‘Betrayal from management’: Confusion continues to reign over PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership
Maybe the biggest unanswered question players have about the merger: Why?
LOS ANGELES — Jon Rahm was at home in Scottsdale, Ariz., making breakfast and taking care of his two young sons last Tuesday morning when he heard his phone buzz.
Then it buzzed again.
And again.
That deluge of texts from friends and colleagues was how the world’s second-ranked golfer learned his sport was about to undergo seismic change. The rest of the golf world discovered at the same time Rahm did that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf had sheathed their swords and laid the groundwork for an unlikely partnership.
Rahm said that he received so many messages that morning that he feared his phone “was going to catch on fire.” At one point, he remembers telling his wife Kelley, “I'm just going to throw my phone in the drawer and not look at it for the next four hours because I can't deal with this anymore.”
It wasn’t just Rahm who was kept in the dark when PGA Tour officials began negotiating in secrecy with the Saudi-backed breakaway LIV Golf circuit. The surprise alliance blindsided top players who accepted vast sums of money to join LIV Golf and those who turned down lucrative offers out of loyalty to the PGA Tour and ethical concerns about Saudi Arabia’s history of human rights violations.
Brooks Koepka was sitting at the bar at an exclusive Florida golf club having breakfast last Tuesday when the news came across the television. Collin Morikawa sarcastically tweeted minutes after Tuesday’s announcement, “I love finding out morning news on Twitter.” Even Rory McIlroy, the staunchest and most outspoken PGA Tour loyalist, said he only received a phone call from a PGA Tour official a few hours ahead of time.
A week removed from last Tuesday’s bombshell announcement, confusion continues to reign as players prepare for this week’s U.S. Open at the Los Angeles Country Club. The world’s best men’s golfers say they have many more questions than answers regarding how the PGA Tour and LIV Golf will coexist going forward and what the format will be.
In his pre-U.S. Open news conference, reigning champion Matthew Fitzpatrick said Monday, “I don't know what's going on. I don't think anyone knows what's going on.” Tuesday, Rahm echoed that talking point, admitting, “We're certainly in a spot in time where there's a big question mark, where we don't have the answers we would like.
“I think it gets to a point where you want to have faith in management, and I want to have faith that this is the best thing for all of us, but it's clear that's not the consensus,” Rahm added. “I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management.”
The union between the PGA and LIV Golf stunned golfers on both sides because the sport had splintered like never before.
In 2021, an upstart Saudi-backed circuit installed Greg Norman as CEO and began trying to lure some of golf’s best-known stars with the promise of massive guaranteed contracts and unprecedented prize money. LIV Golf successfully poached from the PGA the likes of Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and several other major champions.
In response, the PGA increased the prize money available to its players while simultaneously banning golfers who participated in LIV Golf events. Eleven LIV golfers filed an antitrust lawsuit in August accusing the PGA Tour of imposing unfair restrictions to preserve its monopoly. The PGA then countersued, arguing that LIV Golf had improperly encouraged players to violate the terms of their existing contracts.
It was a full-blown golf civil war until both sides abruptly declared a ceasefire. To the disbelief of many golf enthusiasts, PGA commissioner Jay Monahan sat side-by-side on a CNBC set last Tuesday with Yasir Al Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. After a year of high-stakes wrangling and long-distance accusations, the PGA commissioner and Al Rumayyan said that they had talked and came to the realization they could best achieve both their objectives by coming together.
If antitrust laws don’t kill the merger, Monahan would continue to oversee the PGA Tour and Al Rumayyan would serve as chairman of the board. Al Rumayyan offered few specifics about what he would do in his new role aside from trying to grow the game of golf and holding the purse strings.
“The way we’re doing our partnership,” Al-Rumayyan said, “it’s going to be really big.”
Since then, top PGA Tour and LIV Golf players have been left waiting for answers along with the rest of the golf community. Will LIV endure as a standalone entity beyond this year? Will that be in an individual or team format or both? Will PGA tour players who turned down lucrative LIV contracts be compensated in some way? Will players who defected to LIV be allowed to play PGA Tour events without any penalty?
To Morikawa, the biggest unanswered question is simply, “Why?”
“We always want to know that why answer,” Morikawa said. “Like, what's the purpose behind it? But I think there's so many different parties involved that there's too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella of the why. I think what you've seen from the players versus what you've seen from maybe our commissioner versus the board versus Yasir versus LIV — there's a lot of parties involved. Everyone has had a kind of different answer.”
As many of his peers privately grumble about missed paydays or unanswered questions, Rahm approaches the PGA Tour-LIV Golf turf war with a different perspective. The two-time major champion is grateful that no matter how this turns out, he and other top players will emerge just fine.
“I'm in a very high state of privilege in this world,” Rahm said. “I can do what I want. I can do what I love for a living. I have a blast every single day even though I get mad on the golf course every once in a while. When I start with that point of view, no matter what happens, I can only be thankful for what's going on.”
