LOS ANGELES — Count Jon Rahm in as one of the many PGA Tour players who remain confused by the stunning announcement of an alliance between to the tour and LIV Golf made last week.
“There’s a lot of not-answered questions,” the world’s No. 2 ranked player said Tuesday in advance of this week’s U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club. “It’s tough when it’s the week before a major, trying not to think about it as much as possible. 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 that’s not the consensus.
“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management,” Rahm went on. “I understand why they had to keep it so secret. I understand we couldn’t make it through a PAC meeting with more than 10 minutes after people spilling the beans right away in some article by you guys already being out there. So, I get it. I get the secrecy.
“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell. That’s why we’re all in a bit of a state of limbo because we don’t know what’s going on and how much is finalized and how much they can talk about, either. It’s a state of uncertainty that we don’t love, but at the end of the day, I’m not a business expert. Some of those guys on the board and involved in this are. So, I’d like to think they’re going to make a better decision than I would, but I don’t know.
“We’ll see. There’s still too many questions to be answered.”
Rahm said he was home taking care of is kids when the bombshell announcement was made last Tuesday.
“I was just having my normal morning making coffee and breakfast, and basically texts just started flowing in,’’ he said. “I thought my phone was going to catch on fire at one point. There were so many questions that I just couldn’t answer. I think it was that day at one point I told Kelley (his wife), ‘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.’ “
Collin Morikawa, a two-time major championship winner, found it difficult to put the uncertainty in perspective.
“That’s hard because I think for a lot of different parties there’s a lot of different reasons of why it’s happening,” he said of the controversial alliance. “We all want to know the why. 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, because I think what you’ve seen from the players versus what you’ve seen from maybe our commissioner (Jay Monahan) versus the board versus LIV, there’s a lot of parties involved. Everyone has had a kind of different answer and different reaction to all this.
“So, the ‘why’ is going to be very opinionated, and I don’t think we’ll ever really get an answer.”
PGA Tour and LIV Golf are ending a war — by joining forces.
The two golf leagues, along with the European DP World Tour, are merging into one company after a period of fierce rivalry, one where LIV Golf defectors were banned from competing on the Tour.
LIV, financed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund and led by legendary golfer Greg Norman, lured some of the top names in golf last year with reported nine-figure contracts, including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau.
Other huge golf names, however, like Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, stayed loyal to the Tour, despite being offered a massive amount of money.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the PGA Tour-LIV Golf merger
Norman said last year Woods turned down a payday in the range of $700 million-$800 million to stick with the PGA Tour.
With the merger, the Saudi-backed LIV and the Tour are ending an antitrust battle and agreed to end all litigation between the two sides.
“After two years of disruption and distraction, this is a historic day for the game we all know and love,” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement. “This transformational partnership recognizes the immeasurable strength of the PGA TOUR’s history, legacy and pro-competitive model.”
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Rahm is a player who articulates with more amazing perspective than most, and this case was no different as he professed his reasons for remaining loyal to the PGA Tour.
“No matter what happens, whether I agree with it or not, thanks to the PGA Tour,” Rahm said. “They give me a platform to play golf at the highest level, and after taking advantage of that possibility, I’m in a situation where my family and my kids don’t have to struggle financially ever, and I don’t know how many generations I can help if I do it properly.
“I’m in a very high state of privilege in this world. I can do what I want,” he went on. “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 to what’s going on. If things change, things change. I’ll have to adapt to the situation and will have to make some decisions on what’s going on forward, and I’ll make some decisions.
“At the end of the day, I’m still very privileged, whether the PGA Tour [and] LIV Golf align or not or who plays and who likes who. It doesn’t really matter. I’m happy where I am in my life, and every day in the morning when I look at my kids, I’m even more blessed in that sense. It’s an easy way to forget about what’s going on when I look at it that way.
“I can see where I came from in Spain, especially every time I see my parents I remember where which came from and where I’m at. To be honest, all those possible issues seem like a very, very small issue compared to other things in the world.”