How the PGA Tour, LIV Golf shockingly came together to change pro golf
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Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2023. View the full list.
In the end, after all the talk, from all the voices, all around the world, the future of professional golf was decided by two men measuring each other’s leverage.
There’s perhaps never been a more jarring clandestine affair. Who could’ve seen this coming? About two months ago, PGA Tour policy board members Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy began speaking with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the Governor of the Saudi Arabian government-owned Public Investment Fund. After those initial conversations, Dunne and Herlihy connected Al-Rumayyan with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan. The two spoke. Then they met in Venice, sitting down together in northern Italy, perhaps on a gondola. Monahan began trusting al-Rumayyan “10 minutes after sitting down with him,” the former later recalled. Soon after, the two met again in London, this time for lunch and golf.
A deal was struck.
It all happened so fast.
So fast that, they forgot to tell anyone.
Tuesday was unlike any other in golf history. In a snap, without warning, the entire professional sport changed both structurally and fundamentally. The PGA Tour is partnering with an entity it once stood in proud contrast to. The PIF (and with it, the Saudi Arabian government) is investing in the PGA Tour, pumping multiple billions of dollars into the tour’s coffers, and forming a new partnership with the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, a partnership that will end golf’s multi-year turf war.
Read more: The LIV Golf, PGA Tour merger and the craziest day in golf history, explained
No one outside of the initial parties knew what was coming. That includes LIV Golf frontman Greg Norman. That includes PGA Tour loyalists Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. When Monahan spoke to reporters on Tuesday night, roughly seven hours after the original news break, Monahan said: “Now that we’re in a framework agreement. I look forward to talking to all of our players, including them, to make certain that this comes off the right way.”
Monahan used that expression repeatedly. Framework agreement. A means to say nothing is final, nothing is official, but we’re definitely seeing each other.
And no one has any idea how to make any sense of this.
Be clear: The PGA Tour needed money. Lots of it. Money to boost tournament purses and bonus money to compete with what the PIF pumped into LIV for its players’ guaranteed contracts. Money to employ an army of lawyers to battle LIV in court and counter an ongoing DOJ investigation. Money to subsidize its partners at the DP World Tour and their legal fees.
As things stood, after tapping into reserve funds to survive the pandemic, then rebuilding those funds, the tour, Monahan said, “had to invest back in our business through our reserves” in 2023 and was set to do so again in 2024 to survive. A precarious situation. The PGA Tour’s most recent television contract was signed in 2020, before golf’s turf war arose, and could never have been projected to account for the soaring costs. The deal was believed to be worth about $700 million per year and roughly $2.7 billion between 2022 through 2030. Those look like paltry figures in a post-LIV world.
Nevertheless, the tour continued to leverage its product, creating elevated events and bonuses to funnel more money to its biggest stars. It also postured itself as being well-equipped to both attain sustainability and, following LIV’s initial blitz of acquiring stars like Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, survive a cold war and wait out LIV’s demise.
Perhaps lost in the shuffle was how anyone was going to pay for that survival.
The PGA Tour’s talking point now is that the PIF is neither merging with the PGA Tour, nor buying the PGA Tour, but investing in the PGA Tour.
Critics will say that, when it comes to the Saudi’s human rights record, it doesn’t make a difference.
And PGA Tour players will tell you, they were clueless that any of this was coming, and feel betrayed.
GO DEEPER
Power, privilege and risk: The life of golf's most powerful man Yasir Al-Rumayyan
Monahan says, essentially, there was no other choice.
“The PIF was controlling LIV, and we were competing against LIV,” Monahan said Tuesday. “I felt very good about the changes we’d made and the position that we’re in, but ultimately to take the competitor off of the board, to have them exist as a partner — not an owner — and for us to be able to control the direction going forward, put us in a position as the PGA Tour to serve our members, and at the same time, get to a productive position for the game at large.”
Monahan argued that the “much bigger play here” is creating an entity that reinvests dollars in growth businesses, something the tour had been unable to do as a 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organization. That is, even as the tour itself will remain tax-exempt.
You read that right. While the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the PIF’s golf-related holding (i.e. LIV Golf) work together in a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity, the tour plans to do this all while retaining its not-for-profit, tax-exempt status. Whether the federal government agrees with that remains to be seen.
In theory, the tour gets to maintain control and attain absolute financial security.
