PGA Tour and LIV Golf agree alliance, end golf’s bitter fight
The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s professional golf for generations, and LIV Golf, which made its debut last year and is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi money, will together form an industry powerhouse expected to become the sports, executives announced Tuesday.
The rival circuits had publicly clashed over the past year, and the tentative agreement that emerged from secret negotiations blindsided virtually all of the world’s top players, agents and broadcasters. The deal would create a new company that would consolidate the PGA Tour’s prestige, television contracts and marketing power with Saudi money.
The new company came into being so quickly that it doesn’t even have a name yet and is simply referred to as “NewCo” in the agreement documents. It would be controlled by the PGA Tour, but funded significantly by the Saudi government Public Investment Fund. The governor of the fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, will be the chairman of the new company.
The deal, which comes as Saudi Arabia increasingly seeks to assert itself on the global stage as something other than one of the world’s largest oil producers, has implications beyond sport. The Saudi money will give the new organization more clout, but it comes with the disturbing association of the kingdom’s human rights record, its treatment of women and allegations that it was responsible for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic.
The deal doesn’t exactly amount to a Saudi takeover of professional golf, but it positions the country’s top officials to have a huge influence on the game. It also represents an escalation of Saudi ambitions in the sport, moving beyond its corporate sponsorship of Formula 1 racing and ownership of an English football team to where it can influence the highest echelons of a global game.
“Everyone is in shock,” said Paul Azinger, the 1993 PGA Championship winner and NBC Sports’ leading golf analyst. “The future of golf is forever different.”
Since LIV started playing last year, it has used some of the richest contracts and prize money in the history of the sport to lure players away from the PGA Tour. Until Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour was openly uncompromising: LIV was a threat to the game and a glamorous way for Saudi Arabia to restore its reputation. PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan had even avoided mentioning LIV’s name in public.
But a series of spring meetings in London, Venice and San Francisco led to a framework agreement that stunned the golf industry for its timing and scope. Monahan, who defended the decision as a good business choice and said he had accepted being accused of hypocrisy, met with PGA Tour players in Toronto on Tuesday in what he called an “intense” and “definitely heated” conversation.
However, the deal turned out to be correct, predictions that there could eventually be an uneasy recovery from the sport’s fractures. The PGA Tour board, which includes a handful of players like Patrick Cantlay and Rory McIlroy, has yet to approve the agreement, a process that can be tumultuous.
It was just one year ago this week that LIV Golf held its inaugural tournament, prompting the PGA Tour to suspend players who entered it. But by the end of the year, even though the circuit was embroiled in an antitrust battle with the PGA Tour and the stars faced an uncertain future during the sport’s major leagues, LIV had some of the biggest names in golf on its payroll. Players include major tournament champions Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith.
The players were familiar, but LIV’s 54-hole events were shocking, with music blaring and golfers in shorts unafraid of being unceremoniously cut halfway through. The PGA Tour, meanwhile, defended its 72-hole events, where underperforming players don’t go into the weekend, as rigorous athletic tests that clung to the traditions of an ancient game.
The less starchy LIV concept made headlines and the league gained even more attention due to its ties to former President Donald J. Trump, who hosted LIV tournaments and emerged as one of its most enthusiastic promoters. However, the league was still largely dependent on the generosity of an endowment fund that had been warned that a Rebel golf circuit was not a sure financial bonanza. It came to a television deal with the CW Network and corporate sponsorship was scarce.
The league achieved some athletic success, even as players risked eventual exclusion from major golf tournaments, which are hosted by organizations close to, but distinct from, the PGA Tour.
Last month, Koepka won the PGA Championship, hosted by the PGA of America. Koepka, Mickelson and Patrick Reed were among the LIV players who performed particularly well in the Masters Tournament hosted by Augusta National Golf Club in early April.
But within weeks of the Masters, after a series of mutual overtures and months of bravado, PGA Tour and Saudi executives secretly met to see if there was a way they could live together, in part, Monahan suggested, because he did don’t think it was “right or sustainable to have this tension in our sport.” The result was a deal that gives the tour the upper hand, but is poised to make Saudi Arabia’s influence at the top of the golfing world permanent.
