.

GWK: In the last few years, it’s become more apparent that there are two very different tours

CV: You want my honest opinion, I don't like that as much. But again, I understand why we got to there and you got to accept reality.

And you know why we got to that point where we created the signature events. That's what we have now. That's where the whole world of golf situation and competition has put us at, and we will continue to evolve to see what's best in the next few years.

GWK: What sub-committees were you on?

A couple. The pathways sub-committee, that interested me a lot. But I was the first guy to dislike the four subcommittees. The first meeting when they told us about the subcommittees, I raised my hand, I said, ‘That's bullshit. I don't want that. I want to know about it all.’ And I was the first one to raise my hand after two meetings and I said, ‘Guys, this is the smartest thing you have done.’ So we make mistakes. When you get 16 guys, you only get the outgoing people to talk. You don't get the shy people to give input. But when you get a group of four plus one player director, everybody has different minds and it comes together.

GWK: I understand you plan to attend to the PGA Tour Board meeting on Nov. 18 even though you don’t have to be there and have no vote. What made you want to do that?

CV: I want to be prepared. I want to see what the dynamic of a PGA Tour board meeting looks like, feels like and be ready come January when I when I will have a vote. The PGA Tour organization is an unbelievable organization. It's a big organization. There's so much going on. I've seen it this year on the PAC with how much research we've done and how much information they've provided to us. It's only going to get more and more for me here the next few years. I want to be ready and give my two cents.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Camilo Villegas Q&A: On changes coming to PGA Tour, why he wanted PAC role and more