In One Stunning and Silent Move, Jay Monahan Brings in Billions and Kills LIV Golf
Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, just pulled one of the biggest stunners in modern sports history, announcing that the enemy of his friends is no longer his enemy. The PGA Tour will merge with LIV Golf, and now everybody can stop fighting and get along and whoa, whoa, whoa … WHAT?
What happened to two years of rhetoric about how this would never happen? Forget about misleading the media. People do that all the time. Monahan’s own players were convinced this would never happen. Many of them were clear they didn’t want it to happen.
Rory McIlroy lost friendships. Justin Thomas bragged about how the PGA Tour was much stronger than LIV. Matthew Fitzpatrick said he would be angry if the PGA Tour welcomed LIV players back when their contracts were up. Tiger Woods said LIV’s Greg Norman had to go before any peace talks could begin, and that the LIV model was not real competitive golf. Some of them spent days crafting a new model for the PGA Tour to thrive.
Monahan has a lot of explaining to do. I don’t know if he can talk his way out of it. But it’s important to understand something:
This is shocking news to most people in golf, but it’s not a shock to Monahan. He has thought it through. And while it sure looks like the PGA Tour sold its players out by merging with LIV, there is another way to look at it:
In one move, Monahan brought in billions and killed LIV Golf.
He is going to sell that to his players as a huge win. They’re bewildered now and might not buy it. But look: For all the talk about a “merger,” the truth is that LIV Golf, as we knew it, is folding. The Saudi Arabian royal family is diverting its funding to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour.
The moral questions about the implications of taking Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund money are serious, and we should keep asking them. This has been the fundamental objection to LIV for many people, myself included. But within the world of golf, look at how this will likely play out.
The players who left for LIV and huge paydays will have no top-level tour. They can form their own, but they won’t have Saudi money behind it. They will have a choice: Pay a presumably big fine to go back to the PGA Tour or play some low-level independent circuit somewhere. They will still come out ahead, but how much remains to be seen.
Phil Mickelson can rail against Monahan as much as he likes. Mickelson has been saying for many months that the PGA Tour has some dirty secrets about how it has done business, and he was looking forward to those coming out in litigation. Well, now they won’t, unless somebody wants to spend millions and years on fresh lawsuits. If Mickelson wants to play high-level golf, he will need to accept Monahan as his boss.
As for “Greg has to go” … why would anybody think Greg is staying? You may have noticed Norman did not appear next to Monahan on CNBC. He was not crowing on social media. I would be surprised if he has any meaningful role moving forward. I suspect he was as shocked by this news as anybody else.
The PGA Tour stars who turned down nine-figure paychecks for LIV in the last year might be angry that Monahan’s threats of a lifetime ban turned out to be empty. Well, two points there: They will still make much more money, starting this year, than they would have before; and we don’t know what those fines for LIV players will look like.
I’m not saying star players will feel like they were treated fairly. They won’t. But they will all be much, much wealthier, and Monahan is probably betting that will be enough.
The competitive structure of golf, moving forward, is going to look pretty much like what PGA Tour players want it to look like. Their tour removed the threat. There is some talk of merging competitive models to include LIV’s team aspect, and I’m sure there will be some skeleton version of that, but it won’t mean much and might not last, because privately, pretty much everybody in golf knows that the team aspect of LIV was a sham. It was a front to disguise the truth: The only reason players left for LIV was money. Nobody is going to be pounding a table to make sure the HyFlyers and Crushers survive.
As for the players who were angry about finding out the news on Twitter on Tuesday … well, they should be. They were blindsided. Monahan will surely sell this secrecy as the price of victory. Whether they buy it is a fair question.
There have always been two objections to LIV in the world of golf. One was moral: Saudi Arabia’s royal family was engaging in the highest level of sportswashing to make the world think it was more progressive than it was. Those PGA Tour players who said they would never sell out to the brutal Saudi Arabian regime just sold out to the brutal Saudi Arabian regime, and they didn’t even get to make the decision for themselves. Monahan made it for them. If they are offended, they have every right to be.
But if you have paid attention, you have probably noticed that the primary objection for more players was competitive: Professional golf has always been built on the idea that anybody could rise to the top. LIV Golf was an exhibition disguised as a sporting event, and it was threatening to destroy what made the game great. Well, LIV Golf just signed its own death certificate. The PGA Tour model will win.
Monahan has a lot of challenges ahead. First is explaining the surprise. Next is explaining why this is a victory. Then there are the penalties for players who want to come back, and the 2024 season, and lurking over all of it is whether the PGA Tour is raising money from the Saudis or is sportswashing for them—and whether it is possible to do one without the other. Serious questions. Let’s keep asking them. But for those who make their living with clubs in their hands, the bottom line is this: One tour won the battle here, and it sure as hell wasn’t LIV Golf.