Golf is known as an insular game—so often cloistered away in private clubs, played with expensive equipment, obsessed with money and status and tribe—so one might expect that the inner workings of the pro game might be secretive. But nobody (besides, it seems, the Daily Mail) saw Tuesday’s news coming.
The topline is: the schism that opened in the world of men’s pro golf last year when blue-chip players including Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, and Cam Smith accepted nine-figure checks to defect to LIV Golf is now patched over…sort of. Early Tuesday, CNBC reported that the PGA Tour and the golf interests of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF), which mostly consist of the upstart LIV Golf tour, would combine their commercial operations. A new, for-profit entity will be created to oversee both organizations as well as the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour). Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF, will be the chairman of the new, unnamed entity. Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour, will be its CEO. The defectors, seemingly, will be back on the PGA Tour in 2024.
It’s hard to overstate how significant and widespread the surprise was. The media was shocked. The TV partners were shocked. The players were shocked. Rory McIlroy, who spent the past year acting as the face of the PGA Tour and insisting that LIV, for reasons moral or otherwise, was not good for the game at large, was shocked. Greg Norman, the not-yet-former commissioner of LIV Golf, learned the news just before the rest of us. I can’t say for sure, but I’d guess he was shocked.
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What, precisely, this deal will mean for the future of professional golf is not very clear at the moment. Details are sparse. Until early evening on Tuesday, not even PGA Tour members had gotten a chance to ask Monahan about what, exactly, this is all going to mean. But here’s what is clear: after years of jockeying, Saudi Arabia has gotten a big, comfy seat at the golf table—and taken a big step in its goal to shape the entirety of professional sports.
In a surreal TV spot that Monahan did beside Al-Rumayyan, when asked by CNBC’s David Faber how, exactly, LIV players would rejoin the PGA Tour, he, at length, did not answer the question. One thing he did say, though, is that as far as LIV and the PGA Tour were concerned, “the tension is gone.” I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
One big reason: the players are furious. At the Tuesday meeting with Monahan, there was reportedly a “standing ovation” when the idea of new (non-Monahan) Tour leadership was floated. For a year, Monahan had done few interviews and instead leaned on his stars to tout the history and competitive superiority of PGA Tour events. Some of the players who decided to stay with the PGA Tour were rumored to have turned down amounts nearing half a billion dollars. (Tiger Woods is rumored to have turned down a check in the high nine figures.) McIlroy, especially, stuck his neck out for the Tour.
Last February, before LIV had even officially launched, Phil Mickelson, who defected for the rumored price of $200 million, told the writer Alan Shipnuck that the Saudis were “scary motherfuckers” who “execute people over there for being gay” and also that he was happy to take their money. In response, McIlroy said "I don't want to kick someone while he's down obviously, but I thought they were naive, selfish, egotistical, ignorant." On the No Laying Up podcast, Max Homa compared McIlroy to Harvey Dent, a parallel that takes on a bit of a darker tone now.
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What must Rory be thinking now? After spending a year as the Tour’s de facto spokesman, taking flack from Mickelson and pro-LIV trolls online, declining a massive payday, he is going to have to watch as all his antagonists, pockets full, walk back onto the tour from which they were supposedly suspended. (On Wednesday, he said, in reference to the influx of PIF money "I see what’s happened in other sports, I see what’s happened in other businesses. I’ve just resigned myself to it." Also: “I still hate LIV and I hope it goes away.")
That last part is where this gets messy. There will be a process through which LIV players can rejoin the tour after the 2023 season, though what that process will look like is unclear. In a memo to members, Monahan wrote “We will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LIV Golf and determine how best to integrate team golf into the professional game. The 2023 LIV Golf schedule will continue as planned.” It seems as if LIV and Norman are not going to be around for much longer, that a PGA Tour flush with Saudi cash will be the only show in 2024.
LIV Golf was never a good idea, at least as a conventional golf product. It touted a number of aesthetic changes (54-hole events, shotgun starts, players wearing shorts, music awkwardly playing on the golf course) as revolutionary. The team concept—players were organized into 12, four-man teams and each event would have both individual and team champions—was intriguing, but I remain skeptical that it will be smartly “integrated” into the existing PGA Tour framework. Surely the one thing that the new PGA Tour will crib from LIV is big, PIF-funded purses.
Why did things happen this way? Why did this happen at all? One hint might be near the top of the Tour’s press release: “Notably, today’s announcement will be followed by a mutually agreed end to all pending litigation between the participating parties.” Last year, 11 LIV golfers filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour—an ordeal that, until this announcement, was still in progress. Perhaps the fear of untoward revelations in discovery or just the prospect of years of paying millions in legal fees drove Tour executives to take drastic, self-preserving action.
And the PIF was eager to throw a lifeline. It’s notable that in many other sports, or really most other sports, the appearance and incorporation of PIF money hasn’t created much of a publicity problem for anybody. The fund, which currently has over $600 billion in assets under management, has made a massive push to bring top-flight sporting talent to Saudi Arabia. Heavyweight boxing title fights, WWE events, tennis exhibitions, and Formula One races have all been brought to the country in exchange for massive stacks of cash. The PIF was, for a petrostate, quite late to the party when it acquired and then supercharged Newcastle United in 2021, quickly turning the side from a middling Premier League club into a threat to win the league just as the United Arab Emirates had done with Manchester City in the aughts. But its ambitions in soccer were even bigger than that: Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema, debatably and respectively the most famous and the best soccer player on the planet, both now play for Saudi clubs on annual salaries topping $200 million. Last year, the NBA decided that it would allow sovereign wealth funds to invest in teams. It seems only a matter of time before the PIF is involved in basketball, too.
Each of these moves have come with some pushback and handwringing because they are such transparent attempts at sportswashing: efforts to soften its image, in defiance of an abysmal human rights record, as it prepares to transition to a post-oil future.
But LIV was always an unusual venture even in the brazen and gluttonous sportswashing space. The splinter tour had about as bad a first news cycle as it could have asked for after Mickelson’s gaffe, which kicked off months of sportswashing coverage, the tactical retreat of sponsors, and a lot of online shouting. As the tour picked off more and more high-profile athletes from the PGA Tour many LIV players and fans only seemed to become more bellicose and insecure. They got in arguments on Twitter with reporters and television personalities. Patrick Reed sued multiple media organizations for defamation. Norman wrote open letters and got in spats with Tiger Woods. If the point of LIV Golf was to project an inoffensive, forgettable image, to let the arguments fade into the background and let the golf shine, then many of its central actors were doing the opposite of their jobs.
That’s what makes this week’s news so confusing. The PGA Tour never signaled that it was ok with LIV’s existence. It did not ever signal interest in a merger. In fact, it made the most emotional plays to try and break its competition: Monahan went on television almost exactly a year ago to smugly and cynically piggyback on the grievances of the families of people who died in the September 11th attacks, who objected to the involvement of Saudi money in pro golf. He asked: "I would ask any player that has left or any player that would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” Now, certainly, the answer won’t be “no.”
Monahan threatened lifetime bans for any players who went to LIV. He questioned the PIF’s intentions: “We welcome good, healthy competition,” he said last year at the Travelers Championship. “The LIV Saudi golf league is not that. It’s an irrational threat, one not concerned with the return on investment or true growth of the game.” That might have been true at the time—but eventually the threat became rational enough for Monahan to embrace it.
On Tuesday, a CNBC anchor asked if Monahan was concerned about whether the public might think that Saudi Arabia now owns the sport of golf. He replied, “It’s less about how people respond today and more about how people respond in 10 years.” It was jarring just how much his tune had changed.
