There’s an argument to be made — and plenty are making it already — that by partnering with the Saudi-controlled Public Investment Fund, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan effectively killed LIV Golf and the existential threat to the sport’s most elite circuit.
Monahan, the newly crowned worst commissioner in professional sports, will try to make this explanation work for him and win the public relations battle. We’re already getting glimpses of it.
“The PIF was controlling LIV, and we were competing against LIV,” Monahan told reporters Tuesday. “I felt very good about the changes we’d made and the position that we’re in, but ultimately to take the competitor off of the board, to have them exist as a partner — not an owner — and for us to be able to control the direction going forward, put us in a position as the PGA Tour to serve our members, and at the same time, get to a productive position for the game at large.”
Similarly, The Athletic’s Brendan Quinn reported some inside the Tour see the move as an act of survival for a PGA hemorrhaging money to keep up with the Saudis both on the golf course and in the court battles. There has also been speculation the PGA Tour wanted to avoid the discovery process in any legal proceedings. That’s not hard to imagine.
There is some merit in these explanations. The PGA Tour could only retain its talent as long as it had the money to do so. Protecting the existence of the a league is the ultimate goal for any commissioners. If that’s the argument Monahan is sticking to, so be it. He still has to go. He cannot run the PGA Tour for another day. He certainly cannot take over as the CEO of the to-be-named for-profit entity that will control the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and DP World Tour.
MORE LIV-PGA MERGER
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Monahan has burned all his credibility, for starters. Players like Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, Tiger Woods and Jon Rahm stood as his human shield while LIV poached players away over the last two years. Monahan told his golfers they were on the right side of history. He invoked the Saudi connection to 9/11 on national television by asking if any PGA player had ever felt the need to apologize for their tour.
Which makes the the fact that only 90 percent of the room called for Monahan’s job the most surprising report to come out of Tuesday’s PGA Tour players-only meeting. But what’s worse is that even by “saving” the PGA Tour from LIV Golf, Monahan himself seems to have lost the plot.
LIV Golf was created to force the PGA Tour to give the Saudis a seat at the table. Forget about the low ratings, inconsistent broadcasts, the ridiculous team format or anything else. The only reason the PIF invested in LIV was because it wanted access to the type of institutional wealth and corporate relationships the PGA was built on.
LIV is most likely going away now. Maybe before 2024. Maybe after. The assurance of a process by which PGA defectors can re-apply to get on Tour all but guarantees it. Doesn’t that seem to signal that the Saudis never cared about the success of their own league? All they needed to do was bleed the Tour until it desperately needed PIF funding.
That day apparently came seven weeks ago when Monahan and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan first met in Italy. They met again in London for lunch and golf a few weeks later. The whole thing was kept completely under wraps from even the most engaged and important stakeholders — a clear sign both of how dire the situation was for the PGA and how carefully Monahan had to move to avoid any Tour member from stopping him.
There is absolutely zero question the PIF that benefits more from that arrangement. For someone who preached the long game here, Monahan sure looks like he took the easiest exit available.
“Things are not won in soundbites,” Monahan told The Athletic last August. Things are not in individual moves. You win over the long haul. You win by keeping people inspired, learning every step of the way, and understand you don’t have every answer.”
Monahan played everyone and achieved a pyrrhic victory unlike any seen in modern sports. He killed LIV Golf, secured guaranteed billions for the sport and turned an enemy into an ally.
All it cost him was credibility, his standing with the players he supposedly represents and the first line of his obituary. The Saudis now own professional golf. It’s their money, their exclusive investment. Who needs a seat at the table when you can just buy the whole conference room?
Monahan must go immediately. He cannot be trusted with the PGA Tour one minute longer.
The only credit he deserves is having the courage to face all the players he betrayed in Tuesday’s meeting, during which multiple players hurled expletives at him while calling out his hypocrisy. At the end of it all, Monahan told reporters he still thinks he did right.
“It probably didn’t seem this way to them, but as I looked to our players, those players that have been loyal to the PGA Tour, I’m confident that the move that they’ve made the right decision,” Monahan said. “They’ve helped rearchitect the future of the PGA Tour. They’ve moved us to a more pro-competitive model.”
Blathering drivel like this almost makes you wish Monahan had been as gruesomely honest as Phil Mickelson was last February while talking to Fire Pit Collective’s Alan Shipnuck.
“We know they killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” Mickelson said then. “They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
Monahan certainly reshaped how the PGA Tour operates. Now his time in golf has reached its end.
