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      For PGA Tour Players, Betrayal and Confusion in Saudi Deal’s Wake

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      Members of America’s most famous golf tour thought they had a voice. Then came a surprise pact that could reshape the sport for years to come.The U.S. Open winner Gary Woodland had lately sensed something different in professional golf.Players were empowered and emboldened. Executives were listening. The PGA Tour was changing. With the circuit’s dominance challenged by LIV Golf, an upstart built with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the tour felt closer to a cooperative than a dispassionate titan of professional sports.Then came the tour’s surprise announcement on June 6 that, after it had lobbied players to forsake the Saudi money it had associated with human rights abuses, the PGA Tour and the wealth fund would join forces. None of the five players who sit on the tour’s board learned of the deal more than a few hours before it became public.“It was turning toward players being heard over the last year,” Woodland, who became a professional golfer in 2007, said at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the U.S. Open will conclude on Sunday. June 6, he said, showed that the voices of tour players had suddenly been “thrown out the door a little bit.”Woodland is not an outlier. In interviews and during news conferences at the Open, top players described a shaken faith in a PGA Tour they believed had recently offered them more meaningful agency and greater influence. The tour’s ability to ease the restive atmosphere could influence whether the deal, which is facing significant skepticism inside the tour and in Washington, advances in the coming months.Compared to other prominent professional sports leagues in the United States, the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit, has an unusual structure.Unlike in, say, the N.B.A. or the N.F.L., there are no team owners, and there is no labor union. Instead, players are independent contractors who earn eligibility for PGA Tour membership. Tour members do not generally have financial guarantees — they may, however, earn money through assorted sponsorships — but receive tour paychecks tied to their on-course performances. (When Viktor Hovland won the Memorial Tournament this month, he earned $3.6 million of the event’s $20 million prize fund. Golfers who did not play well enough to secure places in the final two rounds collected nothing.)In return for access to tour events and purses, players allow the circuit to negotiate television rights deals on their behalf, among other conditions. Even without a labor union, players theoretically have a say in tour operations: The 11-member board includes five seats for players, and there is a 16-player council that “advises and consults” with board members and the tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan.But when tour leaders negotiated a framework agreement to reshape the sport in the most consequential ways since the modern tour’s founding in the 1960s, players were not in the room. Rory McIlroy, the world’s third-ranked golfer and a member of the tour’s board, learned of the deal a week after it was signed behind closed doors at a Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco.Deepening the turmoil, the tentative deal makes little about the future clear, mostly because lawyers and executives are still haggling over the fine print that stands to determine much about how the sport will be organized, funded and operated.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” Jon Rahm said.Marcio J. Sanchez/Associated Press“I think the general feeling is that a lot of people feel a bit of betrayal from management,” said Jon Rahm, the winner of this year’s Masters Tournament.“It’s just not easy as a player that’s been involved, like many others, to wake up one day and see this bombshell,” he added. “That’s why we’re all in a bit of a state of limbo because we don’t know what’s going on and how much is finalized and how much they can talk about, either.”The sense of duplicity, some players suggested, might not be so severe had they not grown confident in the notion that they were increasingly central to developing the tour’s path for the years ahead.As Tiger Woods receded from golf’s spotlight, Woodland observed, players found their sport searching for figures to help set its tone and direction.“When I first started, you just went out and played and who knows what was going on,” said Woodland, who remains close to Woods. “It was pretty much everyone jumped on Tiger’s coattails and we just went.” More recently, Woodland said, “guys are starting to get a little more of their own voice, and you’re starting to see different opinions.”Faced with the rise of LIV Golf, players had helped devise changes to the tour’s format and schedule. During a private meeting in Delaware last summer they tried to hash out adjustments that could help curb an exodus to LIV. Afterward, Monahan declared that the Delaware meeting “represents a remarkable moment for the PGA Tour and showcases the essence of what being a membership organization is all about.”By the middle of last month, though, Monahan was in Venice for secret talks with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund. Two