When the PGA Tour and the upstart LIV Golf League, funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced their landmark deal in June to let the men’s golf circuits join forces, they left most details unanswered and set a Dec. 31 deadline to to join forces. them out.

Now it is clear that the two sides will need more time.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a memo to players Sunday evening that the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, were “working to extend negotiations” into the new year.

The sides had discussed signing a formal one-month extension, which could be extended further, said three people familiar with the negotiations who were not authorized to discuss them. But while both sides remain focused on completing a deal, they have not yet set a new formal deadline.

Those negotiations continue as the PGA Tour progresses with simultaneous talks to raise additional money from Strategic Sports Group, an investment group led by Fenway Sports Group – the parent company of the Boston Red Sox, the Pittsburgh Penguins and English soccer club Liverpool.

Mr Monahan said on Sunday that the tour and Strategic Sports Group had “made meaningful progress” in their discussions and that the tour had “provided SSG with the due diligence information they requested.” The parties are focused on finalizing the terms of the deal and documents, he said.

The PGA Tour, the Saudi wealth fund and the Strategic Sports Group enter 2024 with great uncertainty about the deal. Since its announcement in June, the questions that initially accompanied the deal’s frenzied rollout appear to have increased: How will potential U.S. investments compare to Saudi money? How will the golf circuits work together even as the Saudis are still actively trying to poach PGA Tour players?

The planned partnership was announced on June 6 with scant outlines of an actual agreement. The PGA Tour and the Saudi wealth fund planned to hammer out details by the end of 2023, including governance, asset valuations and how the money would be deployed.

About two weeks after the preliminary partnership was announced, the tour and the Saudi wealth fund, which had been engaged in a bitter battle for months, agreed to drop their bitter lawsuit against each other. LIV had accused the tour of violating antitrust laws, and the tour had accused LIV of improperly interfering with existing player contracts.

In the months that followed, the tentative pact faced backlash from players, who said they were blindsided by the deal, and from U.S. lawmakers, with some demanding further investigation into the tour’s ties to Saudi money and influence.

Discontent among players, including those on the powerful PGA Tour policy board, was pervasive. And LIV Golf recently signed Jon Rahm, the No. 3 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, taking him off the PGA Tour and highlighting the Saudis’ continued willingness to spend money on the sport and making LIV a rival to to make the tour.

“Having Jon on board was critical to our future and what we want to do,” said Greg Norman, CEO of LIV Golf. said of the move. “It will create a domino effect – more apples will fall from the tree – there is no doubt about that as LIV continues to evolve.”

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Earlier this year, the PGA Tour, the world’s preeminent professional golf league, announced an agreement to form an alliance with LIV Golf, a start-up tour with billions of dollars in backing from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The bitter rivalry between the two leagues and the controversial reaction to the merger of many prominent players have tested the PGA Tour and its leadership. The target of much of the criticism was PGA commissioner Jay Monahan, who went on medical leave a week after the announcement.

Monahan spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times to acknowledge the mistakes made in the rollout of that agreement and to talk about his mental health journey since then.

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The DealBook Summit, hosted by Andrew Ross Sorkin, columnist and editor of DealBook, a daily business and policy report from The New York Times, features interviews with the leaders at the center of today’s biggest stories, recorded live on stage of the annual DealBook Summit event in New York City.

The DealBook events team includes Julie Zann, Caroline Brunelle, Haley Duffy, Angela Austin, Hailey Hess, Dana Pruskowski, Matt Kaiser and Yen-Wei Liu.

Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Nina Lassam, Ravi Mattu, Beth Weinstein, Kate Carrington, Isabella Anderson and Jeffrey Miranda.

The conference room on Capitol Hill is booked, the senators’ agendas have been wiped. But less than two weeks before a Senate subcommittee is set to hold a hearing on the PGA Tour’s planned partnership with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the panel’s ambitions for high-profile witnesses are meeting significant resistance.

There is almost no chance that the wealth fund governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, will voluntarily appear before Congress on July 11 or ever. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan is on medical leave. And LIV Golf, a Saudi Arabian-funded league, is hesitant to send Greg Norman, who won two British Opens in the decades before he became commissioner and lightning rod of the circuit, to the Senate’s permanent subcommittee for investigation.

The dispute over witnesses, just weeks after the panel’s examination of the deal, suggests the investigation could be turbulent. Lawmakers have been particularly frustrated by LIV’s offer to send Gary Davidson, the acting chief operating officer, to the hearing instead of Norman.

“We’ve asked Greg Norman for testimony, and unless there’s a reasonable explanation for his absence — which we haven’t gotten yet — Greg Norman is the one we expect to appear,” said Maria McElwain, Senator Richard’s communications director. Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, said in a statement.

LIV declined to comment Friday, but a person familiar with circuit thinking who asked for anonymity to discuss private negotiations with Congress said the league believed Davidson was more steeped in his day-to-day activities and the possible consequences of the deal. that has turned golf on its head since its announcement on June 6. Norman and Davidson were not involved in the secret talks that led to the deal.

