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    PGA Tour Raises $1.5 Billion From Group of U.S. Investors

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    The move, which involves the Fenway Sports Group, raises questions about whether a deal to combine forces with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund is still necessary.The PGA Tour announced on Wednesday that it had reached a deal to raise at least $1.5 billion from a group of U.S. investors, a move that raises new questions about whether a proposed alliance with a rival tour backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will come to fruition.The influx of money into the PGA Tour, which could end up being as much as $3 billion, is led by the Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club. The tour is simultaneously negotiating a partnership with its well-funded competitor, LIV Golf.That deal, which was announced in June, was effectively an acknowledgment by the PGA Tour that it did not have enough money to compete with the hundreds of millions of dollars the Saudi fund was prepared to put in the sport. A number of prominent players had already left the PGA Tour for the LIV tour.The PGA Tour and the Saudi fund initially set a Dec. 31 deadline to work out details and conclude their alliance. That deadline has since been extended, and the partnership between the two tours has not yet been completed. The question now is whether the deal with U.S. investors changes the PGA Tour’s calculus.The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, said Wednesday on a call with PGA Tour players before the official announcement that the tour “does remain in active and frequent dialogue” with representatives for the Saudi wealth fund. He added that the U.S. investors were “aware and supportive” of its negotiations with the fund, and that he was in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago to conduct due diligence on the proposed alliance with executives supporting the U.S. investor group.The Saudi fund has made clear that it will continue to compete with the PGA Tour through LIV Golf if there is no alliance. In December, the Saudi-backed tour poached Jon Rahm, the world’s third-ranked player.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Pressured by U.S., PGA Tour and Saudi Fund Drop Key Part of Golf Deal

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      The two parties had promised not to poach each other’s players. Their decision to abandon that clause removes one of the few binding provisions of the agreement that has rocked golf.The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, facing pressure from the Justice Department about their ambitions for a new company to shape global golf, have in recent days abandoned a crucial provision of their tentative deal: a promise not to recruit each other’s players.The decision — and the Justice Department’s choice to raise concerns so early in a review that could lead to a government attempt to block the transaction — reflected the fragility, uncertainty and turbulence surrounding the deal.The framework agreement between the tour and the wealth fund included few binding provisions. But one of them was a nonsolicitation clause, which said the tour and wealth fund-backed LIV Golf league would not “enter into any contract, agreement or understanding with” any “players who are members of the other’s tour or organization.”The agreement also said the tour and LIV would not “solicit” or “recruit” players away from each other.Before the deal, LIV used norm-shattering prize funds and guaranteed contracts — some deals promised golfers at least $100 million — to entice some of the world’s top players away from the PGA Tour, which had spent decades as the premier, and largely unchallenged, circuit in men’s professional golf.Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith were among the players who ultimately joined LIV, depriving the PGA Tour of some of the star power on which it had relied to draw fans and sponsors.The nonsolicitation clause was a short-term way to stop the exodus while the tour and the wealth fund negotiated the final terms for their new company, which would bring the golf business ventures of the PGA Tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, into a single entity.“My fear is if we don’t get to an agreement, they were already putting billions of dollars into golf,” James J. Dunne, a PGA Tour board member, said of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Kenny Holston/The New York TimesAfter the text of the agreement emerged late last month, though, antitrust experts warned that the clause could run afoul of federal law because it threatened the integrity of the labor market and promised to stifle competition for players, who have long been independent contractors.In recent days, people familiar with the change said, the tour and the wealth fund decided to abandon the provision in hopes of staving off an extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department. Golf officials disagreed with the department’s misgivings but acquiesced nevertheless.The original language appeared “to be right in the field of vision that the Department of Justice has staked out for its no-poaching enforcement program,” said William E. Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chairman.“They haven’t had a great deal of success in their criminal cases yet,” he said. “But they have said, as a matter of policy, we regard no-poaching agreements as being as being a serious offense worthy of criminal prosecution.”The Justice Department and the wealth fund declined to comment on Thursday. In a statement on Thursday afternoon, the tour said it “chose to remove specific language” from the initial pact after it engaged with the Justice Department.“While we believe the language is lawful, we also consider it unnecessary in the spirit of cooperation and because all parties are negotiating in good faith,” the tour said.The tour formally notified its board of the decision on Thursday, after The New York Times asked the tour to comment on its reporting. A person familiar with the tour’s internal deliberations said the circuit’s leaders had already planned to inform the board on Thursday.Turmoil has enveloped the deal, which has not closed, since it was announced on June 6. On Tuesday, a Senate subcommittee questioned a pair of PGA Tour leaders during a lengthy hearing, part of at least two unfolding congressional inquiries. Tour executives have depicted the framework deal, and the final accord they hope to strike eventually, as necessary.Without some kind of truce, they have said, the wealth fund would assuredly pour more resources into the fight, diminishing the tour one year after another.“My fear is if we don’t get to an agreement, they were already putting billions of dollars into golf,” James J. Dunne III, a tour board member, said of the wealth fund when he addressed lawmakers on Tuesday. “They have a management team wanting to destroy the tour. Even though you can say take five or six players a year, they have an unlimited horizon and an unlimited amount of money.”The reviews on Capitol Hill could lead to damaging public revelations. But Justice Department scrutiny is seen as the more likely path for the government to try to derail the deal, if it chooses to try.Regulators and antitrust scholars have been watching the tour’s public statements with interest, such as when Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, said on June 6 that the deal would let the circuit “take the competitor off of the board.”“Those are sound bites that the Department of Justice would look at and say, ‘Is what occurred promoting competition, or is what occurred stifling competition insofar as an entity with a monopoly grip on the market has eliminated a competitor and solidified their grip on the market?’” said Gerald Maatman Jr., who chairs the workplace class-action group at the law firm Duane Morris.Not every binding provision of the framework agreement has caused such substantial alarm among antitrust regulators. The wealth fund and the tour, for instance, agreed to dismiss acrimonious litigation over their golf pursuits. And although Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who is leading one of the Senate inquiries into the deal, expressed concern this week about a nondisparagement pledge included in the agreement, experts said that kind of restriction was unlikely to draw concern inside the Justice Department. More

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      Other Sports Faced Congress’s Glare. Now Golf Will Get Its Turn.