board members, neither of them players, were on the trip to Italy. The men later gathered in San Francisco over Memorial Day to finish up the framework deal. Afterward, the circle of people who knew about the planned partnership expanded, but did not include any players until June 6, when tour and Saudi officials announced the pact. Some players learned about it on Twitter.The mood inside the tour only worsened as it became apparent that the deal had been constructed in extraordinary secrecy, with players’ representatives on the board shut out of the talks.Joel Dahmen said he recognized that voices of midlevel players like him would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberationsEtienne Laurent/EPA, via Shutterstock“We were given the impression that we were being heard,” said Joel Dahmen, a professional player since 2010 whose public profile soared this year when he appeared in the Netflix documentary series “Full Swing.”Dahmen, a self-described “midlevel” guy, said he recognized that voices like his would receive only so much priority in the tour’s strategic deliberations. But many golfers were flabbergasted that even its greatest headliners were kept away from the negotiations, even as some of their colleagues said they understood that it was impractical to expect tour officials to confer with the entire membership in advance.“If you have to consult every player, then probably nothing’s ever going to happen, and that’s the balance for any organization,” said Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters winner and former world No. 1 player who chairs the tour’s Player Advisory Council. “It’s like the golf club at home: They’ve got the members’ committee, and a few on that committee get to influence decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Scott added, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”PGA Tour officials have rushed to quell the outrage, mindful that frustrations with the organization helped prepare the ground for LIV to entice players away from what is America’s flagship men’s golf circuit. Senior executives have been at the U.S. Open, and Monahan, who began a leave of absence this past week after what the tour described only as “a medical situation,” held a contentious meeting with players hours after the deal’s announcement.Players with some of the closest ties to Monahan and other executives said they had received a barrage of feedback unlike any they recalled. Webb Simpson, a board member who won the 2012 U.S. Open, said, perhaps with a dose of hyperbole, that he had probably heard more from players since June 6 than he had in his 15 years as a tour golfer.“We want to have unity, but we also want to trust our leaders,” said Simpson, who added that he had been calling players to hear out their misgivings and aggravations. “I think as a whole they are struggling with these decisions.”“It’s a player-centric tour,” Adam Scott said, “but it depends where you’re sitting and how you look at things.”Richard Heathcote/Getty ImagesAlthough McIlroy has signaled his support for the deal, other players with board seats have been publicly 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,” Simpson said.He sounded much like Patrick Cantlay, another board member, who said that “it seems like it’s still too early to have enough information to have a good handle on the situation.”The board is scheduled to meet later this month, but it is not clear whether the pact will be ready for a vote by then. At the very least, board members are expecting a briefing that might allow them to answer more detailed questions about the tour’s future.All players can do for now, many said, is to try to imagine what the tour might look like and where they might fit into a changed ecosystem.“Where I think I am — and a lot of other players are — is we’re going to show up at the biggest and best events that we have tee times at, the ones that pay the most money, and we’re going to go play until someone tells us we can’t play in those events anymore, and then we’ll go find other events,” Dahmen said.They are also settling in for a protracted period of uncertainty, grappling with the possibility that the tour could be in turmoil for another year or more. It is an unfamiliar road for many of them, after all of these years in which the tour was the unquestioned destination of choice for many of the world’s top golfers, its business model familiar.“As members or as players,” Scott said, “we haven’t had to deal with anything like this before.” 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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      U.S.G.A. Steadfast in Plan to Curb Pro Golfers’ Driving Distances

