LIV Golf’s Al-Rumayyan and the PGA Tour’s Monahan make strange bedfellows

After more than a year of high-stakes jockeying and long-distance accusations, Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan finally met in May, an arranged blind date at some café or hotel in Venice.

Now the strangest bedfellows will attempt to reshape the future of professional golf and repair the damage done by years of civil war they once waged against each other.

The 53-year-olds in charge couldn’t be more different: Monahan, US Commissioner of the PGA Tour since 2017, and al-Rumayyan, the trusted confidant of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and overseer of his country’s huge public investment fund.

It is that fund, which claims to be worth nearly $700 billion, bought its way into golf last Tuesday. It ended an insidious, court-complicated battle between the PGA’s US and European tours and the Saudi-backed LIV Gulf tour. It immediately resolved the PGA Tour’s financial struggles.

Now al-Rumayyan becomes chairman of this entity. Monahan becomes its CEO. And one of the many complex questions this raises is one of internal logistics. How will this unlikely duo manage – managing the game of golf both on and off the course and managing to get along?

Monahan has deep roots in New England and a background in sports marketing. His leadership style is as quiet as a golf crowd waiting for a winning putt.

“I enjoy all forms of human interaction,” he told Golf Digest in 2017. “Talking to people, listening to them, often just observing. Even unpleasant people I like to discover what drives them. It’s kind of a requirement of the job I’m in right now, because the range of people is so wide, their situations are so dynamic. Their needs and goals may be material, but it’s human interaction that gets us there.”

Al-Rumayyan, the money guzzler with a deep passion for golf, is a stern test of Monahan’s social skills. His “needs and goals” are certainly material.

While al-Rumayyan only has one of (now) 11 seats on the PGA Tour board of directors, he and the endowment fund have the exclusive right to invest in the new entity. That means they control the finances and they plan to pump in billions of dollars.

In its only public appearance since the merger was announced last week, a televised completion on CNBC where the two sat cozily next to each other, al-Rumayyan said he would let Monahan run the operation.

The “voting system” and majority of the board, he noted, “will not be with us.”

But al-Rumayyan’s mere presence — and the deal itself, for now just a framework that could take months to formalize — is a stark reminder that money can trump all.

“The Saudis will want to dominate this,” said James M. Dorsey, an adjunct senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. “They don’t like to play second fiddle. And they believe, not without reason, that money talks.”

It is unclear what kind of takeover leader al-Rumayyan will become. His PIF portfolio is vast and he chairs dozens of state-owned companies, including oil giant Saudi Aramco and mining company Ma’aden. He lets them run largely at his own discretion by executive teams.

But the relationship with Newcastle United, the English football team, offers perhaps the best clues to golf.

The PIF bought an 80 percent share in Newcastle United in 2021. Fans of the English club immediately welcomed the transfer of ownership, as the prospect of success on the pitch took precedence over difficult questions. Drenched in PIF money handed out by al-Rumayyan, Newcastle have risen to the top of the English Premier League.

At Newcastle he has left the day-to-day decisions to others, although he has been quick to approve spending on talent upgrades and has not been invisible.

He occasionally appears at competitions. (Compare that with the largely absent ownership of Manchester City by United Arab Emirates’ Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who made the news on Saturday by advancing to the team’s Champions League final.) He kicked the ball across the team’s pitch and shot it in the locker room.

Yet al-Rumayyan is more passionate about golf. Around LIV, his favorite project, he is known as HE, for His Excellency, and has been in the public eye a lot. At last year’s LIV event in Bedminster, NJ, al-Rumayyan hobnobed with former president Donald J. Trump, the owner of the course. For a time, al-Rumayyan wore a “Make America Great Again” cap.

But most don’t expect him to have an overt public presence in golf or be a well-known figure at the trophy ceremonies. Part of that is his portfolio; he has numerous other business responsibilities.

“How much time does he have to allocate?” said Dorsey. “This is a man at the top of an empire. He oversees many things. I think you’ll see a lot of his lieutenants and not much of him, at least once this is settled.’

