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A year ago, the head of the US PGA Tour Jay Monahan was blasting breakaway Saudi Arabia-funded rival LIV for “trying to buy the game of golf” and citing 9/11 as he lauded players loyal to the American circuit for avoiding “moral ambiguity”.
Now the rupture that threatened the global game appears to have healed after a stunning reversal in which LIV, the PGA Tour and the Europe-based DP World Tour moved to come together under a single umbrella that is set to be showered with billions of dollars of Saudi wealth.
The shock deal — golfers and key institutions on all sides were kept in the dark until the eleventh hour — has left observers wondering how the game’s bitterly warring factions can patch up their differences — and what the consequences will be within the sport and beyond.
“This is the march of globalisation,” said Bradley Klein, a golf historian and course architect critic. “Global capital has extended itself to include professional golf and we are seeing a vortex of a massive capital infusion and events that are going to be staged on a global scale.”
Negotiations with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, were driven by Jimmy Dunne, a Wall Street dealmaker and president of Palm Beach’s ultra-exclusive Seminole Golf Club, and Ed Herlihy, a fellow member of the PGA Tour policy board and lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton.
Dunne called Rumayyan earlier this year and the sides agreed to meet.
“We spent like, two days in London, and we played, of course, a round of golf,” Rumayyan told the Financial Times. “And, should I disclose . . . he lost.”
The combination was then discreetly hashed out in meetings around the world — most recently in San Francisco last week — between emissaries of the tour including Dunne, Herlihy and occasionally Monahan, and those of the PIF including Wall Street rainmaker Michael Klein, British financier Amanda Staveley and Rumayyan.
One person close to the negotiations said the focus had quickly shifted from a narrow legal settlement between the Saudis and the PGA Tour to a more ambitious commercial arrangement that would create a global golf empire.
Dunne, an accomplished amateur golfer and member at several exclusive clubs, is one of the game’s biggest power brokers and counts as close friends top professionals including Rory McIlroy, the Northern Irish star who has been a figurehead of opposition to LIV.
But after a rift that drew in 9/11 victim groups who were outraged at what they regarded as “sportswashing” by a nation from which many of the al-Qaeda attackers hailed, some expressed surprise at the move by a banker who lost dozens of colleagues at his firm Sandler O’Neill in the atrocity.
“Dunne’s partners were slaughtered on 9/11. He was out playing golf,” said another investment banker who is active in the game. “Given the history, it’s remarkable that he’d go in a room with these guys”.
While the PGA and LIV tours have publicly postured that they were comfortable with the gulf in the game, legal action launched during the year-long feud made clear their mutual contempt.
In a federal antitrust lawsuit filed last year by rebel LIV players who had been banned by the PGA Tour, LIV claimed the US group’s “monopoly power has . . . allowed it to preside over the demise of golf itself, by its failure to innovate and broaden the game’s appeal and bring the game into the 21st century”.
The PGA Tour wrote in a countersuit that LIV had “executed a campaign to pay the LIV players astronomical sums of money to induce them to breach their contracts with the Tour in an effort to use the LIV players and the game of golf to sportswash the recent history of Saudi atrocities and to further PIF’s Vision 2030 initiatives”.
But cracks in each side’s strategy were beginning to show. LIV was unable to land a significant network television contract in the US. And its tour, with small fields of contestants and shortened tournaments, failed to secure official ranking points for its players, leaving many LIV golfers with dwindling or no access to the four major tournaments regarded as the pinnacle of the game that are hosted by other governing bodies.
PGA Tour members, meanwhile, were concerned about its ability to continue attracting strong fields and sponsors across its full tournament schedule. And while Monahan argued that the PGA Tour remained the most rigorous test of golf, LIV rebel Brooks Koepka was runner-up and champion respectively in The Masters and the PGA Championship, the first two major tournaments of this year.
“It was inevitable,” said one longtime US golf insider and businessman. “The PGA Tour players want the kind of money that LIV was tossing around. Once they saw how beloved Koepka remained at The Masters and then a few weeks ago when he won the PGA, it was all over.”
One person involved in the civil legal dispute said the litigation was probably what prodded the sides into settling their quarrel.
The federal court said Rumayyan could not claim “sovereign immunity” — a legal principle intended to keep foreign governments out of nuisance court fights — to dodge depositions requested by the PGA Tour. The precedent of Saudi officials sitting for depositions could have altered the kingdom’s broader ability to do business in America.
The US tour, meanwhile, needed its remaining players to fund a battle that had no clear end in sight.
“The PGA Tour was facing a legal fight that could, with all of the appeals, go on for years,” said the person involved in the dispute, adding: “This has been and would continue to be financially draining. So now they get to stop paying their litigation lawyers.”
While the shape of men’s golf remains to be decided, Saudi Arabia is at the wheel even as the PGA Tour says it will keep operating control of its tournaments and the board of the so far unnamed umbrella organisation.
PIF will be an anchor investor in the umbrella organisation, with a minority stake of as much as 49 per cent accompanied by the right to invest more capital and block new potential investors.
Monahan, who will be chief executive of the new umbrella group with Rumayyan as chair, is facing accusations of hypocrisy by those most vehemently opposed to the LIV Tour.
“It’s appalling to wake up and see this news today,” said Terry Strada, chair of 9/11 Families United. “This is a betrayal. Jay Monahan is just a sellout.”
Other human rights activists also lambasted the deal.
“This is the worst face of sportwashing” tweeted Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
But there was a sense of resignation among golfers who had previously resisted the riches of the breakaway tour.
“I still hate LIV,” McIlroy said on Wednesday. But he conceded that the merger “ultimately is going to be good for the game of golf”.
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