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      Players are objecting to a proposed change from golf’s rulemakers to use new balls, but the U.S. Golf Association said Wednesday it would not abandon the plan.The United States Golf Association acknowledged Wednesday that it had heard ferocious opposition to its proposal for professional players to use balls that travel shorter distances — but it also signaled no interest in abandoning its ambitions to rein in equipment in the next several years.The association and the R&A, a governing body based in Britain, had in March proposed a rule that they estimated could trim top golfers’ tee shots by an average of about 15 yards. Framed as an effort to preserve the sport and the relevance of many of its finest courses, the proposal provoked a backlash among hard-driving professionals, who are routinely hitting tee shots at distances that were all but unimaginable only a few decades ago, and equipment manufacturers, who relish selling weekend duffers the same balls the stars strike at events like this week’s U.S. Open.“Our intent is pure; it’s not malicious,” Fred Perpall, the U.S.G.A.’s president, said at a news conference at the Los Angeles Country Club, where the Open will begin on Thursday. “We’re not trying to do something to damage anyone. We’re thinking about all the good that this good game has given us, and we’re thinking about what is our responsibility to make sure that this game is still strong and healthy 50 years from now for our children’s children.”The debate about distance in golf has played out for years, with executives increasingly irritated with stopgap fixes, like redesigning holes to accommodate the game’s most potent hitters. Some of the sport’s retired greats, including Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player, have pressed golf’s rule book writers to take blunt and urgent action.“Not everybody’s got the ability to go buy the golf course next door, like you do at Augusta,” Nicklaus said in an interview with The New York Times at the Masters Tournament in April. “You can’t just keep buying land and adding. We used to have in this country probably a couple of thousand golf courses that could be tournament golf courses. Today, we maybe have 100.”In the 2003 season, PGA Tour players recorded an average driving distance of about 286 yards, with nine golfers, including Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and John Daly, typically hitting at least 300 yards off the tee. So far this season, the tour’s average driving distance stands at nearly 298 yards. Some 91 players — up nearly 10 percent since the U.S.G.A. and the R&A released their proposal — exceed 300 yards on average.Under the plan, balls that travel more than 317 yards when struck at 127 miles per hour would generally be banned.The U.S.G.A. and the R&A are gathering feedback about their proposal, which would not take effect until at least 2026 and would be classified as a model local rule, empowering individual tours and events to adopt it. The U.S.G.A. and the R&A would almost certainly impose the rule at the events they control, including the U.S. Open and the British Open, two of the four men’s major championships.But other golf power brokers, including the PGA Tour, have not embraced the plan, and many of the game’s biggest stars have openly resisted the thought of deliberately curbing distance.Even those who have been receptive to the prospect of making balls seem a little less like long-distance missiles have urged golf’s leaders to have a consistent standard throughout the game, without differences for top-tier professionals.Under the plan, balls that travel more than 317 yards when struck at 127 miles per hour would generally be banned.Desiree Rios/The New York Times“I just don’t think you should have a ball for the pros that might be used some tournaments, might not be used some tournaments, then amateurs can buy different golf balls,” said Matt Fitzpatrick, who won last year’s U.S. Open. “I don’t think that would work.”Tour players recently met privately in Ohio with U.S.G.A. officials and manufacturers to discuss the proposal, and Patrick Cantlay, who is No. 4 in the Official World Golf Ranking, said this week that “tensions were high” in those sessions.“Seems like golf is in a good spot, and doing anything that could potentially harm that would be foolish,” Cantlay said.Mike Whan, the U.S.G.A.’s chief executive, said Wednesday that he was sensitive to the concerns bubbling up from players and suggested that the governing bodies could tweak their proposals in the months ahead. But he emphasized that the U.S.G.A. is also concerned about the millions of golfers who are not professionals and neither he nor Perpall indicated plans for a wholesale surrender.“If you’re going to take on significant governance decisions that you think are going to help the game be stronger in 20 and 40 years, you can’t expect everybody to like those decisions, and that’s part of governance,” Whan said. “You have to decide whether or not you can stand up for what you think is the game long-term, knowing that maybe 20 percent or 30 percent or 50 percent like it and the others don’t. But I think the feedback process is important and it makes us better. Even when we don’t like the feedback we get, it makes us better.”Whan and Perpall’s impassioned defense unfolded as one of golf’s most influential figures, Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, was absent from the U.S. Open course. The tour disclosed late Tuesday that he was “recuperating from a medical situation” and that two other executives, Ron Price and Tyler Dennis, had indefinitely assumed day-to-day oversight of the circuit’s operations.The announcement that Monahan had stepped back followed seven days of turmoil in professional golf. Last Tuesday, the tour announced that it planned to partner with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the force behind the LIV Golf league that upended the sport, after months of depicting Saudi money as tainted. Monahan, who helped to negotiate the deal, was criticized as a cash-hungry hypocrite, but he has retained at least some crucial allies inside the tour.