COLUMBUS, Ohio — Donald Trump suffered a rare defeat Wednesday when the World Golf Championships event held at a course he owns outside Miami was moved to Mexico City. The PGA Tour announced that it was ending a 54-year relationship
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Donald Trump suffered a rare defeat Wednesday when the World Golf Championships event held at a course he owns outside Miami was moved to Mexico City. The PGA Tour announced that it was ending a 54-year relationship with Doral, which Trump bought in 2012 and spent $250 million renovating, because it could not find a sponsor to replace Cadillac, whose contract ran out this year.
The tournament is expected to be played at Club de Golf Chaultapec and will be renamed the Mexico Championship after the Tour reached a seven-year agreement with Grupo Salinas, a collection of Mexico City-based companies overseen by the billionaire tycoon Ricardo Salinas and his son, Benjamin.
Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, said the move was motivated by Cadillac’s decision not to renew its title sponsorship and the Tour’s inability to find a sponsor who would keep the event in the Miami area.
He said it had nothing to do with the politics of Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate whose statements about Muslims, Mexicans and women have had a polarizing effect on many people, both inside and outside the golf industry. The PGA Tour last December was moved to release a statement in response to Trump’s rhetoric denouncing his comments as inconsistent with the sport’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment.
“From a golf standpoint we have no issues with Donald Trump,” Finchem said in a news conference at Muirfield Village, site of the Memorial Tournament, starting Thursday. “From a political standpoint we are neutral.”
Finchem later allowed that the Trump brand, built on his real-estate dealings and aggrandized by his reality television shows and other entrepreneurial forays, presented a problem for would-be sponsors.
“It’s just a struggle to get a customer to spend those kinds of dollars and share the billing,” Finchem said. “So I think actually the difficulty there is more that and less the politics.” He added, “And he knows that.”
The Tour chose a partner, in Salinas, who settled a lawsuit brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2006. Salinas agreed to pay $7.5 million in penalties and compensation to settle accusations of fraud involving a scheme to conceal a deal between a TV Azteca subsidiary and a cellphone company secretly owned by Salina. The settlement, in which Salinas neither admitted or denied wrongdoing, prohibited him for five years from serving as executives or directors of any publicly listed U.S. company.
“We concluded that given all the facts it should not be something that would preclude us to do this particular transaction and all of its elements,” Finchem said.
The partnership with Salinas was announced less than two weeks after one of the Tour’s biggest stars, World Golf Hall of Fame member Phil Mickelson, agreed to pay restitution to the Securities and Exchange Commission after it was revealed he had earned $1 million as a result of a stock tip he received from Billy Walters, a friend and avid golfer who has participated in Tour pro-am events.
Mickelson, who faces no criminal charges, said Wednesday that he has to be responsible for the people he associates with.
“I just think that I just need to be more careful because as a representative of companies, which I take a lot of pride it, those relationships mean a lot to me, and I need to make sure that I represent them as well as myself in the best possible way,” he said.
Trump broke the news of the Tour’s dissociation with Doral on Tuesday night in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity and added, “I hope they have kidnapping insurance,” a reference to the spate of abductions of high-profile sportsmen, including over the weekend the Mexican soccer national team member Alan Pulido, who was rescued.
On Wednesday, Trump released a statement in which he described it as “a sad day” and added, “No different than Nabisco, Carrier and so many other American companies, the PGA Tour has put profit ahead of thousands of American jobs, millions of dollars in revenue for local communities and charities and the enjoyment of hundreds of thousands of fans who make the tournament an annual tradition.
“This decision only further embodies the very reason I am running for president of the United States.”
Rory McIlroy, a former world No. 1 from Northern Ireland, did not sound bothered by the relocation of the World Golf Championship event, won this year by the Australian Adam Scott, outside the United States. In 2015-16, three of the four World Golf Championships events are held in the U.S. — at Doral; Austin, Texas; and Akron, Ohio. The fourth is in China.
“I always felt that having three of them in the United States wasn’t really spreading the game,” said McIlroy, who poked fun at the fact the event is being moved to Mexico, the border country where Trump has promised to build a wall to keep people from entering the United States illegally.
“It’s quite ironic that we’re going to Mexico after being at Doral,” McIlroy joked. “We just jump over the wall.”
