It was an offer they couldn’t refuse.
The entire leadership of Japan’s Professional Golf Association has resigned after two of the executives were discovered to have played golf and socialized with a mafia boss, Golf.com reported.
All 91 representatives of the organization, including chariman Shizuo Mori, will voluntarily step down from their positions in order to help restore public trust in the group.
Between March and June of this year, then-PGA chairman Shinsaku Maeda, 61, and board director Tadayoshi Bando, 67, went to dinner and played golf with the head of a yakuza organized crime syndicate on the Japanese island of Kyushu.
Maeda and Bando were banned from the Japanese PGA in October. The organization strictly forbids socialization with known members of organized crime in its rules.
“We take the matter very seriously,” current PGA vice chairman Nobuyuki Abe said. “We want to do our utmost to prevent a recurrence of such a case.”
New PGA representatives will be elected, and those members will select new directors of the organization.