“Jay is a human being,” Webb Simpson, the 2012 U.S. Open winner and a member of the tour’s board, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Golf is a game, and oftentimes, we make golf into something so much bigger than it is and we dehumanize people.” Perhaps, he said, Tuesday’s announcement would give “people a little perspective.”But Simpson said he knew nothing about Monahan’s status beyond the tour’s initial statement. The tour has declined to elaborate on it or to give a projected timeline for Monahan’s return.Price and Dennis said in a statement that their priority was “to support our players and continue the work underway to further lead the PGA Tour and golf’s future.”In its own statement on Wednesday, the wealth fund “committed to working closely with the PGA leadership and board to advance our previously announced transaction to invest significantly in the growth of golf for the benefit of players, fans and the expansion of the game around the world.” More

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      PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan Steps Back after ‘Medical Situation”

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      The tour did not elaborate on Jay Monahan’s condition but said two other executives would oversee operations during his absence.The PGA Tour said Tuesday night that Jay Monahan, its commissioner, was “recuperating from a medical situation” and that two of its other executives would oversee the tour’s day-to-day operations for the time being.The tour’s four-sentence statement came one week after Monahan, 53, announced that the tour had reached a partnership deal with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which bankrolled the LIV Golf league that has clashed with Monahan’s circuit for more than a year.Monahan, the tour’s commissioner since 2017, was one of the lead negotiators during the secret talks, which led to a deal that has stirred a furor among players, outrage on Capitol Hill and the prospect that the Justice Department will seek to block the arrangement. He has spent recent days crafting a response to a crush of opposition to the deal, including a session with players he called “heated,” a contentious news conference, a town-hall meeting with tour employees in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and a pointed letter to lawmakers in Washington.The tour did not elaborate on Monahan’s condition but said that its board “fully supports Jay and appreciates everyone respecting his privacy.”The tour did not give a timeline for Monahan’s return and said that Ron Price, the circuit’s chief operating officer, and Tyler Dennis, the president of the PGA Tour, would take charge in the interim.Monahan has worked for the tour since 2008, with stints as its chief operating officer, its chief marketing officer and as executive director of the Players Championship. Under the deal that Monahan helped broker this spring after he spent months condemning the rush of Saudi cash into men’s professional golf, the moneymaking components of the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the DP World Tour are to be housed in a new company.Monahan is expected to be its chief executive, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi wealth fund, is in line for its chairmanship. Monahan and his lieutenants have insisted that the company’s structure, which allows for extensive Saudi investment, will give the PGA Tour ultimate authority over the most elite tiers of professional golf. But al-Rumayyan’s role and the potential for significant infusions of Saudi cash have helped stir doubts about the extent of Monahan’s authority.It is not clear when the deal will close, but the agreement has been the subject of intense discussion and skepticism among players at the U.S. Open, where competition is scheduled to begin Thursday at the Los Angeles Country Club. More

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      At The U.S. Open, Golfers Are Focused On LIV’s Merger With PGA Tour

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      Golfers competing in Los Angeles this week were caught off guard by the news that the PGA Tour and LIV had planned to join forces. Now they have to try to win a major.Jon Rahm was at home last Tuesday, preparing coffee with his children underfoot, when the news arrived in a flood of text messages. Collin Morikawa glanced at Twitter and saw the word there. During breakfast at Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Brooks Koepka peered at a television and glimpsed a headline.What was clear Tuesday — one week after the PGA Tour said it intended to join forces with the Saudi wealth fund whose LIV Golf league had fractured the sport — was that the deal Rahm, Morikawa and Koepka heard about in real time had been golf’s version of a flash grenade: stunning, staggering, disorienting.And now, the effects lingering, they need to play the U.S. Open, a major tournament, which will begin Thursday at Los Angeles Country Club. Some escape, huh?