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      PGA Tour Wanted Greg Norman Ousted as Part of Saudi Deal

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      The American circuit’s efforts were made public in documents that Congress released on Tuesday.The PGA Tour sought the ouster of Greg Norman, the two-time British Open champion who became the commissioner of the insurgent LIV Golf league, as a condition of its alliance with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, according to records that a Senate subcommittee released on Tuesday.The tour and the wealth fund did not ultimately agree to the proposal — crafted as a so-called side letter to a larger framework agreement — and, for now, Norman remains atop LIV. But the deliberations reflect an enmity forged over decades of hostilities between the tour and Norman, one of the most talented players in professional golf history who often chafed at the sport’s economic structure.And they underscore the tensions that could linger if the deal closes.The glimpse into the negotiations between the tour and the wealth fund came as the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations began its first hearing into the arrangement, which calls for the business ventures of the tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour to be brought into a new, for-profit company.The plan is facing significant scrutiny in Washington, where some lawmakers have castigated the tour, once willing to condemn Saudi Arabia’s record of human rights abuses, for abruptly growing cozy with an arm of a coercive government. Beyond any congressional misgivings about the wealth fund’s ties to the Saudi government, Justice Department officials are also interested in whether the deal violates federal antitrust laws and whether they should try to block it.Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in his opening statement on Tuesday that his subcommittee’s hearing was about “much more than the game of golf.”“It is about how a brutal, repressive regime can buy influence — indeed even take over — a cherished American institution to cleanse its public image,” Blumenthal, the subcommittee’s chairman, added, citing the kingdom’s record of killing journalists, abusing dissidents and having “supported other terrorist activities, including the 9/11 attack on our nation.”“It is also about hypocrisy, how vast sums of money can induce individuals and institutions to betray their own values and supporters, or perhaps reveal a lack of values from the beginning,” he continued. “It’s about other sports and institutions that could fall prey, if their leaders let it be all about the money.”The proceeding, held in a crowded Capitol Hill room that previously hosted Supreme Court confirmation hearings and meetings of the 9/11 Commission, included two senior PGA Tour leaders: the chief operating officer, Ron Price, and a board member who was intimately involved in the negotiations that led to the tentative deal that was announced on June 6.In an opening statement, Price argued that the tour, faced with the threat of competing with one of the world’s mightiest sovereign wealth funds, had little choice but to seek some measure of coexistence after months of acrimony in court and in jockeying for the allegiances of the world’s best players.“It was very clear to us — and to all who love the PGA Tour and the game of golf as a whole — that the dispute was undermining growth of our sport and was threatening the very survival of the PGA Tour, and it was unsustainable,” Price said. “While we had significant wins in litigation, our players, our fans, our partners, our employees and the charities we support would lose.”Tour leaders have acknowledged that with negotiations for a final agreement still unfolding, board approval is no certainty. Over the weekend, one member of the board, the former AT&T chief executive Randall Stephenson, resigned. In a letter about his exit, Stephenson said “the construct currently being negotiated by management is not one that I can objectively evaluate or in good conscience support.”Tour executives have been eager to show how the agreement leaves them positioned to run professional golf’s day-to-day operations. The tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, has been tabbed as the chief executive of the new company, expected to be called PGA Tour Enterprises, and the tour is expected to fill a majority of the company’s board seats.They have been far less keen to discuss how Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will serve as the chairman of PGA Tour Enterprises and how the framework agreement envisions sweeping investment rights for a Riyadh-based fund whose power and value have swelled in recent years.Neither al-Rumayyan nor Norman agreed to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, citing scheduling conflicts. But documents released by the subcommittee suggest that both will be factors in an inquiry that could last months.The effort to remove Norman was underway by May 24, when the PGA Tour board’s chairman, Edward D. Herlihy, sent a proposed side letter to Michael Klein, a banker working with the wealth fund. The proposal called for Norman, as well as a British outfit central to developing LIV, to “cease” working on LIV within a month of “the management transition to the PGA Tour.”Although Norman’s long-term fate has been uncertain — he was not a part of the negotiations that led to the preliminary deal, stoking questions about his relevance — it was not until Tuesday that it became clear that his future had been a subject of the talks.LIV did not comment on Tuesday, but three people with knowledge of the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss private talks, said the wealth fund had rejected the tour’s proposal.The documents that the Senate released also detail the deliberations over when and how to announce the deal; Klein was among the figures who said the tour and the wealth fund should not wait for a final agreement to disclose their newfound peace.And the