Finchem does not have a vote, but he does have the dominant voice at every meeting, and he has spent his 14 years as commissioner successfully bending the board to his will.
"He's a master at building a consensus, especially when it doesn't appear a consensus exists," says Joe Ogilvie, one of the players on the board. "Watching him in action, it's pretty damn impressive. You can tell he was a debater and a lawyer the way he makes his arguments."
When the meeting adjourned Finchem hopped back in his plane, landing in Florida around 7:45 p.m, 12 hours after he left. If he was drained from a nonstop day, it didn't show.
"I'm already looking forward to getting to the office tomorrow to follow up on some of the things that were discussed today," he said.
Finchem's relentlessness may be the defining trait of his epoch as commissioner. He has been an inexorable agent of change during an era of phenomenal growth, and in his never-ending quest to showcase the Tour's players, he has played midwife to the Presidents Cup, the World Golf Championships and the FedEx Cup. Thanks to Finchem's bare-knuckled negotiating of TV contracts, the Tour's purses have mushroomed from $56.4 million in 1994 to more than $270 million last year, when the 99th man on the money list banked more than a million bucks.
Further, in an era of broken-down football players limping to Capitol Hill to testify about how their game left them disfigured and destitute, the Tour's retirement plan is the envy of professional sports, with numerous players projected to realize eight- and even nine-figure nest eggs.
Finchem is also a marketing maven who has rebranded the Tour as a benevolent instrument of charity that since '93 has dispersed more than $980 million across the nation to worthy causes.
Yet even as Tour players have become fabulously wealthy under Finchem, there exists an undercurrent of discontent with his leadership.
This bad buzz got a high-profile airing last fall when Phil Mickelson called out Finchem on national TV in the moments after a heady win at the Deutsche Bank Championship.
Mickelson was peeved by some of the details in the execution of the inaugural FedEx Cup, and when he skipped the third of the so-called playoff events it was widely interpreted as a slap at Finchem.
The incident followed the massive public-relations hit that came when Tiger Woods did not bother to show up for the first playoff event.
Apparently, the hard feelings linger. Asked to comment about his relationship with the commissioner, Mickelson said, "I'm not going to touch that one. I promised my wife I wouldn't start any controversies this year."
The spat with Mickelson — and Woods's failure to play good soldier — threw into sharp relief Finchem's complicated relationships with the game's superstars.
His decade-and-a-half cold war with Greg Norman has barely thawed, even though Finchem named Norman as captain of the International team for the 2009 Presidents Cup.
One of Norman's primary beefs has been what he considers an institutional unwillingness to share financial information with the players, and Norman continues to toy with a longstanding idea of lawyering up to get the Tour to open its books.
"The lack of transparency is baffling," Norman said in a recent interview. "I'll never understand the way the Tour conducts its business. Finchem forgets that he works for the players, not the other way around."
Finchem's relations with the Tour rank and file couldn't have been helped when earlier this year his compensation was made public. For 2006, the most recent year on record, the commissioner earned $5.2 million, which would have placed him third on that year's money list.
The funny thing about Finchem is that he is always in the news but he has somehow remained a stranger, even to those working alongside him. Ogilvie counts the commissioner as a friend and receives an annual Christmas present, which is traditionally some type of fancy kitchen gadget, as Finchem is both an epicure and an oenophile.
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