“I think there’s more guys that are puzzled about what the future holds,” Jason Day, who had a stint as the world’s top-ranked player soon after he won the 2015 P.G.A. Championship, said in an interview by a practice putting green.“Some guys are emotional, I think, on both sides, which is very much understandable,” added Day, a PGA Tour fixture who turned professional in 2006. “I think we’ve just kind of got to let things settle and see where things are spread out on the table once we kind of know where things are progressing.”It is hardly an optimal outlook just before the third men’s major championship of the year. But it is a pervasive one, and it will assuredly aid the United States Golf Association’s preference for Opens that compel players to use their minds as much as their clubs.No Open in recent memory may demand more compartmentalization from the field.“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Jon Rahm said.Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s a lot of not-answered questions,” Rahm, who opened the 2023 majors cycle with a victory at the Masters Tournament in April, said on Tuesday. “It’s tough when it’s the week before a major. Trying not to think about it as much as possible.”For many of the elite players who could contend for the trophy this weekend in Los Angeles, turbulence in their professional lives, aside from driving, chipping and putting, has been historically scarce.The PGA Tour was unchallenged as the world’s premier circuit for most of a period that began during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and the players who kept their tour cards were rewarded handsomely for performing well in events from Torrey Pines in San Diego to Sea Pines in Hilton Head Island, S.C.LIV’s thunderous emergence last year proved a most severe test of the tour’s supremacy and cast a haze over professional golf. For the first time in generations, the PGA Tour was not the unrivaled signature show in American men’s golf.Now, with the PGA Tour and LIV poised to amass their moneymaking ventures inside one new company led by the tour commissioner and chaired by the Saudi wealth fund’s governor, the dimensions of professional golf are hazier, even for the sport’s biggest names.Will LIV exist in a year’s time? How might players who defected from the tour to LIV be allowed to return? Should golfers who remained devoted to the tour be compensated for their loyalty? And what about all of that money, said to be $100 million or more in some instances, that the wealth fund promised LIV golfers?The deal emerged from seven weeks of secret talks that began with a WhatsApp message on April 18, continued in London, Venice and San Francisco, and culminated in an announcement in New York last Tuesday. Much about the framework agreement, though, is unclear, with bankers and lawyers still rushing to fill in blanks on matters as weighty as asset valuation. Golf executives have suggested that months could pass before the deal closes, and some are privately acknowledging that the shoals before and beyond a closing may not be easy. (“I don’t have enough information about the deal yet to have an unfavorable or favorable view about it,” Patrick Cantlay, a player who is on the PGA Tour’s board, said on Tuesday.)In the meantime, some players suggested that they would simply settle for an answer, or answers, to their most essential questions.“We all want to know the why,” Morikawa said. “We’re so interested in the why. For us, for me right now, it’s just like what’s going to happen? I don’t know. But we always want to know that why answer — like, what’s the purpose behind it? But I think there’s so many different parties involved that there’s too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella.”Substantive answers are unlikely to emerge between now and Thursday’s first tee shots, leaving players to wonder and worry ahead of a tournament that can earn any one of them a spot in history.For Collin Morikawa, the question in the air on the merger seemed to be “Why?”Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Rahm said. “You’re going to need to access every single aspect of your game to win a championship like this. I think it becomes more of a mental factor, not overdoing it at home. You can never really replicate U.S. Open conditions.”Koepka, among the finest major tournament golfers ever, signaled that he had tried to excise any talk of the deal during his preparations for a course he played years ago, and primarily remembered for the Playboy Mansion’s presence on the back nine.“There’s four weeks a year I really care about and this is one of them and I want to play well, so I wasn’t going to waste any time on news that happened last week,” said Koepka, the LIV star who tied for second at the Masters in April and then won the P.G.A. Championship in May near Rochester, N.Y.Last Tuesday, he recalled, he saw the news and then went out to practice.The sport itself, after all, is to come center stage on Thursday, and the questions are not fading — or being answered — this week or next or the next.“There is potential of it being a really, really good thing for golf,” Day said. “But I feel like it’s too early to kind of even say anything like that because you just don’t know where things are going to fall.”For now, he said, “I’m trying to win a tournament.”On that much, PGA Tour and LIV golfers agree — once they stop thinking about last week. 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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      Matt Fitzpatrick and Cameron Smith Don’t Know What’s Next After The LIV-PGA Tour Merger