records show how a British businessman with ties to the wealth fund and its advisers reached out to James J. Dunne III, now a tour board member and one of Tuesday’s witnesses, in December. In an email, the businessman, Roger Devlin, suggested that there could be a pathway to an armistice between the tour and the wealth fund.Dunne, at least at first, declined to engage in a substantive way.Devlin re-emerged in April, warning Dunne that there was “a window of opportunity to unify the game over the next couple of months” before, he thought, “the Saudis will doubledown on their investment and golf will be split asunder in perpetuity.”Although committee investigators told senators in a briefing memorandum that they did not know for certain how Devlin’s April message influenced Dunne, the tour board member contacted al-Rumayyan within days.Dunne, al-Rumayyan and a handful of others met in Britain soon after, starting negotiations that included a number of ideas that did not make it into the five-page text of the framework agreement. Those concepts, outlined in a presentation titled “The Best of Both Worlds,” included Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who had pledged fealty to the tour, owning LIV teams and a “large-scale superstar” team golf event that would feature the world’s top men’s and women’s players.Although the initial deal between the tour and the wealth fund did not include some of those proposals, the final agreement is still being hammered out, a process that could take months.At least as of April, according to documents the Senate released, there was even talk of a deal including memberships for al-Rumayyan at Augusta National Golf Club and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews — two of the most prestigious golf clubs in the world, but ones that are not controlled by the PGA Tour. More

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      LIV Golf Resists Senate Request for Greg Norman’s Testimony on Saudi Deal

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      Less than two weeks before a planned hearing about a transaction that could reshape golf, lawmakers are struggling to assemble a witness list.The Capitol Hill meeting room has been booked, the senators’ calendars cleared. But less than two weeks before a Senate subcommittee wants to hold a hearing about the PGA Tour’s planned venture with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the panel’s ambitions for high-profile witnesses are encountering significant resistance.There is almost no prospect that the wealth fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, will voluntarily go before Congress, on July 11 or ever. The PGA Tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, is on medical leave. And LIV Golf, a Saudi-financed league, is balking at sending Greg Norman, who won two British Opens in the decades before he became the circuit’s commissioner and lightning rod, to speak to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.The dispute over witnesses, only weeks into the panel’s examination of the deal, suggests that the inquiry could be turbulent. Lawmakers are especially frustrated by LIV’s offer to send Gary Davidson, its acting chief operating officer, to the hearing instead of Norman.“We have requested testimony from Greg Norman, and unless there is a reasonable explanation for his absence — which we have not yet been provided — Greg Norman is who we expect to appear,” Maria McElwain, the communications director for Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, said in a statement.LIV declined to comment on Friday, but a person familiar with the circuit’s thinking, who requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations with Congress, said the league believed that Davidson was more steeped in its day-to-day operations and the potential ramifications of the deal that has rocked golf since it was announced on June 6. Norman and Davidson were not involved in the secret talks that led to the deal.Under the structure envisioned in a five-page framework agreement signed behind closed doors on May 30, the business operations of the PGA Tour, LIV and the European Tour, known as the DP World Tour — such as television rights and sponsorships — would be brought into a new for-profit company. The plan calls for the PGA Tour to control a majority of the board’s seats, for Monahan to be the company’s chief executive, and for the tour to maintain authority over many professional golf tournaments.But Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund would have extensive investment rights, and al-Rumayyan is positioned to become the company’s chairman, assuring the Saudis of significant sway over men’s professional golf if the deal closes.The planned venture has drawn weeks of scorn and skepticism from Washington, where lawmakers have fumed over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, much as the tour did before it looked to go into business with the wealth fund. Some lawmakers have threatened to strip the tour of its tax-exempt status, and the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators could spend months scrutinizing the deal before deciding whether they will try to block it.And, hewing to the congressional pastime of publicly haranguing sports executives over issues such as steroids and the rights of college athletes, the Senate quickly scheduled a hearing to examine the deal, even though the most substantial details, like the valuations of assets, may not be resolved for months.In letters last week, though, Blumenthal and Ron Johnson, a senator from Wisconsin who is the senior Republican on the subcommittee, invited Norman, Monahan and al-Rumayyan to appear and be prepared to “discuss the circumstances and terms” of the agreement, as well as “the anticipated role” of the wealth fund in professional golf in the United States.LIV Golf chief operating officer Gary Davidson, right, talks with the Australian golfer Wade Ormsby at a LIV event earlier this year.Scott Taetsch/LIV Golf/LIVGO, via Associated