Rory McIlroy has challenged the absence of a fellow PGA Tour player for skipping a player’s only meeting last Tuesday.

While preparing for the Arnold Palmer Invitational, players were called to discuss the latest changes to the PGA Tour, which now include several ‘designated’ events that many players have called out as being far too in favor of the big guns in the game.

One of the most open in his criticism is James Hahn, who stated that he believes the media has created more of a divide than has been reality, and has also publicly rejected the notion that the changes made by the PGA Tour are for the benefit of all the players.

Morning thoughts on the new structure of the PGA Tour. pic.twitter.com/T7nS4VsKEo

— James Hahn (@JamesHahnPGA) March 5, 2023

However, despite having the opportunity of appearing at the meeting, Hahn’s absence was most noted, even above the likes of Jon Rahm, who said he wanted time with his family.

McIlroy was equally open with his thoughts on the missing Hahn.

At the pre-event press conference, the 2018 API and 2019 Players Championship winner ranted:

“Like, you say all this s— and you’re not even in the meeting? If you want to get informed and be a part of the process—the fact that he wasn’t even in the room was a slap in the face to everyone there.”

Of the meeting itself, the world number 3, who subsequently had the chance to get to 9-under on the 18th green on Sunday, felt players now understood the significant changes to the 2024 schedule.

“I think when more information and data was presented to them, the people that maybe had reservations about it I think came around, or at least were more informed on their opinions, right?” he said, before continuing.

“I think the tour executives did a really good job of basically just walking them through the slides that we saw in the board meeting last Tuesday, obviously not to the same degree of detail.”

“We were in that board meeting for almost seven hours last Tuesday.”

Far from the rumblings on the sidelines, McIlroy saw the meeting as a success.

“Obviously we’re all here trying to get ready for one of the biggest tournaments of the year [the API]. So with that time crunch, we just sort of took the — or they took the sort of most important slides and showed them to the membership.”

“Yeah, I think it was good for them to see that and to see what the thinking is behind what we’re really trying to do here.”

“I think the temperature in the room was nowhere near as hot as I anticipated it to be once the information was sort of laid out.”

Take from the following what you will, but McIlroy certainly believes that the meeting was less “self-serving” than the players meeting held in Delaware last August.

“Yeah, so I said this in the meeting today. The presentation in Delaware was very self-serving for the 20 players in that room. We were looking at fields of 50 to 60. We were looking at only 10 players dropping out of that top 50 every year, so a retention rate of 80 percent,” he explained.

“The tour were like, look, the typical retention rate for the top 50 has historically been around 60 percent, so let’s try to get back to that number. So the structure that has been rolled out here is vastly different from the one that we all talked about and the guys saw in Delaware, and I think for the betterment of everyone” he said, before admitting:

“I think if we had have went down that road, it doesn’t serve the membership anywhere near as well as what this structure does.”