Under the intended structure a five-page framework agreement signed behind closed doors on May 30, the business activities of the PGA Tour, LIV and the European Tour known as the DP World Tour – such as television rights and sponsorships – would be merged into a new for-profit company. The plan calls for the PGA Tour to control a majority of board seats, for Monahan to become the company’s CEO, and for the tour to retain control of many professional golf tournaments.

But Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund would have extensive investment rights, and al-Rumayyan is positioned to become the company’s chairman, assuring the Saudis significant clout in men’s professional golf if the deal closes.

The planned venture has sparked weeks of scorn and skepticism in Washington, where lawmakers are furious about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, much as the tour did before it appeared to do business with the wealth fund. Some lawmakers have threatened to strip the tour of its tax-exempt status, and Justice Department antitrust regulators could spend months investigating the deal before deciding whether to try to block it.

And building on the congressional pastime of publicly harassing sports executives over issues like steroids and college athlete rights, the senate quickly scheduled a hearing to examine the deal, though the most substantial details, such as asset valuation, may not months to be resolved.

However, in letters last week, Blumenthal and Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin senator who is the senior Republican on the subcommittee, invited Norman, Monahan and al-Rumayyan to appear and be willing to review “the circumstances and terms” of the agreement. discuss. as well as “the expected role” of the wealth fund in professional golf in the United States.

The senators, who have not subpoenaed executives, had hoped to solidify the witness list by the middle of this week, but on Friday their panel was still negotiating with the tour, the wealth fund and LIV.

The hearing, if it takes place, will be one of the most important opportunities yet for golf managers to allay concerns about the planned transaction. But the proceedings, like any Congressional performance, carry risks. A single misstep could amplify the public firestorm or, perhaps more alarmingly for the deal’s supporters, prompt government officials to take an even closer look at the pact. (For example, antitrust experts have predicted that Monahan’s claim on June 6 that the deal will “take the competitor off the board” will intensify the Justice Department’s investigation.)

Norman in particular has a history of criticism. For example, last year he downplayed Saudi responsibility for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by saying, “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.” He has made relatively few public comments in recent months, and he and his representatives have declined interview requests from The New York Times.

But when Blumenthal and Johnson wrote to him on June 21, they said the subcommittee “respectfully requests that you appear in person to testify.” LIV executives said Norman would be traveling abroad at the time, and they privately objected to the commissioner being subjected to a congressional investigation without his PGA Tour counterpart undergoing the same investigation, which seems likely given Monahan’s medical leave.

Monahan’s indefinite absence has complicated the tour’s representation at the hearing. The two executives assigned to run the tour on an interim basis, Tyler Dennis and Ron Price, were not involved in the deal talks.

Al-Rumayyan, however, was. But his appearance on Capitol Hill was never considered likely. As one of Saudi Arabia’s most influential figures, he rarely gives interviews outside of tightly controlled environments, and lawyers representing him and the Saudi government waged an aggressive fight to avoid impeachment in golf-related lawsuits in the United States. (The lawsuit was dropped as part of the tentative deal — one of the few binding components of the framework agreement — and al-Rumayyan never gave sworn testimony.)

The wealth fund declined to comment Friday. The tour said in a statement that it was “cooperating with the subcommittee’s requests for information and having productive discussions with them about who will represent the PGA Tour on July 11.”

It added: “We look forward to answering their questions about the framework agreement that will ensure the PGA Tour continues to lead the future of professional golf and benefit our players, our fans and our sport.”

The wealth fund and tour deploy armies of lobbyists, lawyers and political fixers to try and smooth the path of the deal. Before going on leave to recuperate from a “medical situation” the tour failed to detail, Monahan wrote to lawmakers defending the agreement. He also complained that Congress had not given the tour enough support to resist a Saudi “attempt to take over the game of golf in the United States,” as he put it.

“We were largely left to fend off the attacks, ostensibly due to the complex geopolitical alliance of the United States with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” Monahan said. wrote.

It’s not clear if the Senate panel will step up its efforts to obtain testimony from Norman or any of the other witnesses they’ve requested, especially ahead of the July 11 hearing. Most lawmakers are away from Washington for the Senate Independence Day recess, with few expected to return to Capitol Hill until the week of the hearing.

However, the current timing of the hearing may be coincidental for wave leaders. Public attention will turn to the British Open next week, to be played at Royal Liverpool. Cameron Smith, who joined LIV not long after his victory at the Old Course in St Andrews last July, will be looking to defend his title in the last major golf tournament of the year.

The PGA Tour, LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund on Friday asked a federal judge in California to dismiss the lawsuit that catapulted golf’s economic and power structure into the US legal system.

The request to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be resubmitted, came less than two weeks after the tour and the wealth fund, which funded LIV, announced a preliminary agreement to form a partnership to go. While the deal may not be finalized for months and is under increasing scrutiny in Washington, Friday’s filing in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., was a milestone in the abrupt relaxation between the rival circuits.