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      “I just don’t know what’s going on,” Fitzpatrick, the reigning U.S. Open champion, said Monday of the PGA Tour’s merger with LIV Golf. “I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on.”A year ago at the U.S. Open, the field was distracted by an entirely new phenomenon in men’s professional golf: Several players who had turned their backs on the PGA Tour to defect to the insurgent LIV Golf circuit would, for the first time, be competing against their former brethren.Golfers had chosen sides in a sport known for individualism, fueling an unfamiliar team-against-team tension.Twelve months later, and days after the seismic news of the American and European tours forming a partnership with LIV Golf, the disruption at the 2022 U.S. Open now seems like an almost inconsequential diversion. Just ask Matt Fitzpatrick, who won that tournament in Brookline, Mass., for his first victory at a major tournament win and also on the PGA Tour.“I seem to remember last year just thinking about the tournament, just the U.S. Open,” Fitzpatrick said on Monday. “It was easier for me to mentally focus on that and be in a better place than obviously all this confusion that’s going on this week.“The whole thing is confusing.”Asked to elaborate on what he found most confusing, Fitzpatrick could not help but chuckle.“Well, I think I just don’t know what’s going on,” he answered. “I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on.”Fitzpatrick mentioned the Saudi Public Investment Fund, known as PIF, whose staggering riches have backed LIV.“Are we signing with the PIF, are we not signing with the PIF? I have no idea,” he said, adding: “It’s pretty clear that nobody knows what’s going on apart from about four people in the world.”To prove that disorientation was universal across golf, Cameron Smith, who joined LIV not long after winning last year’s British Open, followed Fitzpatrick into the interview room at the Los Angeles Country Club and essentially admitted he was clueless as to what was coming next in his chosen occupation.Smith might rate as something of an insider since he at least received a phone call from Yasir al-Rumayyan, who oversees the PIF and would be the chairman of the new company formed by combining the tours, about the blockbuster deal announced last week.It was a good thing al-Ruymayyan called because Smith said his first reaction to the news was that, “it was kind of a joke.” But al-Rumayyan informed Smith otherwise — without much detail.“He didn’t really explain too much,” Smith said. “I think there’s still a lot of stuff to be worked out, and as time goes on, we’ll get to know more and more. I think he was calling a few different players, so the call was kind of short and sweet.”Despite a lack of clarity about the future of professional golf, both Fitzpatrick and Smith were nonetheless asked about two hot topics since the PGA Tour-LIV deal was announced.For Fitzpatrick, there was the question of whether he thought players, like himself, who were loyal to the PGA Tour should be compensated for turning down the gobs of money LIV was offering.At first, Fitzpatrick appeared ready to address the issue, which is perhaps the most charged and dicey detail to be hammered out in the coming weeks or months. But then Fitzpatrick paused. And paused. He smiled and then exhaled. His eyes roamed the room. Finally, he said with a thin smile: “Yeah, pass.”Fitzpatrick last Friday at the Canadian Open, where he finished eight under for the tournament in a tie for 20th.Minas Panagiotakis/Getty ImagesSmith was asked if he had been given any indication that the LIV tour would continue to exist after this year. He replied: “I really know as much as you guys know, to be honest. I haven’t been told much at all. I guess if anything comes up, I’ll let you guys know.”He refused to answer a question about whether he would want to return to the PGA Tour if LIV was dissolved after this season, calling it “hypothetical.”But he added: “I think I’ve made the right decision anyway. I’m very happy with where I’m at. I obviously made that decision for a few different reasons. Like I said, I know as much as everyone else, and it’s going to be interesting to see how the next few months, maybe even year, kind of plays out.”Smith’s attitude was jovial, which matched the mood of several LIV players who slapped hands with each other and smiled on the practice range on Monday.“I haven’t been told much at all, but I’m just taking it as it goes along,” Smith said. “But there’s definitely a lot of curious players, I think, on both sides as to what the future is going to look like.”Fitzpatrick had an eye on the future and also the past, recalling last year’s U.S. Open fondly.“An amazing week,” he said, hoping to rekindle the magic he discovered.But then, so much has changed in a year. On Monday, there remained one question above all the others. What next for golf?Fitzpatrick shook his head.“I’ll be completely honest, I literally know as much as you,” he said. “I’m sure everyone has gotten questions about it. I found out when everyone else found out. Yeah, honestly, I know literally nothing.” More