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      A Senate hearing on Tuesday is just one part of Washington’s scrutiny of the PGA Tour’s deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.Sports executives and players have sometimes defended themselves or patiently absorbed hours of fury. They have occasionally apologized or pleaded for help. They have shifted blame or used celebrity and childhood memory as a charm offensive. In other instances, they have lied or obfuscated or simply said little at all.PGA Tour leaders, who are expected to appear before a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday to discuss their circuit’s surprise alliance with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, have a menu of time- and pressure-tested options for facing a sports-curious Congress. The tactics they turn to will likely do much to influence whether Tuesday’s proceeding is a blip that leads to a day’s worth of headlines or a debacle that triggers far greater scrutiny.“The PGA would be smart to understand that they’re not calling them in to play patty-cake,” said J.C. Watts, who played quarterback at Oklahoma before representing a district in the state in Congress and, from 1999 to 2003, serving as a member of the Republican leadership in the House.“The constituents back home, they understand sports and they understand 9/11,” Watts added, referring to longstanding accusations that Saudi government operatives played a role in the 2001 attacks. “This is sports with a much deeper twist than your typical hearing.”That Congress, which has a long history of quizzing, hectoring and looming when it comes to sports, would step into golf’s fray felt like a certainty after the tour and the Saudi wealth fund announced a framework agreement on June 6. So far, that activity has taken the form of two Senate inquiries, a House bill to revoke the tour’s tax-exempt status, demands for the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to consider intervening and Tuesday’s hearing at the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.The proceeding is the latest example of a congressional interest in sports that has led to a mixed record. Lawmakers and their investigators have unearthed information and sometimes provoked changes to the sports landscape, either through legislation or the grinding power of the congressional bully pulpit.“I think you’ve got to articulate your public policy purpose,” said Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who was instrumental in hearings nearly two decades ago about steroid use in baseball, which lawmakers depicted as a part of a national scourge. “That’s really what you’ve got to do. It can be a health thing, a tax equity thing, but you’ve got to articulate why Congress is involved, and it’s a high threshold.”Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said the “central” role that sports play in American society makes them especially important for Congress to scrutinize.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesA sports hearing, Davis warned, was “high-risk, high-reward, particularly at a time when Congress is not seen as productive.”Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who is the subcommittee’s chairman, said sports’ “central” role in American society makes them especially important for Congress to scrutinize. The proposed Saudi role in golf, he signaled, was too much for Congress to ignore.“There really is a national interest in this cherished, iconic American institution, which is about to be taken over by one of the world’s most repressive governments,” he said in an interview.On Tuesday, the subcommittee will not hear from any of the three witnesses it originally sought. Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, has been on medical leave for almost a month, though the tour said Friday that he would return next week. Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, and Greg Norman, the commissioner of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league, cited scheduling conflicts and declined to appear.“Suffice it to say, this hearing will certainly not be the last,” Blumenthal said. “We will have hearings after there is a final agreement, if appropriate, and there is a national interest in doing it.”After the tour announced Monahan’s planned return, a spokeswoman for Blumenthal, Maria McElwain, said that the subcommittee would be “following up with him regarding any remaining questions after Tuesday’s hearing.”Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, will not appear before the Senate Committee to testify.Rob Carr/Getty ImagesBut the PGA Tour is hoping to avoid testifying after Tuesday, when Ron Price, its chief operating officer, will appear. Although Price did not negotiate the agreement announced last month, the tour board member who initiated the talks, James J. Dunne III, is also expected to testify.Price and Dunne may also be asked about the weekend resignation of Randall Stephenson from the tour’s board after more than a decade. In his resignation letter, Stephenson, the former chief executive of AT&T, cited “serious concerns with how this framework agreement came to fruition without board oversight.” He added that the deal was not one that he could “in good conscience support,” especially because American intelligence officials concluded that Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler authorized the 2018 murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.“If you are not really nervous and anxious to make sure you are prepared, then you are probably not prepared,” said Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, who has repeatedly testified before Congress. “It will, for sure, be the worst night of sleep that any witness is going to have.”Golf has scarcely been a topic of inquiry in congressional hearing rooms. The sport’s leaders have often handled their business in Washington behind closed doors, relying on a fount of good will and gentility. The tour faced a significant threat in the 1990s, when the Federal Trade Commission examined antitrust issues in golf before its inquiry fizzled amid a pressure campaign from Capitol Hill.Public appearances on the Hill have been more cheery. Arnold Palmer, for instance, addressed a joint meeting of Congress to pay tribute to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Jack Nicklaus spoke to a House committee about character education.Other titans of professional sports have had less pleasant interactions in Washington. Lawmakers have examined everything from college football’s Bowl Championship Series (“It looks like a rigged deal,” President Biden, who was then a senator, said.) to sexual abuse, domestic violence and the N.F.L.’s investigation into the Washington Commanders.But baseball has drawn much of the attention from Congress, like when senators called a 1958 hearing on antitrust exemptions. (“Stengelese Is Baffling to Senators,” read a subsequent headline in The New York Times, which reported that Yankees Manager Casey Stengel had lawmakers “confused but laughing.”)Neither Greg Norman, left, the commissioner of the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league, nor Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will appear at the hearing Tuesday.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressThe more recent proceedings about steroids in baseball featured a series of electrifying hearings, including one in 2005 when sluggers employed all manner of strategies during hostile questioning, and a 2008 spectacle that factored into the indictment of the celebrated pitcher Roger Clemens on charges of perjury, making false statements and obstruction of Congress. He was ultimately acquitted.For all of the commotion and skepticism, though, the cumulative pressure from Congress helped prod baseball into sweeping changes.The Senate subcommittee’s goals for golf are, for now, unclear.“What’s a win on this, outside of getting your mug on the news?” asked Davis, who, after leaving Congress, represented the former Commanders owner Daniel Snyder during a House inquiry. “Is it undoing this deal? Is it exposing some Saudi plot to come in and take over American golf?”The wealth fund has denied that it is using sports to try to repair the kingdom’s reputation as a human rights abuser and has instead asserted that it wants to diversify the Saudi economy and empower the country to play a greater global role. But the Saudi element could still help the Senate inquiry to develop staying power because it gives Congress something to explore beyond a seemingly mundane sports issue.“Usually when you’re taking about sports, you don’t have to talk about 9/11 families, you don’t have to talk about the Pentagon, you don’t have to talk about Flight 93,” Watts said. “In this case, the one opposition that rallies everybody is the Saudi money.”Blumenthal suggested in the interview that he expects Saudi Arabia’s history — in the interview, he accused the kingdom of being “actively complicit in terrorist activities, including 9/11” — to be a central theme of Tuesday’s proceeding and the unfolding inquiry.The panel cannot unilaterally block the deal from advancing, but members are well aware that a crush of revelations or damaging testimony could stir outrage and, perhaps more consequentially, nudge other parts of the federal government that could do more to stop the alliance.Tygart, the antidoping chief, recalled a meeting with a senator before a 2017 hearing, with the lawmaker making plain that he understood exactly how the event could shape public debate, even if it did not yield legislation.“I know,” Tygart remembered the senator telling him, “how much good can come out of witnesses sitting under the bright lights and squirming in their seats.” More

