PGA Tour-LIV golf merger shocks players, sponsors and fans

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One of the oldest and most tradition-bound sports was thrown into chaos on Tuesday after the Professional Golf Association Tour announced it would merge with LIV Golf, a one-year-old interloper backed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. LIV had disrupted the sport by luring away some of the world’s top male players with eye-popping paydays in a multibillion-dollar sportswashing effort.

The bombshell caught the golf world’s players, executives, sponsors and fans by surprise, after more than a year of heated rhetoric, antitrust allegations and escalating lawsuits that were threatening the PGA Tour’s operations. Reporters covering the White House asked about the agreement during an afternoon news conference, highlighting the ugly geopolitics clawing away at the sport.

The deal, struck after seven weeks of secret talks between the PGA Tour and LIV, creates a framework agreement that has so many unresolved details that the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, admitted in a late afternoon news conference that he could not say whether a LIV Tour might still exist in a year.

He also acknowledged that he didn’t know whether there might be a way back to the Tour for the high-profile defectors who signed on to LIV with the promise of eight- and sometimes nine-figure guaranteed salaries.

”The binding element to it is the drop of the litigation,” said Mr. Monahan, of the agreement, underscoring how significant a threat the lawsuits had become.

Under the terms of the agreement, the not-for-profit PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, which runs the PGA European Tour, would merge with LIV into a for-profit entity. Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund (PIF), will become chair of the new enterprise, with Mr. Monahan serving as chief executive. The PIF will invest an undisclosed sum, and will have the right of first refusal on all future investments.

LIV had disrupted the golf world’s genteel ways by enticing some of its top talents with massive signing bonuses and promises of riches regardless of how the golfers performed, including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Talor Gooch, Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau. Teams of four competed in three-day, rapid-fire 54-hole tournaments that promised barnstorming excitement.

LIV’s promise failed to materialize: Its media deals were thin (in Canada, its tournaments are broadcast on the little-seen GameTV cable channel), and crowds remained sparse. But its maneuverings created dissension among PGA players, who began asking why the purses they were playing for were so comparatively small. And the move was widely seen as another triumph for Saudi efforts, along with other expensive investments in the world of sports, to rebrand its reputation as a thuggish, anti-democratic regime.

Putting the PGA Tour further on its back heel, the United States Department of Justice began an antitrust investigation of the organization. That action is said to be unaffected by the agreement with LIV.

The shocking development threatened to overshadow this weekend’s RBC Canadian Open at the Toronto-area Oakdale Golf and Country Club after last year’s edition – the first in three years to take place without pandemic restrictions – had teed off during LIV’s inaugural weekend event.

Laurence Applebaum, the CEO of Golf Canada, which oversees the event, acknowledged to reporters during a news conference that he was “learning in real time along with all of you” about the agreement.

He could not say what effect the agreement might have on future Canadian Open tournaments, including their timing or other elements. “I’m not dealing with complete information, so it would be unfair for me to comment,” he told The Globe and Mail. “I’m going to learn more in the coming days and weeks.”

The swirl of uncertainty pulled in the British golfer Matt Fitzpatrick, who had suggested earlier this year that former colleagues who had defected to the LIV Tour should be banned from the PGA circuit. Mr. Fitzpatrick chose to avoid his scheduled press availability on Tuesday.

Asked during a separate press availability whether there were moral issues with the PGA Tour accepting Saudi backing, Canadian golfer Mike Weir said: “Right now, there’s so many things up in the air, I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought much about that.”

The deal is a stunning turnaround for a sport known for its blue-blood lineage and restraint.

And it marks an embarrassing climbdown for Mr. Monahan, who last year invoked the Sept. 11 attacks in criticizing the golfers who were then choosing to join LIV. “I would ask any player that’s left, or any player that would consider leaving: ‘Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?’ ” he said pointedly during an interview on CBS. Asked how significant the source of LIV’s funding is, Mr. Monahan replied, “It’s not an issue for me, because I don’t work for the Saudi Arabian government.”

On Tuesday, he acknowledged the pivot will leave many critics upset.

“I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” he said during an afternoon news conference. “Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment, and I said it based on someone that’s trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms. But circumstances do change.”

On Tuesday, some families of those killed on Sept. 11 decried Mr. Monahan’s change of heart.

The White House declined to weigh in on the announcement. But the former U.S. president Donald Trump, who will play host to two of this year’s LIV tournaments at his Bedminster and Doral golf courses, proclaimed the merger to be “a big, beautiful, and glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.” (The message, on social media, was written in all-caps.)

Mr. Monahan acknowledged that a 90-minute closed-door meeting with players that had preceded the news conference in the Oakdale clubhouse was “intense, certainly heated.”

“This is an awful lot to ask them to digest, and this is a significant change for us in the direction that we were going down,” he added.