Judge Beth Labson Freeman, who is overseeing the case, is expected to approve the request, a cornerstone of the preliminary agreement between the tour and the wealth fund. By waiving the lawsuit, LIV, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund limit the potential for damaging revelations and mounting legal bills, closing an opportunity for redress if the new alliance falls apart.

Justice Department officials, who were already conducting an antitrust investigation into men’s professional golf, are expected to look closely at the deal and even try to block it or force changes. At least two Senate panels are demanding information about the planned transaction and its fallout, and the deal hasn’t even received approval from the PGA Tour board.

Much about the deal itself also remains in flux, including valuations of the tour’s assets, LIV and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, which will be housed in the new for-profit venture. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, is expected to serve as the company’s CEO, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, is set to serve as the chairman. The PGA Tour expects to get a majority of seats on the new company’s board, but the wealth fund will have extensive power over how it is financed, ensuring the Saudis significant clout.

Until June 6, when the deal was announced, the PGA Tour had warned against allowing Saudi money and influence into golf, leading to lawsuits in California that had costly, complicated lives.

The bitter litigation began last August, when 11 LIV players, including major tournament champions Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, filed a lawsuit accusing the tour of violating antitrust laws. LIV joined the cause herself later that month.

The tour also pursued its own claims against LIV, which it said had improperly disrupted existing contracts with players. The tour later received Judge Freeman’s approval to expand the case to include the wealth fund itself and al-Rumayyan, just one of the rulings that put pressure on the Saudis and their allies, whose superior financial resources put enormous strain on the tour.

The tour, endowment fund and LIV fought a ferocious battle over evidence gathering in the case, and many documents in the case were redacted, but a federal magistrate judge concluded this year that the endowment fund was “the driving force behind the establishment, funding , the oversight and operation of LIV”, undermining the claim that it was a passive investor in golf.

A lawsuit was not expected until at least next year.

Hours before Friday’s filing of the tour and LIV, The New York Times filed a motion asking the court to open the documents in the case. The Times cited a “substantial and legitimate public interest in this proceeding and its outcome” and suggested that the planned partnership could address concerns about competitive harm.

“To the extent that competitive harm existed at the time of sealing, those justifications may not apply with equal force today — or after completion of the parties’ expected merger,” the Times filing reads. Sealing is a decision that can and should be reviewed as facts change and circumstances require it.

It was not clear when the judge would rule on any of Friday’s motions.

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.

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf haven’t yet signed a stunning partnership deal that was only announced last week, but Washington’s vows to delay or halt the deal — or at least make it uncomfortable for golf executives — crystallized on Monday, when the Senate opened an inquiry into the scheme.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and the chairman of the chamber’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, said Monday he had demanded that both the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian-funded LIV provide a wide variety of documents and communications related to the agreement would give. Blumenthal also requested data regarding the PGA Tour’s non-profit status, suggesting a desire to challenge the tour’s tax-exempt status.

In a statement released three days before the start of the US Open in Los Angeles, Blumenthal denounced Saudi Arabia’s “deeply disturbing human rights record at home and abroad” and said the agreement prompted concern” over the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity taking control of a cherished US institution.

LIV declined to comment on Monday and the PGA Tour did not immediately respond to an investigation. However, executives had indicated they expected their agreement to attract continued attention from the federal government.

Congress cannot block the deal simply by opening an investigation, and any legislation derailing the deal would most likely trigger a lawsuit. But the specter of congressional scrutiny and perhaps public hearings could tarnish the deal and make the coming months even more unpleasant for pro golf’s leaders.

Blumenthal has shown a willingness to spar with sports leaders. Lately, he has been pressuring US universities for information about their sports betting partnerships, and he has spent years lashing out at the NCAA leadership over college athlete eligibility.

While the planned deal has caused some heartburn and chatter on Capitol Hill, Congress has not shown a unanimous interest in harassing wave leaders about it. Senator Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who is the top minority member on the panel over which Blumenthal presides, said last week that Congress should stay out of sports.

The PGA Tour’s agreement with the Saudi Public Investment Fund, whose LIV circuit debuted last year, would bring the rival tours’ business dealings into a new company. PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan is in line to serve as CEO, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund governor, will be the chairman.

Under the terms of the agreement, the Saudi wealth fund will have exclusive rights to invest in the new company, giving it significant influence over golf’s financial future. PGA Tour officials have maintained much doubt that they will be the ultimate decision makers, as their allies will hold a majority of the new company’s board seats.

Professional golf caught the attention of Washington regulators ahead of last week’s announcement. Justice Department antitrust investigators spent months asking questions about the tour’s efforts to prevent players from defecting to LIV and investigating whether the tour’s top executives were too close to other prominent golf organizations, such as Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament.

The department has not made any public allegations of wrongdoing and has not commented on last week’s deal announcement. But antitrust experts have warned that the department will almost certainly study it closely and may even step in to try and block it.

Tour executives have expressed confidence that the agreement will pass any legal challenges.