After Rory McIlroy confirmed earlier this week that a number of PGA Tour representatives, including Commissioner Jay Monahan and Tiger Woods, would be meeting in person with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the Tour released a statement on Saturday morning that the meeting went off as planned.
Here’s what was released by the Tour:
As previously stated, our negotiations with the Public Investment Fund (PIF) have accelerated in recent months. Representatives from the PGA TOUR Enterprises Transaction Subcommittee and the PIF have been meeting multiple times weekly to work through potential deal terms and come to a shared vision on the future of professional golf. On Friday evening, an in-person session in New York City included the entire Transaction Subcommittee and PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan and his team, where more progress was made. We remain committed to these negotiations, which require working through complex considerations to best position golf for global growth. We want to get this right, and we are approaching discussions with careful consideration for our players, our fans, our partners and the game’s future.
McIlroy said in pressers prior to this week’s Memorial that members of the Tour’s Transaction Subcommittee have talked three times a week with the Saudis. The New York meeting represented their first in-person gathering since March. The other members of the committee are Adam Scott, board liaison Joe Ogilvie, Enterprises chairman Joe Gorder and Fenway Sports Group principal John Henry.
The PGA Tour has entered into an agreement for Strategic Sports Group to invest at least $1.5 billion and as much as $3 billion into the Tour’s new for-profit entity. The Tour and PIF met in March in the Bahamas after the Players Championship for the first time. Jimmy Dunne, whose secret meeting with Al-Rumayyan in early 2023 led to the Framework Agreement, resigned from the Tour board in mid-May citing “no meaningful progress” toward a deal with PIF. Woods and Jordan Spieth, both fellow Tour player directors, disagreed with Dunne and called that a false narrative.
In an exclusive interview with Golfweek, Ogilvie characterized the first meeting between player-directors and Al-Rumayyan as “perfect.”
“It was a perfect first meeting. When we were going into the room, one of the big things was how do we address him? If we’re gonna address him as His Excellency, that’s just kind of weird,” Ogilvie said. “He comes in the room, shakes everyone’s hand, and looks you right in the eye and says, ‘My name is Yasir. Please call me Yasir.’ I had heard that he’s a nice man and that he loves the game of golf, and nothing told me otherwise after meeting him. It would be naive to think that we’re going to come out of that meeting with a handshake deal and say, ‘We’re done here.’
“It was a very good meeting and you could see that there was a mutual respect between he and Jay, which is also good.”
See more from that extensive Q&A with Ogilvie here.
