Golf is the sport that I’ve played most avidly throughout my life and the PGA Tour is the only professional sport I follow somewhat closely. I have long thought that the United States was seriously mistaken in regarding and treating Saudi Arabia as an ally. It has only ever been interested in inducing the United States to fight its battles for it.
And if the new geopolitical dividing line is between autocracies and democracies, as I think it mostly is, the House of Saud is one of the most repressive regimes on the planet.
So, I was disheartened by the creation of LIV, the Saudi-financed golf league. And appalled by the PGA Tour announcement of an agreement to some sort of still ill-defined combine.
According to the PGA Tour brass, reiterated in congressional testimony this week, it had no choice. There was a money war going on and the other guy had substantially deeper pockets.
This is just one fan’s perspective. But I think the PGA Tour brass was mistaken. I think LIV Golf, if not on its last legs, was close to it.
In fact, I think the PGA Tour brass put itself in a deep hole by panicking and overreacting to the LIV challenge.
LIV did pick off a handful of the top golfers, still capable of winning big tournaments, as their performance in the majors has demonstrated.
But the remainder of LIV’s 48 player field was filled out by golfers with decent records but clearly in the twilight of their competitive years, international players little known in the United States, and a few just starting out a professional career and also largely unknown in the U.S.
LIV Golf wasn’t a success or gathering momentum.
Its tournaments weren’t drawing much attendance. TV broadcasts were late in arriving and not attracting an audience. Few cared who won its tournaments.
The Saudi sovereign wealth fund bankrolling LIV has deep pockets. But its purpose is to generate returns for the House of Saud. The LIV golf adventure was a financial drain. It had little prospect of producing an actual financial return on the Saudi investment. And, if anything, it was generating negative publicity for the House of Saud.
The attempt to sportswash its repressive character was failing. If anything, the bully-boy approach to the venture highlighted and accentuated it.
The head of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is apparently a bit of a golf nut. But LIV Golf was shaping up as a vanity project for him with little return, if not negative returns, for the House of Saud. I suspect that the plug would have been pulled in a year or two.
To compete with the big bucks the Saudis were waving around, the PGA Tour established some events with bigger purses and more limited fields, as well as requiring the top players to play in more tournaments together. The bigger purses and legal fees reportedly drained Tour reserves and put it in a financial hole.
This may have been a miscalculation. I’m not sure that the Saudi big bucks would have attracted many additional defections of the top players.
After all, becoming a LIV player is, essentially, to become a contract employee to one of the world’s most repressive regimes. The players willing to make that Faustian bargain had probably mostly revealed themselves. The remaining top players seemed pretty committed to sticking with the PGA Tour. Digging a financial hole to sweetened purses and rendering the tour financially incapable of sustaining the legal fight, one the PGA Tour was likely to win, was probably unnecessary to retain them. They seemed to have already made their decisions.
What has been revealed about the proposed combine makes no sense. Supposedly there will be a for-profit parent, which the Saudis will pretty much exclusively own. The PGA Tour and the DP World Tour would be subsidiaries.
The claim is that the PGA Tour would remain an independently governed nonprofit. But, then, what is the return for the Saudi investment in the for-profit? Money can’t flow up from the nonprofit to the for-profit. That would jeopardize the nonprofit status of the PGA Tour.
There should be laser-focus on what the Saudis get out of the deal. They aren’t going to be benevolently donating a reported billion bucks just for the good of the game. The Saudis and the PGA Tour brass are concealing the true heart of the deal.
I’ve grown very hopeful that the deal will fall through, LIV Golf will stumble to a close, and the Saudi attempt to take over American professional men’s golf will end up an expensive failure.
I would love for it to be precipitated by a revolt by the PGA Tour golfers tossing out those who made this deal on their ear, and installing new management that will repair the Tour’s finances without making a Faustian bargain with the Saudis – which would taint each and every member of the Tour, even those with the moral fortitude not to make the bargain themselves.
Regardless, I suspect, and hope, that it will prove impossible to create a deal that makes a Saudi investment worthwhile and that the players and golfing public will be willing to swallow, much less antitrust regulators and politicians.