PressThe senators, who have not subpoenaed any executives, had hoped to firm up the witness list by the middle of this week, but on Friday their panel was still bargaining with the tour, the wealth fund and LIV.The hearing, if it happens, will be among the most significant opportunities to date for golf executives to ease concerns about the planned transaction. But the proceeding, like any appearance before Congress, carries risks. A single misstep could intensify the public firestorm or, perhaps more troublingly for the deal’s supporters, encourage government officials to take an even more exacting look at the pact. (Antitrust experts, for instance, have predicted that Monahan’s assertion on June 6 that the deal will “take the competitor off of the board” will intensify the Justice Department’s scrutiny.)Norman, in particular, has a history of drawing criticism. Last year, for instance, he played down Saudi responsibility for the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, saying, “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.” In recent months, he has made relatively few public comments, and he and his representatives have declined interview requests from The New York Times.But when Blumenthal and Johnson wrote to him on June 21, they said the subcommittee “respectfully requests that you appear in-person to testify.” LIV executives said Norman would be traveling abroad at the time, and they privately objected to the commissioner being subjected to congressional inquiry without his PGA Tour counterpart enduring the same scrutiny, which seems likely given Monahan’s medical leave.Monahan’s indefinite absence has complicated the tour’s representation at the hearing. The two executives named to lead the tour on an interim basis, Tyler Dennis and Ron Price, were not involved in the deal talks.Al-Rumayyan, however, was. But his appearance on Capitol Hill was never considered probable. One of Saudi Arabia’s most influential figures, he rarely gives interviews outside of tightly controlled settings, and lawyers representing him and the Saudi government waged an aggressive fight to keep him from being deposed in golf-related litigation in the United States. (The litigation was dropped as a part of the tentative deal — one of the few binding components of the framework agreement — and al-Rumayyan never gave sworn testimony.)The wealth fund declined to comment on Friday. The tour, in a statement, said it was “cooperating with the subcommittee’s requests for information and having productive conversations with them about who will represent the PGA Tour on July 11th.”It added, “We look forward to answering their questions about the framework agreement that keeps the PGA Tour as the leader of professional golf’s future and benefits our players, our fans and our sport.”The wealth fund and the tour are deploying armies of lobbyists, lawyers and political fixers to try to smooth the deal’s path. Before going on leave to recuperate from a “medical situation” that the tour has declined to describe, Monahan wrote to lawmakers to defend the agreement. He also complained that Congress had not given the tour enough support to withstand a Saudi “attempt to take over the game of golf in the United States,” as he put it.“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,” Monahan wrote.It is not clear whether the Senate panel will escalate its efforts to secure testimony from Norman, or any of the other witnesses they requested, especially before the July 11 hearing. Most lawmakers are away from Washington for the Senate’s Independence Day break, and few are expected to return to Capitol Hill until the week of the hearing.The hearing’s current timing, though, could be fortuitous for golf leaders. Public attention will turn the following week to the British Open, which will be played at Royal Liverpool. Cameron Smith, who joined LIV not long after his victory last July on the Old Course at St. Andrews, will try to defend his title at golf’s last major tournament of the year. 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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      Details of PGA Tour and Liv Golf Merger Reveal What’s Left to Settle

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      The five-page agreement provoked a furor but included only a handful of binding provisions.The PGA Tour’s tentative deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund included only a handful of binding commitments — such as a nondisparagement agreement and a pledge to dismiss acrimonious litigation — leaving many of the most consequential details about the future of men’s professional golf to be negotiated by the end of the year.The five-page framework agreement was obtained Monday by The New York Times. The proposed deal, announced on June 6 by the tour and the wealth fund, the financial force behind the renegade LIV Golf circuit, has caused an uproar throughout the golf industry. But a review of the agreement points to the rushed nature of the secret, seven-week talks that led to the deal and the complex path that remains ahead for the new venture, a potential triumph for Saudi Arabia’s quest to gain power and influence in sports and, its critics say, to distract from its reputation as a human rights abuser.Most crucially, the tour and the wealth fund must still come to terms on the values of the assets that each will contribute to their planned partnership. Bankers and lawyers have spent recent weeks beginning the valuation process, but the framework agreement includes no substantive details of projected figures or even the size of an anticipated cash investment from the wealth fund.Instead, much of the agreement focuses on the basic structure of the new company that is to house what the accord describes as all of the “commercial businesses/rights” of the PGA Tour and the European Tour, now known as the DP World Tour.The wealth fund is expected to contribute its “golf-related investments and assets,” including the LIV circuit that split the sport, and will have the first opportunity to invest in the new company. The tentative agreement says that the PGA Tour is to maintain “at all times a controlling voting interest” in the new company, but that Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, will serve as the chairman of the new joint entity. Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner who recently went on leave because of an unspecified “medical situation,” is in line to become its chief executive.The new company, according to the agreement, could pursue “targeted mergers and acquisitions to globalize the sport” and may look to incorporate “innovations from LIV,” such as the team golf concept that the league has championed since it debuted last year.Those provisions, though, are not binding until the tour and the wealth fund strike a final agreement. Instead, the only ironclad caveats of the agreement involve seeking the dismissal of litigation, a mandate fulfilled on June 16; a ban on recruiting players to rival circuits; a deadline of Dec. 31 to sign final accords, absent a mutual extension; and confidentiality and nondisparagement clauses.The effective gag agreement appears far-reaching and prohibits the tour and the wealth fund from “any defamatory or disparaging remarks, comments or statements” about the other side and any “ultimate beneficial owners” — a phrase that could be interpreted to include the Saudi government, which the tour had previously condemned for its human rights record.“I recognize everything that I’ve said in the past and in my prior positions,” Monahan, a leading architect of the deal, said this month. “I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information that I had at that moment, and I said it based on someone that’s trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms, but circumstances do change.”Saudi officials have denied that their investments in sports, which include efforts in soccer, Formula 1 racing and boxing, are intended to sanitize the kingdom’s reputation. Instead, they have depicted those investments as a glossy component of a sweeping effort to diversify the country’s economy under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto leader who is also the wealth fund’s chairman.Al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor, signed the agreement on behalf of the Saudis, with no evidence of direct involvement by Greg Norman, LIV’s commissioner.Monahan and Keith Pelley, the DP World Tour’s chief executive, effectively represented the golf establishment when they signed the deal behind closed doors in San Francisco on May 30. It was sprung upon almost the entire golf industry, including most of the PGA Tour’s board, a week later.The board, which has been considering the deal that it was largely shut out of negotiating, is expected to discuss the pact’s initial terms during a meeting in Detroit on Tuesday. The 11-member board is not believed to be planning a vote yet because the final nuances of the accord may not be hammered out for months.The deal faces scrutiny well beyond the tour’s board. In Washington, Justice Department officials and congressional investigators are preparing to pore over the details of the accord, which antitrust regulators could ultimately try to block. The tour shared a copy of the agreement with a Senate subcommittee on Monday evening, just more than two weeks before a hearing on Capitol Hill that many expect to become contentious.But tour executives concluded in recent months that the new economic order that LIV’s swift rise provoked — swelling legal bills, larger prize purses, a diluted product with the world’s most marketable players competing against one another only four times a year at golf’s major tournaments — was unsustainable. They sought a détente with the Saudis and found a receptive audience in and around the wealth fund, where some officials were frustrated by a series of legal setbacks connected to LIV and uneven success in gaining traction in the crucial American sports market.The second paragraph of the framework nodded toward the turmoil, with the tour and the wealth fund saying they were interested in “ending divisions.” Some elements of the deal amounted to olive branches. In one section, for instance, the two sides agreed to “cooperate in good faith and use best efforts” to bring secure Official World Golf Ranking accreditation for LIV events.The fate of LIV, which sapped the PGA Tour of some of its star players after offering exorbitant contracts and prize purses, is not included in a binding part of the deal. Instead, the new company, if it comes to pass, is expected to “undertake a full and objective empirical data-driven evaluation of LIV and its prospects and potential.”The framework does not outline any financial penalties if the deal does not ultimately progress, but it says the tour and the wealth fund “can revert to operating their respective businesses” if the agreement collapses. 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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      European Tour May Punish LIV Golfers, Arbitrators Rule

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      The decision by a panel in London was an early test for the Saudi Arabia-backed circuit, which is also facing legal battles in the United States.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Golf’s European tour may punish players who defected to the rival Saudi-financed LIV Golf series, an arbitration panel in London ruled in a decision released on Thursday, the first day of the Masters Tournament.With litigation in the United States possibly years from a conclusion, the panel’s decision about the European series, the DP World Tour, was the subject of immense anticipation and anxiety among players and executives. All sides saw it as a crucial test of whether long-established tours could easily discipline players who joined LIV, the league bankrolled with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.The ruling in Europe will have no effect on the Masters, where 18 LIV players are in the field. But it was a blow to a rebel league that had hoped the days of tournament play would deliver a springboard to greater credibility, not renewed discussion about its appeal and risk to big-name pros.The decision is also likely to shape the European roster for the Ryder Cup, the wildly popular U.S.