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      How the PGA Tour and Liv Golf Merger Could Collapse

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      The tentative agreement has been the talk of golf, but there is no guarantee the pact that aims to bring the tour and LIV Golf under one umbrella will overcome every threat.Golf’s big deal — a planned partnership between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — is not how big deals are ordinarily done.There were almost no outside bankers or lawyers involved in negotiations that led to a five-page framework agreement, and only so much input from the PGA Tour board. The initial pact had few binding clauses and did not assign values to assets. The plan that would, as the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, put it, “take the competitor off of the board” came as the tour faced a Justice Department investigation over antitrust matters.“In some ways, this looks a little more like a settlement to me than an actual M&A deal,” said Suni Sreepada, a partner in the mergers & acquisitions group at Ropes & Gray who said the lack of definitive arrangements complicated the path to closing.“The fact that they were willing to publicly announce it does mean that the parties are pretty committed to doing something,” Sreepada said. “But I guess that leaves us with a question of who holds the leverage at this point? And how does this end up getting fleshed out?”If the agreement closes, it stands to reshape golf’s economic structure profoundly, bringing the business ventures of the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, into a new company. The wealth fund is in line to have significant influence over investments in the company, which Monahan is poised to lead as chief executive.Despite the Saudi sway over the new company’s coffers, as well as the plan for the wealth fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, to serve as the entity’s chairman, PGA Tour officials have insisted that the tour retains control over the competitions themselves. They also note that the tour, which had previously condemned wealth fund money as tainted and immoral, will control a majority of board seats.“We are confident that once all stakeholders learn more about how the PGA Tour will lead this new venture, they will understand how it benefits our players, fans and sport while protecting the American institution of golf,” the tour said this month.Those assurances have done little to curb outrage over the pact, which could still fall apart.Here are some of the obstacles the tour, whose board is meeting near Detroit on Tuesday, and the wealth fund will have to overcome during a process that could take months. If the deal is not done by Dec. 31, it could potentially collapse, allowing both sides to decide whether they want to “revert to operating their respective businesses.”The PGA Tour’s board could balk.The tour has an 11-member board that includes five players. The board’s chairman, Edward D. Herlihy, and a member, James J. Dunne III, were involved in the talks with the wealth fund, but others had little knowledge of the deal until the day it became public.The board must sign off on the agreement once the outstanding details are negotiated. Although Herlihy and Dunne are expected to vote for the pact they helped create, most other board members have been publicly silent or noncommittal.“I told myself I’m not going to be for it or against it until I know everything, and I still don’t know everything,” Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 U.S. Open, said in a recent interview. And at a news conference on June 13, Patrick Cantlay, another player with a board seat, said “it seems like it’s still too early to have enough information to have a good handle on the situation.”Beyond the anticipated backing from Herlihy and Dunne, Rory McIlroy, who sits on the board, has indicated reluctant support for the deal, saying: “If you’re thinking about one of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, would you rather have them as a partner or an enemy?”Other directors have not responded to messages or could not be reached for comment.With many of the agreement’s details still being negotiated, the board did not vote on the deal on Tuesday.The Justice Department could try to block the deal.The Justice Department was looking at professional golf before the deal was announced, with antitrust investigators examining the tour’s closeness with other leading golf organizations and its efforts to deter players from joining LIV.The proposed partnership did not extinguish the department’s interest. In fact, it appears to have strengthened it.Although the tour and the wealth fund have refused to characterize the transaction as a merger, antitrust experts say semantics may not matter. Even if the deal is structured as more of a partnership than an acquisition, the Justice Department could seek to block it, as it successfully did with JetBlue’s alliance with American Airlines.Monahan stirred more doubts in Washington with his public observation that a leading rival would no longer be a threat. Antitrust lawyers said the department could interpret his remark as evidence that the elimination of competition is the aim of the deal, not, say, improving the sport.But Monahan also said the agreement would help create “a productive position for the game at large.” The tour is expected to focus on this in the coming months, arguing that by combining resources and repairing the rift in professional golf, the proposed venture would offer fans the best of all worlds, including more competitions between the finest players on the planet.A LIV Golf event at the Trump National Golf Club in Washington, D.C., this year.Chris Trotman/LIV Golf, via Associated PressThe end of the tension could help persuade regulators to approve the deal, reasoning that it is good for consumers.“If I were the lifetime czar of antitrust in the United States, I would ban the deal and tell them go back and compete,” said Stephen F. Ross, who teaches sports law at Penn State and worked for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.But, he said, “the real world is that neither private litigation nor antitrust enforcers have ever been particularly good at policing competition between sporting entities to make sure that consumers’ preferences are respected.”The department could also scrutinize how the arrangement will affect professional golfers, given the Biden administration’s focus on workers. In its successful effort to block Penguin Random House’s takeover bid for Simon & Schuster, the department’s antitrust regulators cited the potential effects on author compensation.Even though professional golfers, who often earn millions of dollars in prize and sponsorship money, may appear to be a less sympathetic group of workers than others affected by corporate transactions, the department could be eager to build case law related to the labor consequences of deals.Congress wants the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to study the pact.The deal has been loudly criticized on Capitol Hill, and a Senate subcommittee has scheduled a July hearing. But a Senate hearing cannot stop the deal, and so some lawmakers have asked a Treasury Department-led panel to intervene.The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is an interagency panel that has broad latitude to scrutinize any transaction that could result in a foreign entity controlling an American business and threatening national interests. Control is interpreted broadly, and can exist even in an investment for a minority stake.A transaction involving golf tours would not immediately seem to trigger a CFIUS review; it does not involve critical technologies and most likely does not involve much sensitive personal data about U.S. citizens. Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, said earlier this month that it was “not immediately obvious” the deal involved national security concerns.The demands for a review have not detailed specific concerns besides a generalized distaste for a partnership between an American sports titan and an arm of a government “known for chilling dissent, jailing dissidents and enacting draconian punishments,” as Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, and Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, put it.But one possible reason to scrutinize the deal involves real estate since CFIUS can review agreements involving property close to sensitive military sites. One of the PGA Tour’s biggest assets that could be controlled by the new for-profit entity is the Tournament Players Club collection of more than 30 golf courses across the United States that are owned, licensed or operated by the PGA Tour. More

