In setting up first-round play for the U.S. Open, the PGA couldn’t have highlighted more starkly its 12-month clash and sudden shocking marriage to the breakaway Saudi-owned LIV Golf organization.
It has set Rory McIlroy, world #3 and outspoken critic of players who absconded, against Brooks Koepka, who just won his fifth major and is the LIV rebel most willing to give the back of his hand to the PGA.
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Here’s a taste of their rhetoric. When the PGA-LIV wedding was announced, Koepka mockingly tweeted, “welfare check on Chamblee,” skewering Brandel Chamblee, golf’s preeminent analyst, who has denounced LIV as the plaything of “murderous dictator” Mohammed bin Salman. McIlroy, for his part, told the rebels last July, “You’ve basically left all your peers behind to make more money … don’t try to come back and play over here again.”
Yet these two pals tee off together in Thursday’s premier threesome with Hideki Matsuyama shortly before 5 p.m. There are other groupings that mix and match PGA loyalists with LIV rebs. Rapprochements are often awkward, but this one is a doozie.
The golf split, followed by a bitter year and volte-face nuptials, has riled lots of people, not least players who passed up seven-, eight-, and nine-figure LIV signing checks — Tiger Woods reportedly turned down $800 million — and now find themselves obliged to accept the prodigals back.
Among others who don’t like it is Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), head of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who is launching a probe and wrote to the PGA expressing disquiet over the organization's U-turn and the fact that LIV’s parent, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, is closely linked to MBS.
Democrats turned against the Saudis after President Barack Obama screwed up Middle East alliances by wooing Iran. But MBS gave them a plausible ex post facto reason with the 2018 strangling and chainsaw dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote for the Washington Post.
It is indeed distasteful that the PGA should get mixed up with this for Gulf gold — not to mention with the splashy marketing of LIV boss Greg Norman and the taint of association with a golf course owned by former President Donald Trump. There could hardly be a sharper contrast than that between LIV and the carefully understated good taste and reverence for the game that the PGA cultivates with a worshipful sincerity, like Jim Nantz’s commentary on the Masters.
But it is difficult to see what grounds there are for interfering in the PGA-LIV union. Golf is not a national security issue. Billion-dollar investments help the Saudis “sportswash” their reputation, but that doesn’t make them more useful or less difficult allies. Anyway, petrodollars have poured elsewhere into sports free of nefarious diplomatic scheming.
Take the English Premier League, where champions Manchester City is owned and controlled by a Gulf sheikdom that has spent its way, buying top players, to creating the world’s best team. Money speaks and always has. It’s why for several decades NFL teams moved from one city to another across the U.S. It’s a bit late to start talking about iconic institutions, loyalty, and the like.
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan has laid it on thick about LIV Golf being disreputable and “embarrassing,” but he finally acknowledged that his side “cannot compete with a foreign government with unlimited money." The legal fight against LIV was going to cost the PGA $50 million, and it is having to shell out another $100 million in prize money to staunch the exodus of top players.
The marriage of the two golf tours is a business decision. Pressure for it massively intensified after Koepka won the PGA Championship, making a mockery of PGA world rankings, which put him at 102nd because LIV tournaments didn’t count. With the game changing so fast and so radically, such anomalies made golf look ridiculous. So the merger was probably inevitable.
What, then, is Congress’s legitimate role?
It's going to be tough to suggest there is an anti-trust concern. If Congress was undisturbed by the PGA’s monopoly before LIV raided it a year ago and cleaved the game in two, any suggestion of worry about a monopolistic merger now would look indisputably like hypocritical circumstantial handwringing.
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Professional golf’s metamorphosis from a sedate and gentlemanly pastime to cutthroat big business has been going on for a very long time. The PGA-LIV split and merger are just the latest and most dramatic lurches in that direction. Their union won’t be stopped or even slowed — nor should it.
We conservatives who wish to conserve what is traditional and good but also believe in free enterprise are left with mixed emotions. The elegant game is compromising and is being compromised. But this has been so increasingly for decades. Whatever Capitol Hill thinks, it is all over bar the shouting.