When the Gulf Swallows Golf
The PGA Tour-LIV merger came as a shock — sort of.
Dear readers,
The blockbuster news in sports this week was the shocking merger between the PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV golf, which took the international golfing world by surprise. Since the two of us are pretty far removed from that world, we invited friend-of-the-newsletter Jake May — a die-hard golf fan — to weigh in on the news. No surprise, he delivered a fantastic piece that’s below.
Jake is also the co-host of Track Club, a podcast about pop culture, entertainment and Formula 1, with our friend Khalil Flemming. One of us has already been on a Track Club episode, so it’s only right for Jake to appear now in Southpaw!
Happy reading.
-Calder and Ian
One of the most ubiquitous segments in sports commentary is the “Winners and Losers” discussion: Who won or lost a trade? Who won the NFL draft? So when the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) announced a “landmark agreement to unify the game of golf, on a global basis,” the sports media world did its thing — who won the deal, and who lost?
Most commentators who weighed in on the momentous deal seemed unaware of its actual details, but in their defense, Tuesday’s announcement was extremely vague. The gist of it is this: the PGA Tour (and its “strategic ally,” the DP World Tour) will remain a nonprofit organization, but the PIF (which finances LIV Golf) will spin off a new for-profit company that will control both the PGA Tour’s and LIV Golf’s “commercial businesses and rights.” Per the framework announced this week, PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan will become the chairman of the Board of Directors of the new company, which will also include current PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan as CEO, investment banker Jimmy Dunne (a PGA Tour board member), and corporate lawyer Ed Herlihy (PGA Tour policy board chairman).
The press release also included a nebulous description of how the PIF money will fit in: “PIF will make a capital investment into the new entity to facilitate its growth and success. The new entity (name TBD) will implement a plan to grow these combined commercial businesses, drive greater fan engagement and accelerate growth initiatives already underway.”
In the days since the announcement, more details have come to light. Dunne attempted to clarify several aspects of the deal in an interview with Sports Illustrated, noting that Jay Monahan, in his capacity as CEO of the new company, will now oversee LIV golf while retaining his role as commissioner of the PGA Tour. According to Dunne, Monahan has told Al-Rumayyan that LIV will be “evaluated” at the end of this year, and “if Monahan wants to disband LIV, he can.” In other words, the PGA Tour and LIV might continue as separate tours controlled by the same company, or, as seems more likely, the parent company might just re-integrate them into one thing.
So the details are scant. But the only winner, in our book, is clearly the Saudis.
Since its founding in 2021, LIV Golf (and by extension, the PIF) has been publicly at odds with the PGA Tour. In order to draw high-profile names away from the already cushy Tour, the upstart league offered individual golfers outrageous sums of money, with some contracts reportedly worth as much as $200 million. As an added perk, they beefed up prize pools in their events, awarding purses of $20 million to a field of just 48 players.
But the real power players behind LIV — the Saudis, led by Al-Rumayyan — had their eyes on something else: a seat at the table in the world of men’s professional golf and another opportunity to use global sport to cleanse Saudi Arabia’s image abroad. It’s called “sportswashing.”
In response to the LIV’s maneuvering, the PGA Tour banned all players who switched to LIV from playing in Tour events. A group of LIV players then sued the Tour on antitrust grounds; the Tour filed a countersuit and waged a PR war against LIV, calling out the Saudis for their involvement in 9/11 and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as well as asking PGA-loyal players to bash their counterparts.
But now, PGA Tour executives — specifically Monahan, Dunne, and Herlihy — have gone into business with the Saudis, accepting an infusion of the very same cash that they previously insisted was beyond the pale. By all accounts, the “merger” was a highly confidential, four-man project: Monahan, Dunne, and Herlihy on one side and Al-Rumayyan on the other. The announcement was a shock to both PGA Tour and LIV players — but it was also a completely unsurprising admission that the PGA’s moralizing about Saudi human rights abuses amounted, at the end of the day, to a whole lot of bullshit.
These PGA Tour executives will have you believe that they are big winners in this deal, and in one sense, that may be true. By partnering with the PIF and bringing LIV under the control of PGA Tour leadership, the Tour has “taken[n] a competitor off the board,” as Monahan himself put it. Additionally, the agreement settles all ongoing legal disputes, which saves the PGA Tour from having to shell out more money in legal fees and undergo a lengthy discovery process that would likely have turned up less-than-flattering details.