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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Seek to Drop Litigation Against Each Other

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      Although the tour’s deal with the Saudi wealth fund has not closed, the request to a federal judge was a milestone in golf’s surprise détente.The PGA Tour, LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund asked a federal judge in California on Friday to dismiss the litigation that catapulted golf’s economic and power structure into the American court system.The request to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning that it cannot be refiled, came less than two weeks after the tour and the wealth fund, which bankrolled LIV, announced a tentative agreement to form a partnership. Although the deal may not close for months and faces mounting scrutiny in Washington, Friday’s submission in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., was a milestone in the abrupt détente between the rival circuits.Judge Beth Labson Freeman, who has been overseeing the case, is expected to approve the request, a cornerstone of the tentative agreement between the tour and the wealth fund. By abandoning the litigation, LIV, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund are limiting the potential for damaging revelations and surging legal bills, as well as closing off one avenue for recourse if the new alliance falls apart.Justice Department officials, who were already conducting an antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf, are expected to review the deal closely and could even try to block it or compel changes to it. At least two Senate panels are demanding information about the planned transaction and its consequences, and the deal has not even secured the approval of the PGA Tour’s board.Much about the agreement itself also remains in flux, including the valuations of the assets of the tour, LIV and the DP World Tour, formerly the European Tour, that are to be housed inside the new for-profit venture. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, is expected to serve as the company’s chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, is poised to be its chairman. The PGA Tour expects to hold a majority of the seats on the new company’s board, but the wealth fund will have extensive power over how it is bankrolled, assuring the Saudis of significant influence.Until June 6, when the deal was announced, the PGA Tour had warned against allowing Saudi money and influence to take hold in golf, fueling California litigation that had a costly, complicated life.The acrimonious proceedings began last August, when 11 LIV players, including the major tournament champions Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, brought a lawsuit that accused the tour of violating antitrust laws. LIV itself joined the case later that month.The tour also pursued its own claims against LIV, which it said had improperly interfered with existing contracts with players. The tour later received Judge Freeman’s approval to expand its case to include the wealth fund itself and al-Rumayyan, just one of the rulings that placed pressure on the Saudis and their allies, whose superior financial resources put the tour under immense strain.The tour, the wealth fund and LIV waged a ferocious battle over evidence collection in the case, and many filings in the case were redacted, but a federal magistrate judge concluded this year that the wealth fund was “the moving force behind the founding, funding, oversight and operation of LIV,” undercutting its contention that it was a passive investor in golf.A trial had not been expected until at least next year.Hours before Friday’s filing from the tour and LIV, The New York Times filed a motion that asked the court to unseal records in the case. The Times cited a “substantial and legitimate public interest in these proceedings and their outcome” and suggested that the planned partnership could make concerns of competitive harm moot.“To the extent that competitive harm existed at the time of sealing, those justifications may not apply with the same force today — or upon completion of the parties’ anticipated merger,” The Times’s filing said. “Sealing is a decision that can and should be revisited as facts change and circumstances require.”It was not clear when the judge would rule on either of Friday’s motions. More

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      Our Golf Reporter Didn’t See the PGA Tour-LIV Golf Deal Coming, Either

