Mickelson Among Players Interviewed in Pro Golf Antitrust Investigation
PITTSFORD, NY — The Justice Department’s antitrust investigation into men’s professional golf included interviews with players, including major tournament winners Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Sergio García, as authorities investigate whether the PGA Tour attempted to manipulate the sport’s job market .
The department, which has been conducting its investigation since at least last summer, has also investigated the specter of collusion in the Official World Golf Ranking and the close relationships between the PGA Tour’s leaders and the various organizations that host the Masters. the PGA Championship and the US Open.
While PGA Tour lawyers met with Justice Department officials in Washington this week, a timeline for the completion of the review — let alone whether the government will try to enforce changes in golf — is not clear. . But the scope and persistence of the investigation has deepened the turbulence in the sport, which has struggled with the recent rise of LIV Golf, a league that used money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to lure top players away from the PGA Tour.
Eight people with knowledge of the Justice Department’s investigation described its scope on condition of anonymity as the investigation was pending. The department declined to comment.
Unlike Major League Baseball, no golf organization has a blanket exemption from federal antitrust laws. A handful of organizations that have close ties to each other have led golf’s upper echelon for generations, but have withstood some scrutiny in the past.
The PGA Tour, the dominant professional circuit in the United States and LIV’s opponent in a pending antitrust lawsuit brought by the rebel league last year, hosts tournaments that have often made up the majority of golfers’ game schedules. But the tour doesn’t host the four so-called major tournaments, the sport’s most cherished events and important ways for players to earn prize money and sponsorships.
For example, this week’s PGA Championship is run by the PGA of America at Oak Hill Country Club, just outside of Rochester, NY. The US Open is hosted by the United States Golf Association and the Augusta National Golf Club administers the Masters Tournament. (The R&A, which organizes the British Open, is based in Great Britain.)
The groups haven’t caught up since LIV debuted last year — the circuit’s players haven’t had suspensions from the majors, for instance — but the establishment of professional golf has remained a focus of antitrust investigators. LIV attorneys applaud the government’s investigation and have been in regular communication with Justice Department officials, who have not taken a position on the league’s lawsuit against the PGA Tour and have not intervened in the case.
“If the system is manipulated, consumers aren’t getting the best product, and if that’s the result of an agreement between two or more parties, that becomes a violation,” said Stephen F. Ross, who teaches sports law at Penn State University and previously worked for the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.
The PGA Tour, which declined to comment on Wednesday but denied aggressive wrongdoing and predicted the department’s investigation would fail, took a hard line last year when LIV emerged. It then threatened and imposed suspensions to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league, which has offered guaranteed contracts worth at times $100 million or more and garnered some of the richest prizes in golf history.
Tour executives have insisted their strategy was rooted in membership rules designed to protect the collective market power of elite players in matters such as television rights negotiations and tournament sponsorship, and that golfers who violate agreed-upon rules could be punished. But researchers have expressed interest in the possibility that the tour’s punitive approach posed a threat to the integrity of the golf job market, which now includes a LIV faction vocally arguing that players are independent contractors who should be free to participate as they choose. to take on tours.
The department’s investigation soon moved beyond a cursory look at LIV’s public complaints and included interviews with some of the golfing world’s most recognizable figures.
Mickelson, who has won six majors, including the 2021 PGA Championship, which made him the oldest major tournament winner in history at age 50, is a formidable public critic of the PGA Tour. He reportedly accepted $200 million in guaranteed money to join LIV last year, caused a storm when he downplayed Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights violations, and last month nearly silenced those who doubted his remaining playing potential when he tied for second place. the masters.
DeChambeau was a sensation when he captured the 2020 US Open title, and García, a Masters winner who first played at a major in the 1990s, is among the most prominent European golfers of his generation.
Representatives for Mickelson and DeChambeau declined to comment. A representative for Garcia did not respond to messages asking for comment.
LIV declined to comment. But league commissioner Greg Norman publicly hinted in March about the circuit’s cooperation with the Justice Department’s investigation.
“The DOJ came and tried to understand the antitrust side of things,” Norman said during an appearance in Miami Beach. “So the PGA Tour created this other legal front they have to fight.”
The review of the tour’s labor practices could prove the most consistent element of the investigation, antitrust experts said, if the Justice Department finds fault with the circuit’s approach.
“That goes more to the kind of core of what the PGA is,” said Paul Denis, a retired Justice Department official who later worked on antitrust cases in private practice. “If that’s where they’re going, that’s much more important because that really impacts their business model in terms of their relationship with the players.”
But U.S. regulators have also become increasingly aware of the close ties between golf’s most powerful organizations and their executives and administrators.
That part of the research is not unique to wave research. During the Biden administration, the Justice Department’s antitrust division has shown particular concern about people filling multiple top positions for potential competitors, and its misgivings have sometimes led public company directors to relinquish board seats.
In October, Jonathan Kanter, the antitrust department’s assistant attorney general, said the ban on overlapping services was “an important but underenforced piece” of federal law.
Whether the Justice Department wants to force changes in executive or board leadership in golf may depend on whether Kanter and his lieutenants believe they can prove the PGA Tour is a competitor to a major tournament organizer, an idea tour executives have privately mocked and used to cast doubt on the strength of the department’s potential case. The tour and major tournaments jockey for television rights and sponsorship fees, but they are far from direct rivals in many ways.
They do cooperate.
The tour has a share in the world ranking system, which major tournaments use in part to determine their fields. In addition to the tour, Augusta National, the PGA of America, and the USGA also have seats on the rating system’s board of directors, and all provide staff for the technical committee.
Player rankings are based on a complex formula that takes into account performance in accredited tournaments, from PGA Tour events to low-profile competitions. As administrators have not yet responded to LIV’s application to join the system – LIV managers have acknowledged that the league would require special dispensations to be accepted immediately – the golfers have slipped down the rankings, putting their future participation in the majors is jeopardized. (Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, has withdrawn from deliberations on LIV’s bid to join the system.)
The Justice Department’s investigation is vital to LIV Golf, which has faced setbacks in its lawsuit against the PGA Tour. But the league has fueled months of chatter about the federal investigation, its possible implications for the PGA Tour — and the potential benefits for LIV.
The tour has countered that effort by citing its record: an FTC investigation that lasted for years and ended in 1995 without any action against the tour.
Shortly before that, Norman’s initial quest to start a global circuit to rival the PGA Tour came crashing down.
David McCabe reporting contributed.