PGA TOUR, PIF, LIV & ALL THAT
LIV Golf appears safe for 2024, and, according to ever-bullish CEO and commissioner Greg Norman, its players are signing two-, five-, even mighty seven-year contracts, so assured are they of their futures in the breakaway, 54-hole and ever-newsworthy professional golf league. It would take an entire feature story to work out what LIV Golf will look like from ’25 and beyond (and ours on page 32 has some mail therein).
As to what a ‘merger’, ‘partnership’ or, ahem, ‘strategic alignment’ will look like between the PGA Tour and the near-trillion-dollar chunk of change Saudi Arabia calls the ‘Public Investment Fund’, and what that means for LIV Golf only time, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan will tell. And they aren’t telling. Al-Rumayyan answers only to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud. And Monahan’s lips will sink no ships. He talks a lot of corporate spin anyway.
We know this: Monahan’s power within the PGA Tour – the members of which reminded him it’s an association for professional golfers – has withered since his captain’s call to get in bed with Al-Rumayyan, who, according to documents released ahead of hearings by the U.S Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (which sounds quite important), wanted membership of the R&A and Augusta National as part of any merger, partnership or alignment between the PIF and the governing body of touring golfers in America.
It was also revealed Monahan, as chief of the third party ‘NewCo’, would have the power to make an “empirical evaluation” of LIV Golf and decide upon its future. But let’s call bullshit. LIV Golf will live and die on the say-so of the masters of that