The partnership with the PIF will also give the PGA Tour access to a gigantic pot of Saudi money that it can use to improve its product, retain top-tier talent — and keep said talent happy with more prize money — and possibly decrease the commercial load during broadcasts to placate fans. The executives behind the deal are likely betting that once they implement these changes, fans and players will forget about where the money is coming from because they’ll be busy enjoying an improved golf product.
This gamble may, sadly, pay off for them. In the past year, the noise around LIV’s connection to the Saudis had already begun to die down. When LIV player Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship in May, for instance, he downplayed his connection to LIV, and the golf world seemed content to celebrate him for winning after a difficult knee injury instead of calling him out for taking money from a murderous regime. For better or worse, things were beginning to feel “normal” again, and in a year or two, it seems likely that most golf fans will fall back on the “inevitability” of Saudi money and continue to engage with the sport without a second thought, just as soccer fans, F1 fans, and cricket fans around the world have learned to do. After all, where else are fans supposed to go to watch golf?
Yet it is precisely this feeling of inevitability that lays bare how much the Saudi Arabian government is the real and only winner of this situation. For Al-Rumayyan, the PIF, and the Saudi regime, controlling international golf has never been about changing the game. It has always been about gaining legitimacy in Western sports while adding to the state’s already well-lined coffers. The precedent has now been set: even if a sports league spends years and millions of dollars fighting a hostile takeover — and even if they center human rights abuses as part of their reasoning against doing business — it doesn’t really matter. If the number of zeroes in the offer is right, they’ll eventually give in.
The PGA Tour’s “wins” are all related to things they now won’t have to do. They won’t have to pay exorbitant legal fees. They won’t have to beg sponsors to pony up for bigger purses. They won’t have to deal with the threat of LIV poaching their players or stealing their market share. Meanwhile, the Saudis’ wins are all things they will have. Sure, LIV in its current form may cease to exist, but LIV never actually mattered to the Saudis. What they will have is Al-Rumayyan as chairman of a new and powerful for-profit entity that effectively controls all of international golf. They will have a seat on the PGA Tour policy board. (Al-Rumayyan will have that too, by the way). Most importantly, they will have demonstrated a winning strategy for barnstorming Western sports: create a bunch of headaches for league executives, and then drown them in cash.
Where does this lead? Will the Saudis angle for ownership of a Big Four American sports team, as they’ve done in the Premier League? Many commentators are saying that the current owners in those leagues would never allow that to happen. But most of those commentators also said that a deal between the PGA Tour and LIV would never happen, so it certainly can’t be ruled out.
In the meantime, the future of the PGA-LIV merger is far from certain. In the days since the announcement, some commentators have argued that the deal could be struck down on antitrust grounds. But even if that happens, the Saudis remain the big winners. If the deal is struck down, the PGA leadership will be left with a gaping hole in their budget and a player base that distrusts them more than ever. Moreover, the public will know for certain what many suspected all along: that the PGA’s “moral concerns” about Saudi human rights abuses were a business tactic designed to crush the LIV and protect their control over golf. If the deal gets nixed, the Saudis may not get the seat at the table that they so desperately want, but they will have a clear path to that seat. They will have shown the sporting world that, sooner or later, they will get what they want, and that there may be no way of stopping them.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the man behind the merger? “The rise of Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the potential new king of golf,” by Adam Kilgore, Rick Maese and Ben Strauss in The Washington Post (June 9, 2023).
. . . Saudi influence in soccer? “The Players Are the Trophies Now,” by Rory Smith in The New York Times (June 9, 2023).
. . . Big Brother at the 2024 Olympics? “Get Ready for AI Surveillance at the 2024 Paris Olympics,” by Dave Zirin and Jules Boykoff in The Nation (June 6, 2023).
. . . more fallout from MLB’s Pride Wars? "Anthony Bass, pitcher who shared homophobic video, cut before Jays’ Pride celebration,” by Chelsea Janes in The Washington Post (June 9, 2023).
 | A guest post by
|