For PGA Tour players: betrayal and confusion in the wake of Saudi Deal

US Open winner Gary Woodland had had a different feel about professional golf lately.

Players were encouraged and encouraged. Executives listened. The PGA Tour was changing. With track dominance challenged by LIV Golf, an upstart built with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the tour felt more like a co-op than an emotionless titan of pro sports.

Then came the tour’s surprise announcement on June 6 that the PGA Tour and the wealth fund, after lobbying players to part with the Saudi money it had linked to human rights abuses, would join forces. None of the five players serving on the tour’s board heard of the deal more than a few hours before it went public.

“The past year has been about players being heard,” said Woodland, who turned professional golfer in 2007, at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the US Open closes on Sunday. On June 6, he said, it appeared that tour players’ voices had suddenly “been thrown out the door a little bit.”

Woodland is not an outlier. In interviews and during press conferences at the Open, top players described shaken confidence in a PGA Tour that they believed had recently afforded them more meaningful agency and influence. The tour’s ability to ease the troubled atmosphere could affect whether the deal, which has been met with significant skepticism throughout the tour and in Washington, moves forward in the coming months.

Compared to other prominent professional sports leagues in the United States, the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt non-profit organization, has an unusual structure.

Unlike the NBA or the NFL, for example, there are no team owners and there is no union. Instead, players are independent contractors eligible for PGA Tour membership. Tour members generally have no financial guarantees – however, they can earn money through various sponsorships – but receive tour wages tied to their performances on the course. (When Viktor Hovland won the Memorial Tournament this month, he earned $3.6 million of the event’s $20 million prize pool. Golfers who didn’t play well enough to secure spots in the final two rounds collected nothing.)

In exchange for access to tour events and purses, players allow the circuit to negotiate television rights on their behalf, among other things. Even without a union, players theoretically have a say in tour operations: the 11-member board includes five player seats, and there is a 16-player board that “advises and consults” with board members and the tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan.

But when tour leaders negotiated a framework agreement to reshape the sport in the most sweeping ways since the modern tour’s inception in the 1960s, there were no players in the room. Rory McIlroy, the world’s third-ranked golfer and member of the tour’s board, learned of the deal a week after it was signed behind closed doors at a Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.

The preliminary deal deepens the turmoil and makes little clear about the future, especially as lawyers and executives are still haggling over the fine print that dictates much about how the sport will be organized, funded and operated.

“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a little betrayed by management,” said Jon Rahm, this year’s Masters Tournament winner.

“It’s just not easy as a player who has been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” he added. “That’s why we’re all in a bit of a limbo because we don’t know what’s going on and how much has been finalized and what they can talk about as well.”

The sense of duplicity, some players suggested, might not be so severe had they not gained confidence in the idea that they were becoming increasingly important in developing the tour’s path for years to come.

As Tiger Woods retreated from the spotlight of golf, Woodland noted, players found their sport was looking for figures to set tone and direction.

“When I first started, you just went and played and who knows what was going on,” said Woodland, who remains close to Woods. “Pretty much everyone jumped on Tiger’s coattails and we just went.” More recently, Woodland said, “Guys are starting to get a little bit more of their own voice, and you’re starting to see different opinions.”

Faced with the rise of LIV Golf, players had helped devise changes to the tour’s format and schedule. At a private meeting in Delaware last summer, they attempted to make adjustments that could curb an exodus to LIV. Afterwards, Monahan stated that the Delaware gathering “represents a remarkable moment for the PGA Tour and shows the essence of what a membership organization is all about.”

In the middle of last month, however, Monahan was in Venice for secret talks with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund. Two board members, neither player, were traveling to Italy. The men later met in San Francisco over Memorial Day to finalize the framework agreement. After that, the circle of people who knew about the planned partnership expanded, but there were no players until June 6, when tour and Saudi officials announced the pact. Some players learned about it on Twitter.

The mood on the tour only worsened when it became apparent that the deal had been negotiated in extraordinary secrecy, with the players’ representatives on the board kept out of the talks.

“We got the impression that we were being listened to,” said Joel Dahmen, a professional player since 2010 whose public profile soared this year when he appeared on the Netflix documentary series “Full Swing.”

Dahmen, who described himself as a “midlevel” man, said he recognized voices like his would be given limited priority in the tour’s strategic deliberations. But many golfers were stunned that even the biggest headliners were kept away from the negotiations, even though some of their colleagues said they understood it was impractical to expect the tour officials to consult with the entire membership in advance.

“If you have to consult every player, nothing will probably ever happen, and that’s the balance for any organization,” said Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner and former world No. 1 who chairs the Player Advisory Council of the United States. the tour. “It’s like the golf club at home: they have the membership committee and a few members of that committee are allowed to influence decisions.”

“It’s a player-centric tour,” Scott added, “but it depends on where you sit and how you look at things.”

PGA Tour officials rushed to quell the outcry, aware that frustrations with the organization helped pave the way for LIV to lure players away from what is America’s flagship men’s golf circuit. Senior executives have been at the US Open and Monahan, who began a furlough last week after what the tour described only as “a medical situation,” held a controversial meeting with players hours after the deal was announced.

Players with some of the closest ties to Monahan and other executives said they received a barrage of feedback like they’d never remembered. Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 US Open, said, perhaps with a dose of exaggeration, that he had probably heard more from players since June 6 than in his 15 years as a tour golfer.

“We want unity, but we also want to trust our leaders,” Simpson said, adding that he had called players to hear their doubts and annoyances. “I think as a whole they are struggling with these decisions.”

While McIlroy has expressed support for the deal, other players with board seats have been publicly non-committal.

“I told myself I wouldn’t be for or against it until I know everything, and I still don’t know everything,” said Simpson.

He sounded a lot like Patrick Cantlay, another board member, saying that “it seems like it’s too early to have enough information to properly manage the situation.”

The board is slated to meet later this month, but it’s not clear if the pact will be ready for a vote by then. At the very least, board members expect a briefing that will allow them to answer more detailed questions about the future of the tour.

All players can do now, many said, is try to imagine what the tour might look like and where they might fit into a changed ecosystem.

“Where I think I am – and a lot of other players are – is that we will show up at the biggest and best events where we have tee times, the ones that pay the most money, and we’re going to play until someone tells us we’re out can play in those events, and then we’re going to find other events,” Dahmen said.

They also face a long period of uncertainty, grappling with the possibility that the tour could remain in turmoil for another year or more. It’s an unfamiliar road for many of them, after all those years when the tour has been the undisputed destination of choice for many of the world’s top golfers, the business model is familiar.

“As members or as players,” Scott said, “we haven’t dealt with anything like this before.”