So, there it is: LIV Golf and the PGA Tour have decided to bury the wedge and merge their professional leagues. In other news, the Israelis woke up yesterday and decided to have a picnic with the Syrians and Iraqis, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden announced they are besties.
What is going on? The LIV and PGA Tour — buddies? Business partners?
Headline you thought you’d never see: “PGA Tour agrees to merge with Saudi-backed LIV.”
It happened.
Remember when Phil Mickelson chose to sign a guaranteed $200 million contract with the new, Saudi-backed golf league, LIV, and he was treated like Aldrich Ames by the media and the PGA Tour?
Remember all those players who passed up eight- and nine-figure offers to remain loyal to the PGA Tour (sorry, Rory)?
Remember all that moralizing from the PGA Tour and its loyalists about taking “dirty” LIV money because the Saudis are among the leaders in the top 25 rankings for human rights abuse?
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Remember all the grumbling that LIV is anti-competition because players are paid a salary instead of strictly relying on prize money?
Remember when the PGA Tour ruled that any player who “participated in an unauthorized tournament (read: LIV) is ineligible to compete in any event sanctioned by the PGA Tour for a period of one year…”?
Remember all that talk about “sportswashing,” the term for countries that use sports to clean up their (bad) image — Look, we play sports, so we must be normal! — as Hitler famously did with the 1936 Olympics?
What happened to all those issues?
Poof. Gone. Nobody cares anymore, or if they do it doesn’t matter.
At this point, we could call PGA Tour officials a lot of things — hypocrite, would be a good start — but it’s unnecessary because they’re doing it for us.
“I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” said PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan. “Anytime I’ve said anything, I’ve said it with the information I’ve had at the moment, and I’ve said it as someone who was trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms, but circumstances do change. Looking at the big picture and looking at it this way, that’s what got us to this point.”
Other than the first sentence, that’s disingenuous. Nothing changed except Monahan realized he couldn’t compete financially with LIV, which is being bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the richest sovereign wealth fund in the world, with estimated assets worth $620 billion. That can buy a lot of golfers and pay for endless legal fees to fight the PGA Tour in court.
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The Wall Street Journal reported that two days after the merger was announced, Monahan told employees, “We cannot compete with a foreign government with unlimited money.” The Journal reported that the tour had already spent $50 million in legal fees and another $100 million to pay for increased prize money and player bonuses in an attempt to compete with LIV. A PGA Tour official told ESPN that the tour had likely spent tens of millions of dollars on legal fees to fight LIV Golf’s antitrust lawsuit as well as an antitrust lawsuit by the US Department of Justice.
So the nearly two-year-old battle to control professional golf is over, for now. This is not an original plot. The PGA Tour and LIV Golf did what the AFL and NFL did decades ago: merge. Ditto for the NBA and ABA. Ditto for the NHL and WHA. And the American League and National League, more than a century ago. It’s an old story.
But many observers felt the same way about the LIV Golf-PGA Tour merger as ESPN’s Scot Van Pelt, who tweeted, “So, you preach loyalty to a tour and convince guys not to take 8- and 9-figure deals based, in part , on that loyalty and, in part, on the source of the money, then those guys find out on Twitter YOU took the very same money?”
LIV Golf got what it wanted. It challenged the PGA Tour’s virtual monopoly of professional golf and won. The real winners are the players, the beneficiaries of the skyrocketing salaries and prize money that the turf was engendered. But the merger left a lot of people confused and angry.
