The money wins again in PGA Tour, LIV golf deal

The mind races at the locker room conversations, the texts from Phil Mickleson, pictured, to his fellow LIV defectors, writes Jason Gay. Who feels smart now? Picture: Getty Images

Money wins.

It’s a pithy line from magnate Logan Roy in the media opera Succession, and it’s never been more apt in the business of sports than it is today, as the PGA Tour announces a merger with LIV, a Saudi-funded rival it condemned as an existential threat to golf.

The money has won. The PGA Tour spent the better part of a year trying to convince the planet that it held some kind of high ground – asking for loyalty from its players and arguing that joining LIV was tantamount to “sports-washing” the grim human rights record of its sponsor.

It couldn’t offer the eight and nine-figure guarantees that LIV was paying, so it played to golf’s conscience, whatever that was supposed to be.

Now it’s over. The PGA Tour and LIV will live under one flag, chaired by Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the Governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund.

PGA Tour boss Jay Monahan – who had led the charge against LIV, calling it “a foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in an attempt to buy the game” – will be CEO of the new entity. The Europe-based DP Tour is also part of the deal.

Shorter version: After condemning players for taking the money, the PGA Tour has … taken the money.

The public, meanwhile, will be asked to forget that the past year ever happened. Golf’s conscience has driven straight off the high road and is doing doughnuts in the club parking lot. You’re going to hear the word “hypocrisy” so much in the coming weeks you’re going to want to banish it like a belly putter.

Are the PGA Tour leaders a bunch of hypocrites for leading us to believe their battle was a righteous cause – going so far as to expel LIV defectors from PGA Tour events – only to turn around and make a deal?

The PGA Tour was happy to be portrayed as if it was in some sort of principled battle versus a golf Darth Vader. Was it Darth versus Darth all along?

Or was the PGA Tour’s righteousness nothing but strategy, a ploy to puff out its chest and make itself fearsome to a competitor with the financial power to grind it down to dust?

Better still, was the hypocrisy right there from the beginning – the idea that a business like the PGA Tour could draw any kind of moral line about where the money comes from?

LIV was hardly the first business to seek Saudi investment – a lot of companies doing business there had long been affiliated with golf, including professional golf itself.

Duller, practical considerations were surely a factor. The PGA Tour and LIV were in the thick of antitrust litigation and this deal eliminates an extended, expensive court battle.

It’s hard not to see this as a rabble-rousing victory for LIV, and in particular Greg Norman, its much-maligned founding father. LIV built a noisy product – no cut-tournaments, fireworks, teams (Fireballs! Crushers!) – and in the space of barely a year, used its financial strength to force the PGA Tour to revise its competitive calendar and compensation scale. Now it’s stepping aboard the yacht as an equal.

The PGA Tour was happy to run out Rory McIlroy star as a spokesperson for its alleged virtuosity. Picture: Getty Images

And how about those LIV golfers who took that money, and now get to return to the fold – and presumably the world rankings – bank accounts still fattened. The mind races at the locker room conversations, the texts from Phil Mickleson to his fellow LIV defectors. Who feels smart now?

What about the CW, LIV’s television partner? They must be doing cartwheels in the control room. Crushers visors for everyone!

On the other side, there will be fury from those who came forward during the LIV saga to remind the public of those alleged Saudi human-rights abuses as well as its implicated involvement in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Surely they feel used.

What of Rory McIlroy? The PGA Tour was happy to run out its telegenic star as a spokesperson for its alleged virtuosity, expressing solidarity with the sport’s dusty traditions and questioning the motives of colleagues who fled for all that LIV dough.

What about any other golfer courted by LIV who bought the PGA Tour’s protest about loyalty and tradition, and chose to shun the money and stay? How can they possibly take the governing body seriously anymore?

Cynicism, of course, is the default position for many aspects of professional sports. This one is going down like a double stack of cynicism on cynicism, a bracing jolt of reality for anyone who thought this dispute was about anything more elevated than the bottom line.

In the coming days we will learn of more winners, losers and raw feelings. It’s an old lesson that gets repeated again and again in sports and business, but still deserves an occasional reminder.

The money has won, because it almost always does.

The Wall Street Journal