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      The announced deal to drastically change golf took nearly everyone by surprise.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Alan Blinder’s plans blew up around 10 a.m. last Tuesday.Mr. Blinder, who covers golf for The New York Times, had just settled in at his home office when he received a heads-up from a source with some gobsmacking news: The PGA Tour and LIV Golf, the insurgent league bankrolled by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, had agreed to a partnership, suspending a bitter and costly struggle for supremacy of men’s professional golf.“I shouted down the hall to my wife that LIV and the PGA Tour were joining forces, and that I probably wouldn’t be around for dinner,” Mr. Blinder said in an interview. “And then I got to work.” He barely left his desk for the next 13 hours.Below, Mr. Blinder shares how he pivoted from shock to covering the news, the implications of the deal beyond sports and the questions he still has heading in to the U.S. Open, which begins today at the Los Angeles Country Club. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How surprised were you?It was one of those things that people thought was a distinct possibility at some point in the future, but all the reporting we had done, all the signals were that the tour and LIV were preparing to fight each other in court for the foreseeable future. There was a monstrous case in a federal court in California involving contract interference and antitrust law. And suddenly that was all set to vanish.Who was the first person you called?My editors, to tell them that their day was about to get blown up, too. We published an article reporting the news less than 10 minutes after I told my editors, and that soon grew into live coverage. Once the news was published, I tried to figure out, in detail, what on earth had happened and what it meant. Because the announcement was steeped in legalese and jargon, I spent the rest of the day on the phone with sources and experts both inside and outside of golf just trying to understand what this framework agreement meant.Why is this happening now?The most significant factor is that the PGA Tour was under increasing financial strain. I’m not saying the tour was going to go broke tomorrow, but I think the tour realized it was in an exceptionally expensive fight that was not going to get any easier. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has gobs of money, but it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing from its perspective, either. LIV had faced some pretty significant setbacks in court.Who stands to benefit the most from the deal?It depends on your perspective. The PGA Tour is arguing that it’s going to have a majority of the board seats and its commissioner, Jay Monahan, as the new company’s C.E.O. Its supporters are insistent that they still control the game of golf, that they are the majority stakeholder in this endeavor. But the Saudis have significant influence. The governor of Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, is going to be this new entity’s chairman, and the Saudis have extensive rights to invest in this partnership. How this actually looks going forward remains to be seen.Will we see a loosening of PGA Tour standards to align more with the LIV Golf version of the game, which includes music at events, looser dress codes and no cuts of golfers?The PGA Tour is saying that it still has control over all the competition and play. We’re not expecting the overarching rules of golf to change, in part because the tour doesn’t control them. Could you see some elements of LIV borrowed and integrated into the PGA Tour? Perhaps. The PGA Tour is trying to appeal to a younger audience and broaden the appeal of the game.There have been vows from Washington to slow or stop the deal — or, at least, make it very uncomfortable for golf executives. What are the odds that lawmakers will succeed in blocking the deal?A lot of experts expect the Justice Department to go to court to try to either block the deal or insist upon changes. This is also somewhat unusual because it’s not like this deal was announced last week and suddenly the Justice Department was intrigued by pro golf. Their antitrust folks had already spent months and months and months looking at professional golf. So they have a bit of a head start if they really want to scrutinize this deal.Why should people who don’t follow golf care?This is a golf story, but it’s a story that could play out in other sports going forward. Is it possible that we will see Saudi Arabia or other wealthy states try to make their mark on other sports?This is not just a story of sports, or business, or geopolitics. It’s a story that includes all of those different threads and more. We had a big article in Monday’s paper that had four bylines on it, and only two of them were the bylines of sportswriters.What are the biggest questions you have going forward?Beyond tour memberships and where you play, how does golf kind of take a breath after all this tumult? The golf industry is a pretty small world. A lot of people know one another well and have known one another for a long time, so they’ve really been shaken up over the last year. So one of the big questions is, when do all these wounds get patched up? More

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      The Titanic PGA and LIV Golf Deal Stokes Anger on Capitol Hill

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      American lawmakers and officials are studying the pact between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.One of golf’s greatest tests will unfold starting on Thursday, when the U.S. Open begins at the Los Angeles Country Club. It might be an easier lift — it will assuredly be a shorter one — than the test that is emerging in Washington.The abrupt announcement last week that the PGA Tour will tie itself to Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and its LIV Golf league is provoking American officials in ways as predictable as they might be persistent in the months ahead.Antitrust experts are insisting that the Justice Department should consider suing to stop the agreement, which calls for the business operations of LIV and the PGA Tour to be brought into one new company, if the deal closes in the coming months. Lawmakers are complaining that the Florida-based PGA Tour is lurching into business with an arm of the Saudi state that it roundly condemned until last week. Political strategists are scrambling to shape perceptions of an agreement that was forged in secret and, upon its release, promptly criticized as a well-heeled exercise in hypocrisy and whitewashing.Whether the commotion will amount to anything beyond a few news cycles of fussing — a successful assault on the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status comes to mind — may not be clear for months. But a week into golf’s latest maelstrom, a deal that could eventually prove lucrative for players and executives is already promising a booming era for lawyers, lobbyists and political sound bites, too.Although golf had been under pressure inside the Justice Department, where antitrust regulators were looking at the PGA Tour, the announcement last week brought the tumult to Capitol Hill.In the House, Representative John Garamendi, Democrat of California, swiftly introduced a bill to revoke the PGA Tour’s tax-exempt status. And in the Senate, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, announced on Monday that a subcommittee he chairs would conduct an inquiry into a deal that he said “raises concerns about the Saudi government’s role in influencing this effort and the risks posed by a foreign government entity assuming control over a cherished American institution.”At the U.S. Open in Los Angeles this week, PGA Tour golfers like Jon Rahm will be playing with men like Sergio Garcia, who defected to LIV last year.Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesThat there would be a battle was never much in question. The principal short-term matter to resolve was who, exactly, would be picking which fights.The golf side of the battle features two forces with formidable records across decades in Washington. Even though Saudi Arabia has had plenty of bipartisan tangles, the kingdom’s officials and allies have often enjoyed an uncommon rapport with their American counterparts, as was on display during a visit from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last week. And the PGA Tour has usually found the capital to be a wellspring of courtesy, especially when its supporters helped short-circuit a Federal Trade Commission inquiry in the 1990s.The trouble for the wealth fund and the tour is that Washington also has a bipartisan affection for lawmakers imitating sports executives, and browbeating actual ones, in public and in private. It can be good politics to glower at the commissioners who draw more jeers than many elected officials, and headline-making hostility from Congress could complicate the golf industry’s quest to sell the deal to the public — and then move past it.The tour and the wealth fund can take some comfort in history, which suggests a successful congressional effort to thwart the deal directly is unlikely. The Hill, though, could still seek to make the transaction painful beyond a feisty public hearing or two. A change to the tour’s tax status, like the one envisioned in the bill introduced in the House, could cost it millions of dollars a year because it has been structured as a “business league” that is exempt from taxes under section 501(c)(6) of the Internal Revenue Code.Groups like the PGA Tour have combated legislative headaches surrounding their tax-exempt status in the past, with one effort to end the practice for sports leagues vanishing from a 2017 tax bill at the last moment. In the past 18 months, years after the N.F.L. and Major League Baseball surrendered their exempt statuses, public records show that the tour has spent at least $640,000 on lobbying, with much of that work tied to “tax legislation affecting exempt organizations.”As a part of his inquiry, Blumenthal on Monday demanded documents related to the tour’s tax-exempt status and, in his letter to the tour, wondered whether the deal would allow a foreign government to “indirectly benefit from provisions in U.S. tax laws meant to promote not-for-profit business associations.”Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, similarly seethed that the tour had “moved itself right to the top of the leaderboard in terms of most questionable tax exemptions in professional sports.”But Wyden has also suggested that the deal should run into resistance before the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a Treasury Department-led committee that examines national security implications of foreign investments in real estate and American companies.Whether there are serious national security concerns about a deal involving golf tours, or whether the committee will even review the agreement at all, is unclear. Janet Yellen, the secretary of the Treasury, said last week that it was “not immediately obvious” to her that the agreement related to national security. But Wyden, who is planning a congressional investigation of his own, has signaled his interest in the department’s exploring whether the deal could give “the Saudi regime inappropriate control or access to U.S. real estate,” most likely through the tour’s Tournament Players Club collection of golf courses.And those are just the spats that have erupted since last Tuesday.The PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, left, and Jimmy Dunne, a board member, were closely involved in the merger negotiations.Getty ImagesUrged on by LIV’s lawyers, Justice Department regulators have spent months examining whether the PGA Tour’s tactics to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league were illegal, and whether the tour’s coziness with other leading golf organizations — like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament — violated federal law. Instead of quieting misgivings about golf, the deal has only intensified them and might have even armed the department with a new lever: suing to stop the pact, which the tour and wealth fund deny amounts to a merger.“Generally, we want to encourage parties to settle their disputes outside of the judicial process, but it doesn’t mean that settlements are immune from antitrust,” said Henry J. Hauser, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who now practices at Perkins Coie, one of the capital’s best-connected firms. “If companies try to resolve a legitimate dispute by agreeing to common conditions that stifle competition, that could be a problem.”The Justice Department has declined to comment.The tour is moving aggressively to curb Washington’s irritation, going as far to suggest that Congress and other parts of the federal government could have done more to help it rebuff a Saudi challenge.“While we are grateful for the written declarations of support we received from certain members, we were largely left on our own to fend off the attacks, ostensibly due to the United States’ complex geopolitical alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, wrote in a letter to lawmakers last week. “This left the very real prospect of another decade of expensive and distracting litigation and the PGA Tour’s long-term existence under threat.”In the penultimate sentence of his letter, Monahan described the tour as “an American institution,” just as Blumenthal would on Monday. But like many executives before him, Monahan is finding that Washington is forever eager to scrutinize American institutions, especially when sports are involved.He may ultimately find that the shouting has only just begun.Lauren Hirsch More

