Ian Baker-Finch, Australia’s 1991 Open champion, is settling into his new role as chairman of the PGA of Australia. In this wide-ranging Q&A, “Finchy” addresses the current stand-off in men’s professional golf, his vision for PGA members and tournament golf Down Under. 

To call former major winner Ian Baker-Finch “the nicest guy in golf”, while accurate, is perhaps not giving the Queenslander credit for his skills and no-nonsense approach to sports administration. Not to mention the fact he is one of the main voices of the PGA Tour’s commentary team on CBS, alongside Jim Nantz. Baker-Finch has spent the past six years as a member-elected director of the PGA of Australia, where he has served as chair since last May. He will remain in the role until at least 2027. 

Baker-Finch, the 1991 Open champion, splits his time between Palm Beach, Florida – in order to travel easily to a significant number of PGA Tour events – and Australia. While Down Under recently, he made time with Australian Golf Digest at Kingston Heath to talk about the state of Australian golf, from an administrative and tournament perspective, as well as the global split of professional tours and his future in commentary.

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Australian Golf Digest: How are you enjoying your time as a director and the past eight months as chair of the PGA of Australia?  

Ian Baker-Finch: I’m really loving it. I’ve been attending all of the international world meetings for PGA associations for quite a while with [former chair] Rodger Davis. We’ve got an alignment plan for Golf Australia, the PGA and all of the golf bodies in Australia to move forward as a one-stop shop. We’re all in the one place there at Sandy Golf Links.

We’ll always be our own organisations; the PGA will be a member organisation with 3,000 members while Golf Australia will always be looking after the junior golf, amateur golf and the clubs and facilities. We now have joint services in the middle. We’re all under one sponsorship umbrella; all directional money goes through a joint group.

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What’s your vision for the next five years or so? 

At the end of my three years, I’d love for there to be just one organisation – not Golf Australia or the PGA, but ‘Golf in Australia’. I’d see there being an ambassadorial role, a commissioner role, a commission running golf in Australia and all the other bodies just fit like silos into that mainframe. We are aiming for a OneGolf system, but that may not happen in the next three years, but there’s no reason why we can’t all be working together to improve golf. 

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Is doing that more complicated than it sounds, or less complicated?

Well, it certainly has been extremely complicated over the years, and you throw LIV into the mix as another cog in the wheel. It just makes it a little more difficult to iron out a vision for all of us. It can work. I think there’s a place for LIV. I have no issues with them. I also love the fact that Ripper GC is the best team. That’s fantastic. There isn’t a need to be disruptive to our tour here, or to golf in general. The better players will play in the majors and I think the majors will find a way forward for them. But then you’ve got the DP World Tour and the PGA Tour and they have to figure that out. And then the Australasian Tour, we have to fit in with all of them.

We’re a tour of 18 tournaments and it’s a good, healthy tour. It’s a pathway, like young Elvis Smylie winning the Australian PGA Championship. He gets a DP World Tour card for two years. If he keeps playing the way he has been and finishes the season top-10 on that tour, he can go straight to the PGA Tour [through the alliance between the US and European circuits], which is the premier tour in the world. 

The more our better players come back to Australia to play, the better our tour is, the better our sponsorships are, the healthier all of it is. Our young players then get to play against the best players in the world, improve their games and get through to play in the Northern Hemisphere. As far as tour golf goes, that’s how I see it happening and that’s what I’d like to see happen – continuing on that path. 

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How are things at the participation, vocational, club and administrative levels? 