Monahan, the tour commissioner, is about to become the CEO of the new company, which will include an executive committee filled with tour loyalists. But al-Rumayyan’s presence and promise that the endowment fund can play a vital role in the company’s eventual financing means there’s a lot Saudi Arabia can do to shape the sport’s future.
In a memorandum to players on Tuesday, Monahan emphasized that his tour’s “history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is ready for the future.”
That was hardly a consensus. Mackenzie Hughes, a PGA Tour player, sourly commented on Twitter that there was “nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour we said we never would.” And Terry Strada, the chairwoman of 9/11 Families United, who had attacked the Saudi foray into golf over doubts about the kingdom after the 2001 terrorist attacks, said Monahan and the tour had become “merely more paid Saudi shills, which made billions cost people”. dollars to clear Saudi reputation.”
The tour and endowment fund both had incentives to forge an agreement, in addition to the prospect of closing a chaotic chapter marked by accusations of betrayal and greed.
LIV had faced setbacks in civil suits against the PGA Tour that threatened to drag al-Rumayyan into sworn testimony and forced the wealth fund to turn over documents that could have become public. The tour has come under scrutiny from Justice Department antitrust investigators, who had spent the past few months investigating whether the tour’s tactics to counter LIV had undermined golf’s job market.
The process between the tour and LIV will end under the terms of the agreement announced on Tuesday. The fate of the antitrust investigation was less clear — experts said the new arrangement wouldn’t automatically absolve the tour from potential legal trouble — but LIV’s status as the lead cheerleader evaporated.
For this year, the world’s pro golfers are unlikely to see seismic changes in their schedules or formats of play, with LIV and the PGA Tour expected to hold competitions as planned. However, there could be many more sweeping changes later on, especially as the new PGA Tour-controlled company will determine if and how LIV’s team-oriented format can be combined with the tour’s more familiar offerings.
LIV players are expected to have opportunities to sign up for the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour, circuits some of which had resigned when faced with fines and suspensions, but could face residual penalties if they leave in the first place. Through a spokeswoman, Greg Norman, the two-time major tournament champion who was LIV’s commissioner, declined to be interviewed Tuesday.
Whatever comes from LIV’s brand or style, Tuesday’s announcement is a unique milestone in the Saudi quest to become a titan in global sport. The deal will see the kingdom, at least in golf, move from a wealthy disruptor to a seat of power at the establishment’s table.
Saudi officials have repeatedly denied that political or public relations motives underlie their eager pursuit of sports investment. Instead, they framed the investments as necessary to support the resource-rich kingdom’s finances and strengthen its position on the global stage.
In addition to its golf influence, the wealth fund previously bought Newcastle United, a powerful English football team, and a company with close ties to the fund is eyeing investments in cricket, tennis and e-sports. And Saudi Arabia has been trying to become a host of major sporting events, from boxing matches to its ongoing bid to host the 2030 World Cup.
But when Saudi Arabia invaded the gulf last year, it was almost inconceivable that al-Rumayyan would so quickly become a formal ally of Monahan and the sport’s other powerhouses.
“Anyone who thought about it logically would see that something had to be done,” Adam Hadwin, a PGA Tour player, said Tuesday. It was inconceivable, he suggested, that the world’s best players would only compete against each other in the four major tournaments, but a truce “that happens so quickly and in this way is surprising.”
For most of the past year, LIV players have been asking questions about Saudi Arabia’s human rights history and other issues that have helped push the kingdom’s rise in golf to become an international focal point. They were, they often said, just golfers and entertainers.
Until Tuesday, Monahan had tried to use Saudi Arabia’s slur to undermine the new league and its golfers.
“I would ask any player who has left, or any player who would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” he said last year.
When Monahan stated on Tuesday that golf faction leaders had “realized that we were better off together than fighting or apart,” it was the players on his tour who were questioned about lucrative connections with Riyadh.
“I’ve dedicated my whole life to being at the highest level of golf,” said Hadwin, the tour player. “I have no plans to stop playing golf because the entity I play for has joined forces with the Saudi government.”
Reporting contributed by Andrew Dash, Kevin Draper, Lauren Hirsch, Eric Lipton, Victor Mather, Ahmad Al Omran And Bill Penington.