-vs.-Europe competition that will be held in Italy this fall. To be eligible for the European team, players must be members of the DP World Tour.The case before the arbitrators in London involved a narrow issue: the conflicting events policy of the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, which bars players from participating in certain tournaments without approval. In their ruling, announced after a five-day hearing in February, the arbitrators concluded that rebel players had committed “serious breaches” of the tour’s rules.The arbitrators found that the violations “increased the likelihood that commercial partners would be tempted to terminate or limit relationships with the tour.” Citing “the scale and importance of the potential harm” to the tour, the panel said that Keith Pelley, the tour’s chief executive, had “acted entirely reasonably” when he turned down the players’ requests to appear at LIV events.In a statement hours before the start of the Masters, Pelley embraced the ruling.“We are delighted that the panel recognized we have a responsibility to our full membership to do this and also determined that the process we followed was fair and proportionate,” Pelley said.LIV did not immediately comment on the decision.Even though the case dealt only with a specific tour policy, many sports lawyers predicted that its outcome could shape ambitions to create alternatives to marquee leagues, tours and federations. A victory for the tour, that thinking went, would lend fresh support to the kinds of rules leading sports organizers have created to protect their television rights agreements and market power. A ruling for the players might have encouraged athletes — and not just in golf — to weigh more seriously overtures from start-up leagues and competitions offering richer paydays.The subject has bubbled up repeatedly in recent years, with particularly fraught cases involving soccer, speedskating and swimming, and could become more common as athletes assert greater autonomy and as wealthy Persian Gulf states look to invest more heavily in sports. The women’s golf world, for example, has been rife with speculation that Saudi Arabia will eventually underwrite a women’s league similar to LIV, a competition that has fractured the men’s game.That split became conspicuous last June at a course near London, when longtime tour players like Ian Poulter, Charl Schwartzel and Lee Westwood appeared at LIV’s first event. The tournament offered early glimpses at just how much money golfers stood to make if they shunned traditional tours in favor of the Saudi-backed circuit: Schwartzel won $4.75 million at the three-day event, thanks to his individual and team performances. He had earned close to 17.7 million euros, or more than $19 million, over his tour career, where his first win was in 2004.Tour officials, wary of allowing individual golfers to undercut their multimillion-dollar television contracts and sponsorship arrangements, responded with suspensions and fines. Poulter, though, was among the players who won a stay of the punishments, pending the arbitrators’ ruling. This week’s decision ultimately covered 12 players — four others had abandoned their appeals — who competed in the LIV event in Britain or a subsequent one in the United States, a group that included Poulter, Westwood, Martin Kaymer, Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed. Schwartzel and Sergio García were two of the players who had withdrawn from the case.García, Reed and Schwartzel, all of whom are past Masters winners, are among the LIV players competing this week in Augusta.LIV’s skeptics routinely see the circuit, with its 54-hole, no-cut tournaments, as promoting a diluted version of golf and as a way for Saudi Arabia to put distance between itself and its human rights record. LIV executives insist they are only trying to electrify and repopularize a sport they judge stagnant, and the league’s players, many of whom signed contracts that guaranteed them tens of millions of dollars, see themselves as independent contractors who should be free to compete when and where they choose.“There is no difference whether I’m on the PGA Tour or on LIV: I’ve always played two tours,” Reed said in a January interview at a DP World Tour event in Dubai, where he was wearing a LIV hat on a driving range. “So all these guys saying that you can’t basically double-dip, you can’t — What’s that cake phrase they love to use? Make your own cake and eat it, or something like that? — well, Rory, myself, all these guys have played on multiple tours.” (Rory McIlroy, a star of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, has been among the most outspoken opponents of LIV.)In their decision, the arbitrators said pointedly that the independent contractor argument was “overplayed.”“Individual players have to accept some limitation on their freedoms inherent in tour membership,” the panel said. No player, the arbitrators noted, “suggested that he had given up his independence by signing up to onerous (albeit remunerative) obligations to LIV.”The tour, the arbitrators ruled, had not broken laws governing competition or the restraint of trade.“It is no part of competition law to require incumbents to offer no resistance — they are entitled to react and retaliate, even if dominant,” the panel added.The ruling by the arbitrators is unlikely to have a direct effect on the legal battles in the United States, where LIV and the PGA Tour are mired in bitter and expanding litigation. The American dispute will not go to trial before next year.The British newspaper The Times had reported on Tuesday that the arbitrators had ruled in the DP World Tour’s favor, triggering a wave of chatter around Augusta National’s grounds. With the text of the ruling then still unreleased, McIlroy largely deferred comment but said, “If that is the outcome, then that certainly changes the dynamic of everything.”If LIV players resign from the tour, their prospects of making the Ryder Cup team will vanish under the eligibility rules. Sticking around might not guarantee a place on the roster, either.“I can only do what I can do, and that is to play the tournaments I can play, try to play them the best way possible, and then everything else is out of my hands,” García said on Tuesday. “So the decisions if we can get picked or will get picked or anything like that, it’s not going to come down to me.”Instead, he said, his Ryder Cup fate could be settled by whether the European captain, Luke Donald, “thinks that I’m good enough. We’ll see.” More