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      The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger, Explained

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      The announced deal to dramatically change golf is far from complete.The PGA Tour, the world’s pre-eminent professional golf league, and LIV Golf, a Saudi-funded upstart whose emergence over the past year and a half has cleaved the sport in two, have agreed to join forces.The pact is complicated and incomplete, and numerous golfers hate it. They are directing their wrath at the architects of the deal. Let’s start from the beginning.What are the PGA Tour and LIV Golf?The PGA Tour holds tournaments nearly every weekend, mostly in the United States but also in other countries in North America, Europe and Asia, with prize pools worth millions of dollars. The tour has been the home to practically every male golfer you can name: Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Arnold Palmer and so on.It has relationships with, but is separate from, the organizations that stage men’s golf’s four majors: the Masters Tournament, the P.G.A. Championship, the U.S. Open and the British Open. (The L.P.G.A., which runs the women’s tour, is separate.)LIV Golf began in late 2021 with the former PGA Tour player Greg Norman as its commissioner and billions of dollars in backing from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which is known as the Public Investment Fund. LIV lured several PGA Tour players, including the major champions Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka, with massive purses and guaranteed payouts that far surpassed what they could earn on the established circuit.LIV promised a sharp break from golf’s fusty traditionalism, starting with its name, which, when pronounced, rhymes with “give” but is actually the Roman numeral for 54, the number of holes played in each tournament. LIV had music blaring at its events, looser dress codes and team competitions — and tournaments that lasted three days instead of four. Further, and of particular appeal to potential players, while the PGA Tour tournaments cut golfers with the worst scores after two rounds, LIV did not cut anyone.What was the relationship between the leagues before the deal to align?Acrimonious, to put it lightly. Players who joined LIV were forced to resign from the PGA Tour — and its European equivalent, the DP World Tour — under the threat of suspension and fines. LIV sued the PGA Tour, and the PGA Tour countersued, litigation that is technically continuing (though the deal is supposed to resolve it).PGA Tour supporters and other critics of LIV said the venture was simply an attempt by the Saudi government to distract attention from its human rights record, while LIV supporters said the PGA Tour was a monopoly that used inappropriate strong-arm tactics to protect its position in big-time sports.And yet now they are combining?Yasir al-Rumayyan, left, who is the governor of the Public Investment Fund and who oversees LIV, would chair the board of the new entity. Former President Donald J. Trump, middle, has hosted LIV tournaments on his courses.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIt seems so. The PGA Tour and LIV announced on Tuesday the creation of a new entity that would combine their assets, as well as those of the DP World Tour, and radically change golf’s governance.The PGA Tour would remain a nonprofit organization and would retain full control over how its tournaments are played. But all of the PGA Tour’s commercial business and rights — such as the extremely lucrative rights to televise its tournaments — would be owned by a new, yet unnamed, for-profit entity that is currently called “NewCo.” NewCo will also own LIV as well as the commercial and business rights of the DP World Tour.The board of directors for the new for-profit entity would be led by Yasir al-Rumayyan, who is the governor of the Public Investment Fund and also oversees LIV. Three other members of the board’s executive committee would be current members of the PGA Tour’s board, and the tour would appoint the majority of the board and hold a majority voting interest, effectively controlling it.When does this take effect?Not yet.First, the idea also has to be approved by the PGA Tour’s policy board, what it calls its board of directors, which includes some people who were left out of the secret negotiations for this deal in the spring.The policy board is made up of five independent directors, including Ed Herlihy and Jimmy Dunne, who helped negotiate the deal. The board also includes five players: Patrick Cantlay, Charley Hoffman, Peter Malnati, Rory McIlroy and Webb Simpson.Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the PGA Tour, said Tuesday that there was only a “framework agreement” and not a “definitive agreement,” with many details still to be decided. The definitive agreement needs a vote before it can go forward.And for the rest of 2023, all the tours will remain separate, and all their tournaments will continue as scheduled.And after that?Who knows? This is how Monahan answered questions on Tuesday about what golf might look like in the future.Will LIV continue to exist as a separate golf league? “I don’t want to make any statements or make any predictions.”Will LIV golfers go back to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour? “We will work cooperatively to establish a fair and objective process for any players who desire to reapply for membership with the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour,” Monahan wrote in a letter to players.Will PGA Tour players, many of whom spurned LIV and its huge paydays, receive compensation? Will LIV players somehow be forced to give up the money they were guaranteed? “I think those are all the serious conversations that we’re going to have,” Monahan told reporters.How do players feel about all of this?LIV players like Brooks Koepka seemed to take a victory lap.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesBroadly, LIV players seem to think they have gained a major victory, and they are probably right. They got their cake (huge paydays) and can eat it (a pathway to returning to the PGA Tour), too.Mickelson, the first major player to leave for LIV, tweeted that it was an “awesome day today.” Koepka took a jab at Brandel Chamblee, a former professional golfer and current television commentator, who has been vocally anti-LIV.Many PGA Tour players were less jubilant. They were blindsided by the news, learning of the agreement when the public did, and they did not seem to understand why the tour waged a legal war against LIV and a war of morality against Saudi money, only to invite the wolf into the henhouse.Monahan met with a group of players on Tuesday in Toronto at the Canadian Open, which was set to start in two days, and afterward told reporters it was “intense, certainly heated.”Johnson Wagner, a PGA Tour player, said on the Golf Channel that some players at the meeting called for Monahan’s resignation.“There were many moments where certain players were calling for new leadership of the PGA Tour, and even got a couple standing ovations,” he said. “I think the most powerful moment was when a player quoted Commissioner Monahan from the 3M Open in Minnesota last year when he said, ‘As long as I’m commissioner of the PGA Tour, no player that took LIV money will ever play the PGA Tour again.’”Wagner estimated that 90 percent of the players in the meeting were against the merger.On Wednesday morning, however, McIlroy, perhaps the most influential PGA Tour player not named Tiger Woods, said he was reluctantly in favor of the agreement. McIlroy said he had “come to terms” with Saudi money in golf. “Honestly, I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that this is, you know, this is what’s going to happen,” he said.Rory McIlroy is a member of the PGA Tour’s policy board, which must vote to approve the definitive agreement. McIlroy has been one of the most outspoken players against LIV.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesI see a photo of former President Trump up there. Is he involved in this?Yes, though not directly. The Trump Organization owns golf courses around the world, and Donald J. Trump has for years sought to host major tournaments on its properties. Those efforts suffered a setback after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, as the golf establishment distanced itself from the former president. Most significantly, the P.G.A. of America pulled the 2022 P.G.A. Championship from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.But Trump had cultivated unusually close ties to Saudi Arabia while president, and Saudi-backed LIV had no problem embracing him. Last year, two LIV events were held at Trump courses, and this year it will be three.Trump’s son Eric said that the agreement between LIV and the PGA Tour was a “wonderful thing for the game of golf” and that he expected tournaments to continue to be held at Trump-owned courses. He declined to comment on whether the Trump family played any role in bringing the two parties together.If the PGA Tour was so against LIV and Saudi money, what changed?Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, at the Players Championship in March. He said the ability to “take the competitor off of the board” while retaining control was a significant factor in the merger.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock“Listen, circumstances change, and they’ve been changing a lot over the last couple years,” Monahan said.Get it? No?“What changed? I looked at where we were at that point in time, and it was the right point in time to have a conversation,” Monahan said.Between the lines, Monahan made it sound like the agreement came down to money and competition, as it often does. To compete with LIV, the PGA Tour has enhanced purses, supported the DP World Tour financially and pursued extremely expensive litigation. “We’ve had to invest back in our business through our reserves,” Monahan said.He also said the ability to “take the competitor off of the board” while retaining control was significant.Can anybody else stop the deal from going through?The Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission or the European Commission could certainly try.For about a year, the Justice Department has been investigating the tight-knit relationship between the PGA Tour and other powerful entities in golf. Among its questions is whether the organizations have exerted improper influence over the Official World Golf Rankings, which determine players’ eligibility for certain events and can be an important factor in their success and income.As part of their deal, LIV and the PGA Tour agreed to drop their dueling lawsuits, but doing so would not necessarily change the Justice Department’s inquiry. If there were any illegal conduct by the PGA Tour, a merger would not prevent the PGA Tour from being punished for it.“The announcement of a merger doesn’t forgive past sins,” said Bill Baer, who led the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the Obama administration.The federal government, through the Justice Department and the F.T.C., also reviews more than 1,000 mergers for approval each year, and the European Commission reviews them for the European Union. Without a definitive agreement, it is not clear whether this might be the type of combination regulators could block or whether they would try to do so.Saudi Arabia seems to have grand sports ambitions. Will it always remain a junior partner to the PGA Tour in golf?As always, Saudi Arabia has the perfect vehicle to gain more control: money.The Public Investment Fund will invest “billions,” according to its governor, al-Rumayyan, into the new for-profit entity. It will also hold “the exclusive right to further invest in the new entity, including a right of first refusal on any capital that may be invested in the new entity, including into the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and DP World Tour,” according to the release announcing the agreement.If the Public Investment Fund invests more money, it will surely demand more board seats and greater voting rights, further tilting control of men’s professional golf toward the kingdom. More

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      Phil Mickelson Interviewed in Antitrust Inquiry Into Pro Golf

