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The day PGA Tour players learned of their league’s horrific merger with their rival’s, it seems even the tour’s most ardent superstars and defenders were left in the dark.
The PGA Tour made global news on Tuesday, announcing that it would form a new business entity to “unify golf” by merging with the DP World Tour and, surprisingly, LIV Golf, the upstart league that turned the sport on its head in the last year-plus.
In short, the merger will see the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and PIF — Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which funds LIV Golf — combine its business operations. The PGA Tour will remain a tax-exempt 501(c)(6) organization, but the new collectively owned entity to be named will be for-profit. Litigation between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf will also end, and there will be a path for LIV players to re-apply for PGA Tour or DP World Tour membership next season.
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan held a players-only meeting at Oakdale Golf & Country Club in Toronto on Tuesday, host of this week’s RBC Canadian Open, and spoke to the media afterward. He said talks about the agreement had been going on over the past seven weeks, which included four in-person meetings and numerous video chats and phone calls.
Players — like two-time tournament winner Colin Morikawa, among others — have expressed their frustration at learning of the deal via social media, and apparently, even golf’s best dogs weren’t on board. According to the Golf Channel Todd LewisHowever, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy were both left in the dark about the merger as well.
Monahan explained why there weren’t more people, including the players, in the episode.
“Given the complexity of what we were dealing with, it’s not uncommon for the circle of information to be very narrow,” Monahan said. “The fact of the matter is that this was a shock to a lot of people because we weren’t in a position to share or explain, as we normally would, and it was really a result of our commitment to confidentiality through the end.”
Neither Woods nor McIlroy have spoken publicly about the news, though McIlroy is scheduled to meet the press on Wednesday in Oakdale.
“One of the first things I thought was, I wonder what Tiger and Rory and so many other guys would have thought that they would have turned down 10 if not hundreds of millions of dollars to go to LIV [when this happened]said Golf Channel analyst Brundle Chamblee. “They stood on principle, they fought for the PGA Tour, they fought for the improvement of the PGA Tour—and it came out of nowhere.”
As the battle of the PGA Tour vs. LIV Golf has intensified over the past year, Woods and McIlroy have taken on important roles for the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Monahan.
On Tuesday, Monahan was asked if he specifically regretted not informing players like Woods and McIlroy earlier.
“What we agreed on here is a framework agreement and the binding elements are linked to the lawsuit,” he said. “A lot of those details we have to work through. If we had announced a final agreement this morning and I was calling them in the morning and I had made commitments on behalf of the PGA Tour that I hadn’t had a chance to check it out fully with our policy board and with those two people in a larger group, then it would be This is a complete miss on my part, and I realize that.
But this was a framework agreement. We think it’s the right convention. Obviously, Tiger and Rory’s perspective is one that I understand very well, and it was part of my thinking during these conversations, and it will be part of my thinking going forward. Now that we’re in a framework agreement, I’m looking forward to speaking to all of our players, including the two of them, to make sure this comes out the right way.”
It was at this tournament last year when LIV played its first event, the Transatlantic in London, that the division in golf became real.
“I want to play on the PGA Tour against the best players in the world,” McIlroy said in his pre-tournament press conference that week. “And I think for me, speaking to a few people yesterday and one of the comments was, anything, any decision you make in your life for money just doesn’t end up going the right way. Obviously, money is a deciding factor in a lot of things in this world. But if it’s pure money then it’s not, you know, it just doesn’t seem to go the way you want it to.”
McIlroy won that week, which the PGA Tour team likes to say is a win for the good guys. He continued to support the Tour, almost exhausted, every time he was asked about LIV Golf. Two months after winning the Canadian Open, McIlroy was in a private meeting of the top PGA Tour players at the BMW Championship. Woods flew in specifically for the meeting, which was held at the Du Pont Hotel, with the goal of uniting the Tour, backing up the Weaknesses and countering the threat of LIV Golf.
“When I got here last summer, I was thankful that Tiger and Rory and that group of guys got together (at BMW) because I was part of the process,” Monahan said at The Players Championship in March. “I understood what they were going for; the lines of communication were very open and transparent. In my role, my job is to put that together and eventually go back to the board of five player-managers and five independent directors and, along with my team, make a recommendation that would be in Tour interest. So, having conversations with those players, having conversations with our player advisory board, with the board of directors, with membership week in and week out, which is what our player relations team does, that’s how we communicate.”
Woods, like McIlroy, defended the tour whenever he was asked about it, citing the legacy of the guaranteed paycheck.
“I think what they did is they turned their backs on what allowed them to get to this position,” he said at the Open Championship last summer.
Woods and McIlroy continued to be among the most vocal advocates of the tour. McIlroy, a player director on the Players Advisory Council, sat in on the seven-hour board meeting on Tuesday of the Arnold Palmer Invitational earlier this year and tied for the second time five days later.
You could tell that his duties were also exhausting. After missing out on the Players Championship, he said, “I’m ready to go back to being just a golfer.”
After Tuesday, what remains are a lot of unanswered questions. For the future of the PGA Tour, LIV, players loyalty to their commissioner and much more.
“Guys who stayed loyal to the PGA Tour, it was like a kick in the teeth for them,” PGA Tour player Callum Tarren said on Golf Channel Tuesday. “Obviously Rory has been a huge advocate for the PGA Tour and now it kind of looks like all his hard work and commitment to the PGA Tour has left him by the wayside.”