The Year That Golf Battled for Its Soul
The PGA and LIV Golf squared off against each other all year, and the intrigue is far from over.
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Business News/ Special Report / The Year That Golf Battled for Its Soul
The 2021 professional golf season was the last one conducted before the arrival of LIV Golf. At the end of the year, one golf website held a reader poll on the biggest stories the game had faced. No. 1 was Tiger Woods’s car crash, no surprise, but No. 2 was nothing more mundane than the USGA’s revised mandate that drivers couldn’t exceed 46 inches, rather than the old 48 inches.
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Ah, simpler times.
By 2023, professional golf was aflame with bickering, betrayal and backroom deals cut by a cabal of all-powerful boardroom warriors, as well as Senate hearings and other unpleasantness that spilled onto the business page and then the front page. Money, not birdies, seemed to be the only thing that mattered. LIV Golf had belligerently launched in June 2022, but it wasn’t until 2023 that the shock waves were fully felt.
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Between the ropes, pro golf’s product actually improved in 2023. To fend off the LIV threat, the PGA Tour started its splashy new “designated" events, enticing the top players with $20 million purses; previously, the Tour average was less than half of that. These eight tournaments featured a series of shootouts among brand-name players, and the TV ratings spiked accordingly.
(Of course, many B-list tournaments suffered, as the stars consolidated their schedules around the designated events, part of the new class warfare on the Tour between the haves and the have-mores; the entire organization began catering to a small group of top players who were setting policy for a couple of hundred members.)
LIV also began to slowly find its footing, as the tournaments in Australia and Singapore drew large crowds and enthusiastic media coverage. The strong play of LIV golfers in the major championships—notably Phil Mickelson’s run at Augusta and Brooks Koepka prevailing at the PGA Championship—gave the upstart league a much-needed shot of credibility.
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From greens to courtrooms
But the larger story played out off the course, as the rival tours battled for the soul of golf in front of judges and in the court of public opinion. With the PGA Tour’s legal fees running deep into eight figures, and corporate partners pushing back on the spiraling cost of sponsoring a tournament, commissioner Jay Monahan reluctantly sought an armistice in the weeks after the Masters. He had spent the previous year demonizing LIV’s benefactors—the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia—and besmirching its seemingly endless supply of money. It was an emotion-based strategy that worked in the short term, helping to slow the high-profile defections from the Tour.
But in secret meetings from Venice to San Francisco, Monahan and his most trusted board members (private-equity star Jimmy Dunne and high-powered attorney Ed Herlihy) tried to co-opt the Saudi money for the Tour. They were negotiating with a powerful presence: Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the PIF and the chairman of Aramco. Al-Rumayyan was quickly becoming one of the most influential figures in global sports. (As chairman of Newcastle United, he helped oversee a turnaround of the proud English soccer club, and Al-Rumayyan is said to have exerted plenty of soft power in helping Saudi Arabia land the 2034 World Cup.)
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On June 6, in a joint TV appearance, Monahan and Al-Rumayyan stunned the sports world by announcing that the war was over. They had collaborated on what would billed as a merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf but was really a new entity to be created by the PIF, the Tour and its counterpart in Europe, the DP World Tour. This framework agreement would reshape the professional game. Monahan’s blindsided players were furious and congressional scrutiny began almost immediately.
“It think it’s a really serious thing to have a foreign dictatorship in charge of a major U.S. sports league," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.). “This is watershed moment and I think we need to treat it as such." For the PGA Tour, the most important part of the armistice was getting the dueling lawsuits dismissed “with prejudice" (meaning they can’t be refiled).
The fallout dominated the second half of the golf season. Monahan’s reputation cratered, owing to the duplicity of the negotiations; Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) was among those calling for his resignation. (Monahan took a monthlong leave after a stress-related health scare.) Tour board member Randall Stephenson, the former CEO of AT&T, resigned in protest and a disillusioned Rory McIlroy later did so as well.
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Despite the collateral damage, Monahan was committed to boldly reshaping the structure of the Tour from an outdated 501(c)(3) to a modern for-profit entity that could siphon billions of dollars of the institutional investor money that is flowing into professional sports.
As it became clear that the framework agreement was merely aspirational and not binding, moneyed interests from Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood maneuvered to get in on the deal. The Tour is seeking billions of dollars in investment, and all these new bidders could come in alongside the PIF—or push out the Saudis entirely.
Dangerous game
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The latter scenario is a dangerous game for Monahan, as the fragile cease-fire would end and a spurned Al-Rumayyan could accelerate his bidding war for top talent. But if the Tour rejects the Saudi money, that would buy back some goodwill from fans and players and make the congressional scrutiny go away. (The Justice Department’s lingering antitrust investigation is another matter.)
The negotiations became more complex in early December when LIV signed reigning Masters champion Jon Rahm to a blockbuster deal. That puts more pressure on Monahan to consummate a deal with the PIF, so old-line events in the U.S. and Europe can have access to the LIV stars. With Rahm in the fold, LIV is now in a stronger position if the negotiations fall apart and the circuits go back to competing against each other.
Meanwhile, the products between the two warring tours will continue to converge. In 2024, the PGA Tour’s designated events will have reduced field sizes and no cut, meaning guaranteed money for the players. Sounds a bit like LIV, no?
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The framework agreement is due to expire on Dec. 31, 2023, but people close to the deal indicate the deadline is likely to get extended into 2024. The 2023 season may have been one of the messiest ever, but the intrigue is far from over.
Alan Shipnuck is a sportswriter whose latest book is “LIV and Let Die: The Inside Story of the War Between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf." He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
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