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      The Justice Department met with PGA Tour lawyers this week, but a timeline for the completion of its review is unclear.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — The Justice Department’s antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf has included interviews with players, including the major tournament winners Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Sergio García, as the authorities examine whether the PGA Tour sought to manipulate the sport’s labor market.The department, which has been conducting its investigation since at least last summer, has also explored the specter of collusion in the Official World Golf Ranking and the tight-knit relationships between the leaders of the PGA Tour and the distinct organizations that stage the Masters, the P.G.A. Championship and the U.S. Open.Although lawyers for the PGA Tour met with Justice Department officials in Washington this week, a timeline for the review’s completion — much less whether the government will try to force any changes in golf — is not clear. But the inquiry’s scope and persistence has deepened the turbulence in the sport, which has been grappling with the recent rise of LIV Golf, a league that used money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to lure top players away from the PGA Tour.Eight people with knowledge of the Justice Department’s inquiry described its breadth on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was pending. The department declined to comment.Unlike Major League Baseball, no golf organization has a blanket exemption from federal antitrust laws. A handful of organizations that have close ties to one another have run golf’s top echelon for generations but have withstood some scrutiny in the past.The PGA Tour, the dominant professional circuit in the United States and LIV’s opponent in a pending antitrust lawsuit that the rebel league brought last year, stages tournaments that have often made up the majority of golfers’ competition schedules. But the tour does not run the four so-called major tournaments, which are the sport’s most cherished events and important ways for players to earn prize money and sponsorship-sparking clout.This week’s P.G.A. Championship, for instance, is being overseen by the P.G.A. of America at Oak Hill Country Club, just outside Rochester, N.Y. The U.S. Open is organized by the United States Golf Association, and Augusta National Golf Club administers the Masters Tournament. (The R&A, which organizes the British Open, is based in Britain.)The groups have not moved in lock step since LIV debuted last year — the circuit’s players, for example, have not faced bans from the majors — but professional golf’s establishment has remained a focus of antitrust investigators. Lawyers for LIV have cheered the government’s scrutiny and have regularly communicated with Justice Department officials, who have taken no stance on the league’s lawsuit against the PGA Tour and have not intervened in the case.“If the system is rigged, then consumers are not getting the best product, and if that is the result of an agreement between two or more parties, then that becomes a violation,” said Stephen F. Ross, who teaches sports law at Penn State University and previously worked for the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.The PGA Tour, which declined to comment on Wednesday but has aggressively denied wrongdoing and predicted that the department’s inquiry would fizzle, adopted a hard line last year when LIV emerged. It threatened, and then imposed, suspensions to discourage players from defecting to the Saudi-backed league, which has offered guaranteed contracts sometimes worth $100 million or more and provided some of the richest prizes in golf history.Tour executives have insisted that their strategy was rooted in membership rules designed to protect the collective market power of elite players in matters like television-rights negotiations and tournament sponsorships, and that golfers who breach rules they agreed to can be disciplined. But investigators have shown interest in the possibility that the tour’s punitive approach threatened the integrity of golf’s labor market, which now includes a LIV faction that vocally argues that players are independent contractors who should be free to compete on tours as they choose.The department’s inquiry swiftly moved beyond a superficial glance at LIV’s public complaints and came to include interviews with some of golf’s most recognizable figures.Mickelson, who has won six majors, including the 2021 P.G.A. Championship that at 50 made him the oldest major tournament winner in history, has been a fearsome public critic of the PGA Tour. He accepted a reported $200 million in guaranteed money to join LIV last year, provoked a firestorm when he played down Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses and, last month, all but silenced people who doubted his remaining playing potential when he tied for second at the Masters.DeChambeau was a sensation when he captured the 2020 U.S. Open title, and García, a Masters winner, first starred at a major in the 1990s and has been among the most distinguished European golfers of his generation.LIV golfer Bryson DeChambeau signed autographs for spectators on Wednesday during a practice round ahead of the P.G.A. Championship.Desiree Rios/The New York TimesRepresentatives for Mickelson and DeChambeau declined to comment. A representative for Garcia did not respond to messages requesting comment.LIV declined to comment. But the league’s commissioner, Greg Norman, publicly hinted in March at the circuit’s cooperation with the Justice Department investigation.“The D.O.J. came, trying to understand the antitrust side of things,” Norman said during an appearance in Miami Beach. “So the PGA Tour created this other legal front that they have to fight.”The review of the tour’s labor practices could prove the most consequential element of the investigation, antitrust experts said, if the Justice Department finds fault with the circuit’s approach.“That one goes more to the sort of core of what the PGA is,” said Paul Denis, a retired Justice Department official who later worked on antitrust matters in private practice. “If that’s where they’re headed, that’s much more significant because that really does affect their business model in terms of their relationship with the players.”But American regulators have also become increasingly mindful of the close ties among golf’s most powerful organizations and their executives and administrators.That prong of the investigation is not unique to the golf inquiry. During the Biden administration, the Justice Department’s antitrust division has shown particular concern about people serving in multiple top roles for potential competitors, and its misgivings have sometimes led directors of public companies to surrender board seats.In October, Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the antitrust division, said that the prohibition on overlapping service was “an important, but under-enforced, part” of federal law.Whether the Justice Department seeks to compel changes in executive or board leadership in golf may hinge on whether Kanter and his lieutenants believe they can prove that the PGA Tour is a competitor to a major tournament organizer, a notion that tour executives have privately scoffed at and used to cast doubt on the strength of the department’s potential case. The tour and the major tournaments jockey for television-rights fees and sponsorships, but they are far from head-to-head rivals in many senses.They do, however, cooperate.The tour has a stake in the world ranking system, which major tournaments use, in part, to determine their fields. Along with the tour, Augusta National, the P.G.A. of America and the U.S.G.A. also have seats on the ranking system’s governing board, and all of them supply personnel for its technical committee.Player rankings are based on a complex formula that considers performances in accredited tournaments, from PGA Tour events to competitions on circuits that draw little notice. Since administrators have not yet acted on LIV’s application to participate in the system — LIV executives have acknowledged that the league would require special dispensations to be accepted immediately — its golfers have slid downward in the ranking, threatening their future participation in the majors. (Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, has recused himself from deliberations about LIV’s bid to join the system.)Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division.Carolyn Kaster/Associated PressThe Justice Department’s inquiry is of substantial importance to LIV Golf, which has faced setbacks in its lawsuit against the PGA Tour. But the league has spent months stoking chatter about the federal investigation, its potential implications for the PGA Tour — and the potential benefits for LIV.The tour has countered that effort by citing its record: an F.T.C. inquiry that lasted years and ended in 1995 without any action against the tour.Shortly beforehand, Norman’s first quest to start a global circuit to rival the PGA Tour collapsed.David McCabe More