But at what cost? Much of the reaction around the tour Tuesday was of surprise that things were at a point where this was necessary. Many were under the impression that the tour was winning the fight with LIV both in the legal system and as a product. LIV departures had dwindled and rumors of the venture’s dire financial picture have swirled. The legal battle between the tour and LIV was creating additional headaches for the PIF. The Saudis claim in court that al-Rumayan was a “sitting minister of government with sovereign immunity” triggered the English Premier League to re-examine the PIF’s ownership of Newcastle United.
Monahan, meanwhile, has always preached the long game. In a conversation with The Athletic last August at the Tour Championship, he repeated an idea he’s long said to tour players: “Things are not won in soundbites. Things are not in individual moves. You win over the long haul. You win by keeping people inspired, learning every step of the way, and understand you don’t have every answer.”
Many were trying to square words like that with what was said Tuesday.
Late in the day, Monahan addressed tour players during a contentious meeting at the Canadian Open. One agent with multiple players in the room described there being “varying degrees of confusion and anger and sadness.” The anger was directed at Monahan, squarely. Tour players declined lucrative offers from LIV Golf while being sold on the ideals of loyalty to the PGA Tour. It’s unclear if those individuals will be compensated in any way. Many in the room were most angry by the idea of defectors to LIV being granted reentry to the tour, something Monahan previously vowed to never allow.
“It probably didn’t seem this way to them, but as I looked to our players, those players that have been loyal to the PGA Tour, I’m confident that the move that they’ve made the right decision,” Monahan said to reporters after the players meeting. “They’ve helped rearchitect the future of the PGA Tour. They’ve moved us to a more pro-competitive model.”
Players in the closed meeting were told the tour is receiving upwards of $2-3 billion, all litigation ending and LIV likely going away, according to an industry source briefed on the matter and granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
While some inside the tour spoke Tuesday of a measure of survival, others wondered if the tour’s deal with the Public Investment Fund is, in fact, the opposite. A move of aggression, not desperation. With billions of new dollars flowing in, the tour is now in a position to grow and perhaps become an even more centralized force in golf, whether that’s by acquiring an entity like the PGA of America (and full control of the Ryder Cup) or the LPGA Tour. In its previous financial state, such ideas were an impossibility.
Was this the play or a forced hand?
Was this done out of fear? Fear of the tour having to open up its books in the discovery process in the courts? Fear of financial instability? Fear of what was coming next?
Or was it an act of survival? Why fight a rival when you can take its funding?
Or was it simply the oldest love story there is? How the rich get richer.
The reality is that, no matter what Monahan says, this is a different PGA Tour. There’s no turning back from this. Al-Rumayyan will join the PGA Tour Policy Board and has already stated that more billions of investment will be available. No one will say no to that money. The players will get paid, maybe even get a taste of revenue sharing — make more and more. In time, the more the PIF invests, the more it will control. In more time, leadership will change, board seats will change. More control. Eventually, this will be what the Public Investment Fund wants.
A natural question in the aftermath of all this has been what will become of LIV.
The question feels irrelevant because what’s the difference anymore?
The PGA Tour, after a seven-week dalliance, has become something else. Something it once desperately wanted not to be.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: Cliff Hawkins and Craig Mercer / Getty Images)
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Brendan Quinn covers college basketball and golf for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from MLive Media Group, where he covered Michigan and Michigan State basketball. Prior to that, he covered Tennessee basketball for the Knoxville News Sentinel. Follow Brendan on Twitter @BFQuinn
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Coop ..
· Jun 7
It is the PIF that is playing the long game. Everyone else is just a pig at the trough.
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Chuck M.
· Jun 7
Monahan is one arrogant prick but a helluva lot richer arrogant prick today
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Kurt W.
· Jun 7
To have a 180 of this magnitude screams that Jay knew that he was fighting a losing battle.
Did they want to show their books? Did they want to justify that this wasn’t an anti-competitive monopoly? Did they want to fight multiple legal fronts?
But be very very clear, this would have NEVER EVER have happened had Jay just been opening minded enough to take the damn meeting 3 years ago. To not even meet them, to not even discuss a possible landscape where they could co-exist was the highest form of arrogance.
And that lack of foresight and surplus of ego has been rewarded with him being appointed the most powerful position in golf…. You couldn’t make it up.
As for the LIV players rejoining the PGA/DP tours again… It’s amazing how billions of dollars can make the words “Lifetime Ban” quickly become “Welcome back Man!”
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