Part of it is Saudi culture; he must “walk a fine line,” according to Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, given Prince Mohammed’s autocratic leadership.

“If you look too big, and you appear to be Mr. Saudi Arabia, Bin Salman doesn’t approve of people stepping on his toes,” Ulrichsen said. “But we also saw that al-Rumayyan is probably the most trusted and competent member of his inner circle.”

Al-Rumayyan was a little-known bank manager in 2015, when King Abdullah died. Power was consolidated around Prince Mohammed, who soon initiated Vision 2030, an ambitious makeover for Saudi Arabia and its reputation. Part of that involved building the PIF as a diversifying vehicle for the growth of global capital, both financial and cultural.

Prince Mohammed, who wanted to flush out the aging elite who he saw as limiting the country’s ambitions – imprisoning and abusing hundreds of them – turned over responsibility for the fund to al-Rumayyan.

Ongoing human rights abuses and the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Prince Mohammed’s orders, the Central Intelligence Agency said, have made the Saudis global pariahs.

But under al-Rumayyan’s leadership, the investment fund grew exponentially.

Investments in sports in particular have proven to be an effective launderer of reputation which some refer to as sportswashing. The pinnacle of that effort may be the takeover of golf, announced the same week Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.

“This was part of establishing Saudi Arabia on the world stage,” Ulrichsen said of Saudi’s rise to international sports. “And in this case, it shows that Saudi Arabia is welcome again at the highest kind of table in the United States, especially after what happened after 2018. That period of isolation is now definitely over.”

For Saudis, the golf deal is more of a global news event than a national event. Wednesday front page Arriyadiyah, the kingdom’s top sports daily, was dominated by news of French footballer Karim Benzema’s move to Jeddah-based Al-Ittihad, the last prize for the top Saudi league, which has already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, among others. The gulf merger announcement was not found in any of the paper’s pages for the day, earning only a brief mention on page 11 on Thursday.

But al-Rumayyan is on a one-man mission to use golf for Saudi advantage. He helped settle the Saudi Golf Federation and the Saudi Golf Company, formed in 2019 to promote the game in the country.

One of the uncertainties is Monahan’s long-term role as CEO. Tax records obtained by ProPublica show that he was paid $14 million in salary in 2021 for his role as PGA Tour commissioner. He spent most of 2022 and early 2023 fending off LIV through insults and lawsuits.

That lawsuit has now been withdrawn, sparing cash-strapped PGA Tour funds while protecting al-Rumayyan and the wealth fund from impeachment and discovery.

Was it all gamesmanship that can now be forgiven? Or could al-Rumayyan be working behind the scenes to find a leader better suited to his goals?

Monahan wants golf fans, sponsors and his own players to resist the reflexive, collective shudder at this new arrangement, portrayed by many as a money over morality transaction, and to think about where golf worldwide could be in 10 years .

It most likely depends on what al-Rumayyan wants.

It could be mere adjustments in payouts, schedules and formats to lift a flaccid, traditional business – the way he’s been dealing with Newcastle. Or it could be a makeover. A possible comparison, with no ties to the PIF, is how international cricket introduced Twenty20 to counter dragging, multi-day matches with something shorter, livelier and more consumable, which is similar to what LIV has been trying to do.

At the heart of it all, for now, is the relationship between these two men — an impossibly wealthy moneylender from Saudi Arabia and a Massachusetts sports executive steeped in tradition.

“We sat down in Venice for about two hours, he and I, to understand each other,” al-Rumayyan said. “He talked about his ambitions, his life. I did the same. Even my family was with me in Venice. We had lunch with a large group of people. The understanding and positive thinking is what really unites us in growing the game of golf. The passion we have, both of us, is what really cemented this kind of agreement.

Spring in Venice has a way of generating such enchantment.

Skeptics might point out that Venice is a series of islands and an easy place to lose your sense of direction. Cynics may note that it is sinking.

Ahmad Al Omran reporting contributed.