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      A New Twist for the Tradition-Bound Masters: The LIV Golf Era

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      LIV, Saudi Arabia’s breakaway league, split men’s professional golf. Now, the drama is coming to one of the sport’s most hallowed stages.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The mystery started in earnest last spring and lasted until autumn’s twilight. But Phil Mickelson — among the most famous frontmen for LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — insists that he believed he would be allowed to play the 2023 Masters Tournament, which opens Thursday.Never mind any discomfort, or how on-course rivalries had transformed into long-distance furies tinged by politics, power, pride and money. No, Mickelson reasoned, tradition would prevail at Augusta National Golf Club, surely among sports’ safest wagers.“The history of this tournament, the history of the majors, is about bringing the best players together, and it really needs to rise above any type of golf ecosystem disruption,” Mickelson, a three-time Masters winner, said in an interview last month.“I wasn’t really worried,” said Mickelson, who spent the 2022 Masters in a self-imposed sporting exile after he effectively downplayed Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses. But, he allowed, “there was talk” of exclusion from one of golf’s most revered events.Augusta National extinguished the talk on Dec. 20: If a golfer qualified for the Masters through one of its familiar pathways, like being a past champion, his 2023 invitation would be in the mail.The club’s choice will infuse its grounds through at least Sunday, when the tournament is scheduled to conclude, weather permitting. All of the customary narratives that surround a major tournament are bubbling: Will Scottie Scheffler become the first repeat winner in more than two decades? Might Rory McIlroy finally complete the career Grand Slam? Can Jon Rahm regain his dominant winter form? And, as ever, what will Tiger Woods do?But an undercurrent of ambition, curiosity and gentility-cloaked discord is present, too.Dustin Johnson, Mickelson and Harold Varner III, all LIV golf athletes, on the 18th green during a practice round on Tuesday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFor LIV, the competition will be a breakthrough if one of its players dons the winner’s green jacket. For the PGA Tour, the Masters is an opportunity to showcase that its 72-hole approach to an ancient game is still king. And for Augusta National, the tournament is an opportunity to depict itself as skeptically above golf’s chaotic fray.“At the Champions Dinner, I would not have known that anything was going on in the world of professional golf other than the norm,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said Wednesday, the day after the traditional gathering of past Masters winners.He added: “So I think, and I’m hopeful, that this week might get people thinking in a little bit different direction and things will change.”It was virtually certain that this week would not descend into open brawling, and it has not. Some players have complained about a news media hyperfocus on any potential tensions — and acknowledged that they, too, had wondered about the vibe and contemplated the stakes for their tours.Cameron Smith, at No. 6 the highest-ranked LIV player, said PGA Tour players had greeted him with hugs and handshakes. Asked what, exactly, he had anticipated, he replied: “I wasn’t really sure, to be honest.”He seemed more certain that LIV could use a strong showing on the leaderboards around Augusta National’s hallowed stage.“I think it’s just important for LIV guys to be up there because I think we need to be up there,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of chatter about these guys don’t play real golf; these guys don’t play real golf courses. For sure, I’ll be the first one to say the fields aren’t as strong. I’m the first one to say that, but we’ve still got a lot of guys up there that can play some really serious golf.”Cameron Smith, LIV’s highest-ranked player, said PGA Tour golfers had greeted him with hugs and handshakes.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMcIlroy, seemingly approaching sainthood in the eyes of PGA Tour executives for his steadfast defense of their circuit, said the Masters was “way bigger” than golf’s big spat and that he relished the opportunity to go up against 18 LIV players who are among the world’s finest golfers. Being around them again, he suggested, can build rapport, though he acknowledged restored proximity was not a guarantee of perpetual harmony.“It’s a very nuanced situation and there’s different dynamics,” McIlroy said. Referring to Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson, the LIV stars and major winners, he added: “You know, it’s OK to get on with Brooks and D.J. and maybe not get on with some other guys that went to LIV, right?”For its part, Augusta National, whose private membership roster is believed to include at least two former secretaries of state, has sought to tamp down theatrics.Groupings for Thursday and Friday are about the most anodyne possible, at least in the PGA Tour vs. LIV context. Woods and Bryson DeChambeau, who recently suggested that Woods had all but excommunicated him, will not have a reunion at the first tee. Fred Couples, a PGA Tour loyalist who called LIV’s Sergio Garcia a “clown” and Mickelson a “nutbag,” is scheduled to play alongside Russell Henley and Alex Noren. McIlroy is grouped with Sam Burns and Tom Kim.And Ridley said that Augusta National had not invited Greg Norman, the LIV commissioner, to the club, where the leaders of the PGA Tour and DP World Tour have held court in recent days.