Golf Australia has been doing a great job. [Golf Australia chief executive] James Sutherland was telling me that 33 per cent more juniors have joined clubs in the past 12 months. We have 3.8 million people playing golf. It’s one of the top participation sports in the country. Golf is sexy, fun and exciting. We’ve got two great boards at Golf Australia and the PGA that are working together to unify golf in Australia. As more top-level sponsors come to tournaments, more will follow. We’ve had Challenger, which has been fantastic as the sponsor of the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia. They could see the potential to be part of every tournament across the country, wherever we go. BMW have jumped in, they’ve always been a sponsor, but now they’re owning the PGA Championship naming-rights sponsorship. Rolex, there’s no better company in the world than Rolex – everyone knows Rolex. It’s the leader in its field, like BMW. We’ve got more than 60 general managers in Australia now that have come through the PGA program. There’s a lot of different aspects of PGA of Australia – professionals and international professionals that are PGA members. We have more than 3,000 members and more than 300 tour-pro members. I’m passionate about it. I’ve had a great life in golf and I want to give back as much as I possibly can and that’s why I’m doing this.

Our PGA teams (who we’re very proud of) continue to perform, with 10 broadcasted tour events in 10 weeks, one being the Australian Senior PGA Championship, and other events in the same period: the National PGA Professional Championship, the National PGA Associate Championship, the Scramble championship final and, in addition, stage the awards nights in every state, including our PGA Awards dinner at Brisbane City Town Hall.

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How do you see the state of the global tours, with the PGA Tour engaged in discussions with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, which finances LIV Golf?

It is hard to know what’s going to happen with all the tours and how this whole thing plays out. People have been talking about a merger between LIV and PGA Tour. I doubt a merger will happen. They are two separate products. 

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Do you think it’s more about the tours and LIV Golf co-existing? 

Yes, and I don’t see any reason why they can’t. I think a lot of the anxiety has died off. The PGA Tour seems to have this option for a lot of money to come in from the Saudi government, the PIF, and talks about it. That will help strengthen the PGA Tour. It’ll have more financial backing. They’ll be able to improve their worldwide television product if they’re running it all in-house. I’m not sure how that injection of funds will bring the PGA Tour and LIV Golf closer together. The players all talked initially about wanting to play less. Now, they might actually end up playing more, with 14 LIV tournaments, four majors and the Ryder Cup for those who qualify. There are 20 events in Ryder Cup years. When they were a member of the PGA Tour, they only had to play 15 or even less in Europe. 

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In time, could you see LIV golfers who are in demand playing a few PGA Tour events, and PGA Tour pros playing select LIV events? 

I’d like to see something like that happen, where there’s less rock-throwing at each other. I just don’t know how we can do that. I think the fact that those that left, the majority of them left nicely, calmly, “Hey, I’m taking the money. Love you guys. I’ll still send you a Christmas card.” Some didn’t and I think those who didn’t go nicely probably won’t be welcomed back onto the PGA Tour, nor should they be. They made their bed and now they’ve got to lie in it. But it would be interesting to see if a couple of teams from the DP World Tour or the PGA Tour went and played against the other LIV teams and there was a bit of a team competition maybe in the offseason, after the FedEx Cup’s finished or the Race to Dubai is finished. There are only so many weeks and each tour wants to maximise the best times of the year, whether it be for television or weather at their preferred times. So it’s hard to fit another tour into that preferred time of the year.

And then for us here in Australia, we want our better players on the Northern Hemisphere tours to come back and play in Australia. We have to fit our schedule around when our best players can come back and play. We want to do everything we can to have them come back. For Cam Smith to come back and play four tournaments, it’s amazing. Same with Lucas Herbert and Marc Leishman. They’ve all come and played the two events. 

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 Earlier this year, former Ryder Cup captain Paul McGinley said he’d love to see the Australian Open and several other national opens award the winners starts in all four men’s majors. Would you love to see that?  

