In 2023, golf mergers were the big story

Golf is a sport where certain years rise above others, and 2023 could be one of those years. It’s a heady list.

In 1860, Willie Park Sr. won. the first British Open, which was held at Prestwick Golf Club, marking the debut of the oldest major tournament.

In 1913, amateur Francis Ouimet won the US Open, beating the two best English golfers of the time and popularizing the sport in the United States.

In 1930, Bobby Jones completed the first and only Grand Slam, winning the four majors of his era in one go. year.

Babe Didrikson Zaharias became the first woman to play on the PGA Tour in 1945, competing in the Phoenix Open and Tucson Open. She dominated that decade of golf.

The LPGA was founded in 1950.

In 1968, a group of professional golfers, led by Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, broke away from the Professional Golf Association of America to form the PGA Tour.

Tiger Woods completed the Tiger Slam, winning all four men’s major championships consecutively over two seasons, from 2000-1.

This year could be crucial for the men’s and women’s tournament, with both top tours looking at mergers.

For the PGA Tour, June 6 marks a before and after in professional golf. That morning, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, announced a “framework agreement” for the PGA Tour to partner with LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed golf league he had spent much of the previous year discrediting.

“I would ask any player who has left or any player who would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being on the PGA Tour?” Monahan had said a year earlier.

It was one in a series of comments he and officials made linking LIV, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), to the country’s history of human rights abuses.

But that day in June, in an about-face, Monahan sat next to the fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, and called for cooperation.

“There’s only a handful of people who aren’t surprised, given the last two years,” said Kevin Hopkins, vice president at Excel Sports Management. “Not knowing where this will lead will be the next headline.”

As shocking as this announcement was to golf fans, it was also a surprise to the PGA Tour membership, which was largely caught off guard.

The women’s year was more positive: exciting major championships, the debut of a promising young star, a fiercely fought Solheim Cup that ended in a draw between the two teams – but there is also a cloud of uncertainty hanging over the women’s tour.

After the LPGA and its equivalent across the Atlantic, the Ladies European Tour (LET), reached an agreement to merge, the LET vote to approve the merger was abruptly postponed. Here’s a look back at a rollercoaster year.

Behind the scenes

The PGA Tour-LIV announcement looms large because of the tour’s sudden turnaround and the way it angered and alienated some of the top players, including Rory McIlroy, who had been one of Monahan’s closest allies. He has done so ever since resigned from the PGA Tour board.

“My reaction was surprise, because I’m sure a lot of players were shocked by this, by what happened,” Woods said during his Hero World Challenge last month. “So quickly, without any input or any information about it, it was just thrown out there.”

This move left top players pushing for control of the tour’s board. Woods, who now sits on the board, said the players wanted to ensure that in the future “we would not be left out of the process in the same way.”

For his part, Monahan has expressed regret over the manner in which the announcement was made. “The rollout was a failure on my part,” he said at the New York Times DealBook Summit last month. “I owned it, and I still own it.”

On the other hand, LIV Golf got a boost, if not a lifeline. The competition had been rolled out haphazardly. The first tournaments in 2022 were marred by problems such as the lack of a television deal and team uniforms.

The PIF poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the new competition, but after the first wave of star runners to LIV – Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and then-reigning British Open champion Cameron Smith – attention shifted to poor event attendance and a lack of a major media partner to broadcast the events.

The June 6 announcement gave relevance to the new competition.

“We went from unfairly cast as outsiders in golf to our chairman sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with the commissioner of the PGA Tour,” said Gary Davidson, interim chief operating officer of LIV Golf in 2023. “We always knew LIV could coexist to exist.”

Their merger discussions with the LPGA and LET went smoothly. The two tours have been completed operating in a joint venture since 2020, a period in which prize money increased on both tours.

This year, the two boards negotiated the terms of a merger, with the LPGA essentially taking over the LET. Whether this happens depends on a vote by the LET players.

“The vote was postponed by the LET Board from its original date of November 21 because more time was needed to evaluate all relevant information received,” said Mollie Marcoux Samaan, the LPGA commissioner. “No new date for the vote has been set yet. The LPGA board remains excited about the opportunity to bring our two organizations together.”

In the spotlight

Both the women’s game and the men’s game also provided compelling storylines on the course.

The first men’s major, the Masters tournament, came down to a match between PGA Tour fixture Jon Rahm and Koepka, a multiple major champion who had left for LIV. Rahm prevailed, but in the next major, the PGA Championship, Koepka pulled away from the field to win his fifth major.

LIV saw this as validation. “Competing in the Masters and then winning the PGA Championship was huge for us,” Davidson said. “It proved the competitiveness of LIV, that it could prepare the boys well for majors.” (On Thursday, LIV announced that Rahm would join his tour next year.)

The five major women’s championships also created excitement. Lilia Vu won the first and last of the majors, rising to the No. 1 ranking and claiming the Player of the Year title. Céline Boutier became the first French player to win the Amundi Evian Championship in her home country. And Allisen Corpuz, a young American in her second year on the tour, won the US Women’s Open.

The LPGA also got a feel-good story with Rose Zhang, who was long the No. 1 women’s amateur in the world. Zhang turned pro in June and won the first event she competed in.

“It’s been a whirlwind for her, but she’s done what people expected of her,” said Hopkins, who leads Excel Sports Management’s LPGA practice. “The LPGA is excited to have her as one of its stars.”

The team competition was intense on both the men’s and women’s sides, but in different ways: the Solheim Cup was tense and exciting, while the men’s equivalent, the Ryder Cup, was a rout. Team Europe defeated the American team, which only managed to maintain its 30-year losing streak in Europe.

There is one wrinkle for future European teams, and that is the partnership that the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour have created. The PGA Tour has effectively turned DP World into a feeder tour, granting membership to the top 10 players in the annual Race to Dubai rankings. This effectively clears out the best players in Europe.

With only a few weeks left in the year, there’s still the possibility of more drama. While all eyes are on whether the framework agreement between PGA Tour and LIV will be signed by the end of the year, questions remain as to whether the LPGA-LET merger will also go through. It’s a fitting end to a tumultuous year.