“The primary issue and the driver there is that I want the focus this week to be on the Masters competition,” Ridley said. He said he believed Norman had attended the tournament twice in the last decade, once as a radio commentator.Ridley also sidestepped a query about whether Augusta National had become complicit in “sportswashing” Saudi Arabia’s image.“I certainly have a general understanding of the term,” Ridley said. “I think, you know, it’s for others to decide exactly what that means. These were personal decisions of these players, which I, you know, at a high level, don’t necessarily agree with.”“I want the focus this week to be on the Masters competition,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWith tournament play scheduled to begin Thursday morning, the week’s emphasis is rapidly shifting toward the competition itself. The event’s American television broadcasters appear unlikely to dwell on off-course subjects unless they must.“We’re not going to put our heads in the sand,” said Sean McManus, the chairman of CBS Sports, which will broadcast the third and fourth rounds on Saturday and Sunday. “Having said that, unless it really affects the story that’s taking place on the golf course, we’re not going to go out of our way to cover it, and I’m not sure there’s anything that we could add to the story.”ESPN, which will air the tournament’s first two rounds, has suggested it is even less interested in golf’s geopolitical soap opera. Curtis Strange, the two-time U.S. Open champion who is now a commentator, said he didn’t “see us mentioning the Roman numerals at all.”“We have to give respect to the Masters Tournament,” he said. “The only way I could ever see anything coming up — and not even mentioning LIV — but some of these players haven’t played a lot of competitive golf. So how sharp can they be?”LIV golfers have said that they will be prepared for the rigors of the Masters, even though they have been playing 54-hole events, instead of 72, at courses that some doubt will have them ready for Augusta’s challenges.That dynamic will make this year’s tournament more of a proving ground than usual. But there is always next year: When Augusta National released its Masters entry criteria for 2024 on Wednesday, there were no changes that immediately threatened LIV players.Mickelson’s bet was still proving safe. More

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      LIV Players Excluded From World Golf Rankings For Now Or Forever?

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      The Official World Golf Ranking is a dividing line between LIV Golf and the sport’s establishment. Since the metric helps determine access to major tournaments, the argument is hardly academic.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Since he stepped into a tee box near London last June, Dustin Johnson has earned at least $36 million in prize money, the most of any golfer in the world.He has also seen his standing in the Official World Golf Ranking plunge, from No. 15 to No. 69.Less than three years after his Masters Tournament victory, Johnson is hardly playing poorly. But his collapse in the ranking — one he says he no longer bothers to monitor — is a calculable consequence of his choice to leave the PGA Tour for LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that debuted last year.LIV has gleefully rocked men’s golf and reveled in challenging some of the old order. The circuit, though, is finding that its independent streak can go only so far, and it is seeking at least some favor and special dispensations from the industry’s most hidebound gatekeepers.Those allowances have not come yet. LIV asked to be included in the ranking system about nine months ago, but executives are still weighing its application, and players like Johnson are slipping in the formula-based standings since they are appearing in few, if any, events that award ranking points. In golf, ranking is not merely a matter of ego; for many players, it affects the values of sponsorship deals and serves as a crucial gateway for entry to major tournaments such as the Masters, which will begin Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.“They need to do something to figure it out because, obviously, we have great players playing over here, and we’re not getting any points for events, and we should be,” said Johnson, who plays on the LIV circuit with the past major champions Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith, who, at No. 6, is the highest-ranked LIV player.“They just need to figure out a system that’s fair for everyone,” Johnson, who spent 135 weeks at the No. 1, said in an interview last month, when he figured his play these days warranted a position around No. 5.A potential affiliation between LIV and the O.W.G.R., which a handful of elite tours and governing bodies control, is being debated privately. But whenever a resolution comes, its ripple effects could shape LIV’s allure to players and the majesty of the Masters and the other major men’s tournaments: the British Open, the P.G.A. Championship and the U.S. Open.LIV and its supporters contend that if the league’s players are routinely excluded from major tournaments because of a spat over rankings, the reputations of golf’s pre-eminent tests will erode and, in turn, public interest in the competitions will fade. The Saudi league’s critics, though, are skeptical that LIV’s 54-hole, no-cut tournaments should be readily compared to the 72-hole events that are commonplace on established circuits like the PGA Tour.Players earn ranking points each time they compete in eligible events over a rolling two-year period. So as the months have progressed and LIV golfers have appeared in fewer sanctioned competitions, their banked points have declined, and they have slid down the list.Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, arrived at last year’s Masters at No. 19. He has fallen to No. 155. Koepka, a four-time major tournament winner who prevailed at LIV’s event in Florida over the weekend, missed the Masters cut last spring but was No. 16 afterward. A former world No. 1, Koepka is now No. 118. Patrick Reed, the 2018 Masters champion, played Augusta last year ranked 31st; he now stands at No. 70.“I think a lot of people are against them having world ranking points,” Jon Rahm, the current third-ranked player and an occasionally fearsome critic of the formula, said late last year. “I’m not necessarily against it, but there should be adjustments,” maybe, he suggested, by prorating the available points for 54-hole events.“I think a lot of people are against them having world ranking points,” Jon Rahm said about LIV’s players.Mark Baker/Associated PressBut Rahm, a PGA Tour star, added of LIV: “They do have some incredible players. To say that Dustin wasn’t one of the best players this year would be a mistake.”Bickering over golf rankings is not quite as old as the sport itself, but it hardly started with LIV’s founding.The system that became the O.W.G.R. debuted in 1986 as the Sony Ranking. Ostensibly created to sort the planet’s best golfers — the PGA Tour money list had been regarded as the most sensible measure of a player’s fortunes — the ranking was initially seen in some quarters as a glossy way for a powerful agent to elevate the profiles of his firm’s clients. There was even a derisive nickname for the system: the “Phony Ranking.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.Learn more about our process.Views eventually softened, and now there is little mistaking the ranking’s widespread, if sometimes begrudging, acceptance, or its links to the golf establishment. Its governing board includes the leaders of the P.G.A. of America, the R&A, the U.S. Golf Association and some of the world’s most elite tours.The O.W.G.R. has said almost nothing publicly about LIV’s application. By the end of last year, though, the ranking’s technical committee had completed a review of LIV’s application, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the confidential process. The milestone shifted the application to another committee, this one including representatives of the major tournaments, to render a verdict.The technical committee concluded that the new circuit easily cleared some of the standards for inclusion, such as sponsorship from a tour that may propose new members (in this case, the Asian Tour) and a commitment to abide by golf’s playing rules. But the panel, according to people involved in the process, flagged what some members regarded as serious shortcomings in LIV’s model, which some thought made it a “closed shop.”Officials fretted over the absence of an open qualifying school — tournaments that can allow players to join a circuit — before the start of LIV seasons, although league officials have argued that their “promotions” event suffices. And beyond the 54-hole nature of LIV tournaments, there were widespread worries about the league’s reliance on 48-player fields, which are far smaller than typical for professional circuits, and concerns that LIV golfers’ ownership stakes around the league could affect performances. Even now, skeptics note, LIV has not been around long enough to participate in the system.But LIV executives and players have focused on a particular lifeline: that the ranking’s most senior leaders have absolute discretion over admissions, including the authority to set aside any eligibility guideline.The major tournaments that use the rankings as an entry method have similar powers and are not obligated to employ the formula in the future, but no organizer has even hinted at plans to abandon the ranking. Unless Augusta National, for instance, alters its protocol, many of the 18 LIV players in the Masters field this year could be left out as soon as 2024.A handful face far less risk. In Augusta, many golfers and executives anticipate that past Masters winners will maintain their traditional lifetime privileges to play the tournament. But less renowned LIV players know that this turn at Augusta National could be their last — unless, for example, they finish in the top 12 this year.“It amps up the pressure,” said Harold Varner III, who made his Masters debut last year but said he had accepted the possibility of being left out of future major fields. (“My goal over all through all of this was, what was best for golf — and getting paid,” he said.)“It amps up the pressure,” Harold Varner III said of potentially being excluded from future major tournaments.Doug Mills/The New York TimesEven players who have proven capable of winning majors have confessed to fears that they could eventually be left out of some of golf’s most venerated events.“Augusta is one of the places where you want to play every year,” said Smith, who, if the rules remain unchanged, will qualify for the Masters through at least 2027 by virtue of his British Open win last July but currently has no guarantees beyond that. “Until these rankings get sorted, it’s definitely going to be in the back of my mind for sure.”He has, though, often resisted the urge to lash out in personal terms, even as his ambitions of reaching No. 1 have darkened for now.“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” Smith, who was reportedly promised at least $100 million in guaranteed money if he joined LIV, said recently on an Arizona patio. “But at the same time, I think there’s an argument for coming to a golf tournament and knowing who you have to beat.”If Smith, or one of his LIV colleagues, wins at Augusta in the coming days, his ranking will surely soar. The Masters, after all, is an eligible tournament. More