I would love to see players who win big tournaments get starts overseas, not necessarily the Australian Open. The Australian PGA is a bigger event in many ways, so maybe it’s the PGA Championship that could offer a spot into the Masters and the other majors. That actually happened last year with Joaquin Niemann [who won the 2023 Australian Open to get into the Open Championship, before receiving special invitations to the Masters and PGA Championship]. What we’re trying to do with the Australian PGA Championship is to grow it to become the biggest and the best and the shining light on our tour. We would like the winner of the Australian PGA to be invited to the majors, certainly the US PGA Championship. If the winner of the Australian Open was invited to the Masters or the US Open or the Open Championship, we would love that, whatever event. I don’t think necessarily it has to be The Open. The hard thing with co-sanctioning with the DP World Tour, is we’re bringing a lot of players from Europe and around the world into our country to play, which is great for our young players, but it also limits us to 70 Australian players, not 144. The more you spread what you have, the harder it is for our own players to get into the bigger events. We do balance it, and the DP World Tour has been very good with us. When there are spare spots, the Australian players get in.

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Three years into the mixed-gender Australian Open, what are your thoughts on it?  

OK, we love mixed events. We have the WPGA and the PGA of Australia all playing together. We have six tournaments this year on the Webex Series that are men and women together playing for the same trophy. It really is a joint tournament. The rest of the world’s watching us and seeing how we do it, and we do it well. We’re all for that. Four of the past seven years we’ve given our No.1 accolade in Australia for the leading PGA of Australia member – the Greg Norman Medal – to Hannah Green or Minjee Lee. They have won it twice each now, so we’re all about gender equity and inclusivity.  

That being said, there’s an economy in having both the Australian Opens together because we have one event, one setup. So hopefully we spend a little less money in one than we would for two separate Opens. For the women, the time of year is not good for them because the lead-in event [the LPGA’s CME Tour Championship] was the week immediately before the Australian Open in Florida. You couldn’t get any further away. I live in Florida and I know it’s halfway around the world. They have eight tournaments leading into it, the biggest tournaments on the schedule worth $3 million, $5 million and $11 million tournaments. They went from Asia to America, and then down to Australia. It’s just not the right time of the year for the best women players. They want to have December off and come back fresh. For the men, it’s a good time to get all of our Aussie boys back home. The PGA Tour is finished. It’s a little soon after DP World Tour is finished and it’s hard for all of them to get back in time for the PGA and the Open, but most of them have tried and done a good job.

For the men, I think this is the right time of the year. It’s ideal, actually. For the women, I think February, early March, perhaps. February is the best time. There are two Ladies European Tour events that Golf NSW put on. The Australian PGA is putting on the Women’s PGA Championship. To fit in and create four big events in a row, we could have the Women’s Australian Open. There are also several events on the LPGA Tour in Asia around March. They may not all come but if we held it in that time, I think we’d get 100 of the best women players in the world playing here. If we could have it on the Melbourne Sandbelt, that’d be a bonus. We could have it at Royal Adelaide, Royal Queensland, Royal Sydney or The Australian – one of the great clubs.

I would like to see the two Opens separated. It doesn’t mean it isn’t great as it is – I’m not against it – though I just think they could both shine a little more if they were separate.

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To pivot to commentary, you’re one of the main voices on the PGA Tour alongside Jim Nantz for CBS. How much are you still enjoying your commentary?  

It’s been a long time. I first started commentary when I stopped playing after the British Open in 1996. I had to take six months off to fix some injuries. I was in bad shape. I came back and commentated the summer of golf in Australia. I did 12 events in a row, and I was offered the job in the US the next year because I’d done so well in that. I didn’t play for a year, and I stupidly returned and played the British Open in 1997. [Baker-Finch shot 92 in the first round at Royal Troon and withdrew before retiring from tournament golf.]

It’s a long time, nearly 30 years. It’s been fun. It’s been a great ride. I’m going to do it next year. I’m not sure whether I’ll continue on. We’ll see if they still want me. I think the younger announcers that are coming on – Trevor Immelman does a great job with us at CBS, Colt Knost as well. Smylie Kaufman coming through in his 30s, he’s a natural. Amanda Balionis does a great job with us, too, and is excellent at the interviews. I’m not quite a dinosaur yet, but I’m getting close to that stage. We’ll see how long I keep doing it.