HAMILTON, Ontario – With the dew just burning off at Oakdale Golf & Country Club, Maverick McNealy was wasting time toward the end of his practice round at the RBC Canadian Open when he glanced at his phone.
“I had like 40 text messages and was like, Wait a second, ‘A deal with PIF’, what’s going on here? Do I play for LIV now? What’s the deal?’” McNealy recalled.
It was a common sentiment just before 10 a.m. ET on June 6, 2023, as the golf world learned the shocking news that the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund were calling a truce after nearly a year of legal wrangling and a turf war that had fractured the game at its highest level.
At first blush, the news was complicated by bungled messaging and confusion that the Tour and PIF – which had funded LIV Golf and spurred the divide in professional golf – had merged. Even the sub-headline on the Tour’s own press release sent an alarmingly incorrect message: “PGA Tour, DP World Tour, LIV Golf merge commercial operations under common ownership.”
“Clearly, the first reaction from all of us was just shock, curiosity, surprise, because this was clearly a different direction then we were told we were going for a number of months,” veteran Kevin Streelman said. “I would say that made it very chaotic.”
The chaos only escalated later that afternoon in Canada, when Tour commissioner Jay Monahan walked into an unprecedented player meeting to discuss the news of the day. Tour player meetings are normally banal and lightly attended affairs, but this was different. Monahan faced a packed house of unhappy and unsympathetic faces.
“Why was this not a good decision a year or two years ago?” one player asked, while another challenged the decision: “This is a players’ tour; this is the first time anyone even on the [Player Advisory Council] has even heard about [the framework agreement]. The players should be making the decisions – not someone that’s never played golf in their life.”
“There’s a video that came out, basically you said a few years ago that no player has ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour,” said another player at that meeting. “When the news [of the framework agreement] came out, I got a text that asked if we’re going to have to start apologizing for where the money is coming from. It’s embarrassing.”
It was a tipping point in the most contentious period in professional golf history, and Monahan’s attempts to explain why the deal needed to be negotiated in secrecy, as well as why the Tour had to pivot so dramatically following months of criticism of both the Saudis and LIV Golf, did little to calm the room.
“Sitting in that player meeting,” McNealy recalled, “tensions were high, guys were upset. I think somehow Jay was surprised at the reception. His remarks about June 6 were different a few months later after he saw how it was received by players, fans and media. The player meeting didn’t do much to calm us or make us feel better about the situation.”
That discontent grew over the next few days as players mulled what the framework agreement with PIF would mean to them and how the Tour would be impacted by a potential definitive agreement, which would see the Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour brought under the same, for-profit umbrella.
“My phone was blowing up,” Ryan Palmer said. “Like everyone else, nobody knew what was going on.”
And now, 12 months later, the narrative hasn’t changed much.
“Still a lot of unanswered questions,” Palmer conceded. “You’re seeing board members resign left and right. In all honesty, as a player, I have no idea. I know they’re doing the right thing. I believe they are. But I’m anxious to see.”
In the months since Monahan endured that withering Q&A with players in Canada, the outlook for a potential deal with PIF, and a reunification of the game, has become much more complicated.
A Department of Justice investigation, a U.S. Senate hearing and an avalanche of palace intrigue has filled the void since the Tour announced the framework agreement, and for those whose livelihoods depend on the outcome, the Tour doesn’t seem to be any closer to a deal now than it was on June 6, 2023.
“Like a lot of people in the golf world, I was surprised like, Whoa, where’d that come from?, and optimistic,” Cink said of the June 6 announcement. “Since then, I would say that my thoughts have kind of come away from the optimism side a little bit, just because of how complex it is.
“I don’t hold anybody responsible for the complexities of the situation, but to announce the framework agreement might have been just a hair premature, because of the complexities [of a deal] are hard to fathom for most people.”
Since the framework agreement was unveiled, the Tour has created PGA Tour Enterprises – the for-profit entity that will be the circuit’s driving force – and acknowledged “ongoing negotiations” with PIF and its governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, but a definitive agreement remains out of reach.
Complicating things further is the behind-the-scenes intrigue of a potential deal. Last month, Jimmy Dunne – the architect of the framework agreement and, according to his testimony before the U.S. Senate, the voice who convinced Monahan to finally talk with Al-Rumayyan in early 2023 – announced he was stepping down from the policy board.
“Since the players now outnumber the independent directors on the board, and no meaningful progress has been made towards a transaction with the PIF, I feel like my vote and my role is utterly superfluous,” Dunne wrote in his resignation letter to the board.
A deal with PIF is either inevitable or impossibly elusive, depending on who you ask, but it’s the uncertainty of the negotiations that now dominate the landscape, with players no more at ease with the Tour’s pivot than they were 12 months ago.
“I think we need a player meeting,” Palmer said. “It would be nice to get all the players into one of those mandatory meetings with directors and board members and just hear it instead of reading about it here and there. It would be nice to get together and hear Jay’s voice. We normally have two or three meetings every year, and we haven’t had one yet. We had one at a signature event, but to me that doesn’t really count as a player meeting. I’d like to see that before the playoffs.”
The original framework agreement included a no-poaching clause to stem the flow of PGA Tour stars to LIV Golf, but that provision was removed after the Department of Justice suggested the clause could be considered an antitrust violation. In December, when LIV Golf signed then-world No. 3 Jon Rahm to a deal reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the move felt like a leverage play to expedite negotiations towards a definitive agreement. But the Dec. 31 deadline came and went with no news.
“I’m still not really sure if it’s good or bad,” Tommy Fleetwood said. “I don’t know the inner workings of the deal or what it means for our tour, what it means for LIV, honestly.”
In January, the Tour announced an agreement with Fenway Sports-led SSG to invest up to $3 billion into the for-profit entity, and in April the circuit outlined how players would be receiving equity into PGA Tour Enterprises. Despite that relentless news cycle and historic change, a deal between the Tour and PIF remains out of reach, even after a group of player directors met with Al-Rumayyan in the Bahamas in March and, according to multiple sources, there’s almost daily conversations between the two sides.
For some, however, the growing frustration of the unknown has been somewhat mitigated by a fundamental shift in how the Tour is governed. The 13-person board of directors for PGA Tour Enterprises includes seven players, giving the members the majority vote to either approve or reject any deal with PIF.
The disruption caused by LIV Golf and the framework agreement also created an opportunity to reinvent the professional game. Earlier this year, Rory McIlroy outlined a world tour concept with an international schedule, and other players have increasingly come around to the idea that the most tumultuous time in the history of the game could be the rocket fuel that revolutionizes the sport.
“Yes, I’m optimistic,” Streelman said. “The latest stuff I’ve heard is incredible. The higher-ups are going to have to make bigger decisions with what we [players] have brought to the forefront, but I think there are some intriguing ideas. They are very green, and very early at this stage, but I think it’s a good direction.”
The shock of June 6 has slowly and grudgingly faded, and it’s been replaced by the curious combination of anxious uncertainty and cautious optimism.
Source Agencies
