THIS IS THE thing with Donald Trump: there’s always a tweet.
(Or, if you happen to be banned from Twitter for inciting an attempted coup: there’s always a tweet’s equivalent on Truth Social.)
This, from July last year.
“All of those golfers that remain ‘loyal’ to the very disloyal PGA will pay a big price when the inevitable merger with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big ‘thank you’ from PGA officials.”
And lo it has come to pass. Trump’s dark heart has given him a capacity to identify and exploit cynicism so awesome that it made him president, so if he is correctly predicting the strategic direction of an organisation, then it’s fair to say said organisation is as empty inside as he is.
Today’s announcement of a merger between the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Tour was a bombshell in the truest sense of the word: it landed and in an instant blew away the battle lines so painfully, vexatiously drawn across almost two years of tumult.
Nobody saw it coming. Not the players, not other executives, not the best-connected journalists. Collin Morikawa tweeted, “I love finding out morning news on Twitter.” LIV CEO Greg Norman was told about it a moment before it was announced on CNBC. Journalist Alan Shipnuck only yesterday tweeted that he had just completed the final draft of his upcoming book about the LIV split.
Today’s news fills the Succession-shaped niche of drama made out of corporate structure: the story is largely defined by what we don’t yet know, but here is what we do know.
LIV and the PGA Tour have been at war for more than a year, with the PGA Tour and DP World – née European – Tour disbarring any members who went to play with LIV. Players and organisations slung insults at each other through the press but of most consequence in the dispute was an antitrust suit launched by LIV against the PGA Tour. That litigation has been brought to an abrupt end with today’s announcement that the three tours would now come together as one organisation.
We don’t even know what this new entity will be called yet, but we do know is that PIF will invest in it and have first dibs on all future investment, so their influence will not wane without their wanting it to. The governor of PIF, Yasir Al-Rumayyan – who is also the chairman of Newcastle United and Saudi Aramco - will be the chairman of the new entity, with PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan to be appointed as the CEO.
We also know that the players who signed up from LIV will be given a chance to return to the DP World and PGA Tours, meaning they will be back competing in regular events and will be eligible for future editions of the Ryder Cup.
The statement says the new entity will figure out the best way of promoting team golf, which is sold as LIV’s USP, but we don’t know whether the the LIV tour will continue in its current guise as we don’t know anything about the future schedule.
We also don’t know whether the returning LIV players will have to pay any penalty for having walked away, and we don’t know whether those who stayed with the PGA Tour will be compensated for turning down offers from LIV. (Hideki Matsuyama reportedly left $300 million on the table.)
We don’t know how some of the PGA Tour’s top golfers are feeling today, though it’s fair to say the dial is swinging between betrayal and fury. And we also don’t know how on earth Jay Monahan looks a PGA Tour golfer in the eye from this day forth, because Monahan’s chummy appearance on CNBC with Al-Rumayyan is one of the most shameless about-turns in the history of professional sport.
When LIV were enticing many of Monahan’s best players to LIV, he dismissed the Saudis’ claim on the sport on moral grounds.
A year ago this week, ahead of the Canadian Open, Monahan appeared on CBS and genuinely said this, invoking Saudi Arabia’s proximity to the 9/11 attacks. (15 of the 19 hijackers were from the kingdom, and Saudi Arabia deny any role in the attacks.)
“As it relates to the families of 9/11, I have two families close to me who lost love ones. My heart goes out to them. I would ask any player who has left or would consider leaving: have you ever had to apologise for being a member of the PGA Tour?”
Members of the PGA Tour should apologise for being so naive as to have trusted Monahan. Today he told the Financial Times that he began to trust Al-Rumayyan within 10 minutes of sitting down with him in Venice.
Monahan wasn’t content to be the sole voice of moral outrage in defending his territory from LIV, and was happy to wheel out his best and brightest to take a righteous stand against the Saudis. It was a classic piece of executive delegation: if you don’t have a backbone, find someone who does.
So he turned above all to Rory McIlroy, whose principled stand against the Saudis was still earning him the derision of Phil Mickelson up to last week. In 2020 McIlroy dealt a blow to an earlier vision of Saudi investment by saying he was uncomfortable with the source of the money. Now Monahan has to tell him he has secured exactly that money.
Justifying the merger on CNBC, Monahan genuinely grasped for the “growing the game” line parroted by LIV’s PR team.
“Today the tension goes away”, he said. “The litigation is dropped. On behalf of this game we are coming together. It’s less about how people respond today, all about how people respond in 10 years. There will be a lot more people playing this game all over the world.”
Removing tension is, of course, bullshitspeak for quitting.
It was anticipated that the two separate Tours would eventually come to some kind of settlement, but that it would be an abrupt merger about which none of the players were informed is an absurdity.
It’s a good deal for the PGA Tour in one sense. The merger resolves the Saudi question while flooding its coffers in cash while, in theory at least, retaining PGA Tour control at board level. The Saudis, meanwhile, get to have enormous influence in a major international sport, extending further the tentacles they have already spread to football and formula one. But this one goes beyond a nation state hosting a major competition or buying a team: Saudi Arabia has effectively just bought an entire sport. Today’s merger is a kind of sportswashing watershed.
But beyond that, Monahan has done a deal that has shown that even his greatest players are mere pawns in a callous corporate game.
That his condemnations of Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses and the earnest objections of his players now take on the hue of Monahan’s own negotiating tactics is sick.
In exposing the empty greed at the heart of professional sport, this merger is epochal.
