The chairman of Augusta National, Fred Ridley, is a man of legacy.
We know this because he is the president of a club steeped in tradition, founded in 1932, and because he takes great pride in his workplace. Foley & Lardner, which was founded in Milwaukee in 1842 when the city had less than 10,000 residents and its streets were still unpaved, is one of the nation’s leading law firms with more than two dozen offices, an A-list clientele, and $1 billion in gross annual revenues. Ridley, who is 71 years old, practices law out of the firm’s Tampa office.
For Ridley, his company’s centuries-long growth from its modest beginnings is significant. He described working for Foley & Lardner as a “privilege” and said, “We exist today because of many generations of lawyers who thought it was important to leave our organization better than they found it,” while speaking to the media at the Masters last year.
Ridley wasn’t trying to gain favor by praising his boss. He was addressing a bigger issue regarding the divide in men’s professional golf that was brought about by a number of top players joining the new, lucrative LIV Golf Tour. For Ridley, those pros were essentially prioritizing loot over heritage, and that could not be beneficial for the game as a whole. According to Ridley, “these players were moving to another opportunity, maybe not thinking about who might come behind them, and taking the platform that had been given to them—that they had rightfully earned success on, by the way.”
The chairman was restating remarks he had made in a statement at the end of 2022, stating, “We are disappointed in these developments,” in reference to players leaving for LIV.
Therefore, it is unlikely that Ridley was overjoyed by LIV’s greatest 2023 coup—the acquisition of Jon Rahm, the current green jacket winner. Rahm’s LIV leap means that in April, for the first time in the league’s brief history, one of its representatives will be seated next to Ridley at the legendary Champions Dinner on Tuesday night during Masters week, thanks to Saudi sponsorship. LIV brass, including golf enthusiast Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which underwrites LIV, won’t be unaffected by Rahm’s presence at the head of the Champions Dinner table, even though most of the perceived awkwardness and frostiness between LIV and PGA Tour players has subsided since the 2023 Masters.
Ridley will surely be questioned about his most recent opinions on League of Legends and the ongoing instability and unpredictability of the professional league when he speaks with the media at the 2024 Masters. However, in the meantime, we learned a little more about Ridley and his club’s perspective on LIV’s present standing in the game from an Augusta National statement on Wednesday.
