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      PGA Tour Payouts Soar as Saudi-Backed LIV Golf Rains Down Riches

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      A $20 million purse is on the line in Arizona this week — matching, for about a month, a PGA Tour regular-season record.SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — After all these years — and given the ritualized rowdiness, it is impossible to say for certain — the money at the Phoenix Open might be flowing as freely as the drinks and the jeers around the 16th hole.A decade ago, PGA Tour players came to the desert to jockey for a share of $6.2 million in prize money. Last year, they competed for a cut of $8.2 million. This time around? The pool is $20 million.In a decidedly turbulent era of men’s golf, even the tournament that calls itself the People’s Open is a front in the sport’s transcontinental, multibillion-dollar arms race. Classified by the PGA Tour as a “designated event” for this year, the Phoenix Open is one of 10 tournaments on the circuit’s regular-season calendar that have promised purses of at least $15 million; all but one have offered $20 million or more.A central question for the PGA Tour is whether those payouts, and promises of more like them, will help create enough of a counterweight to the riches of LIV Golf, the circuit that has the financial backing of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and, after only a season of play, a track record of eye-popping contracts and guaranteed prize money.Asked in an interview at T.P.C. Scottsdale, the site of this week’s tournament, whether he believed the tour’s increased purses had helped curb an exodus of players to LIV, Commissioner Jay Monahan noted that many tour members were involved in designing the overhaul. Under the revamped system, the tour’s most elite and popular players are usually required to play the biggest events on the regular-season calendar, ensuring sterling fields and, presumably, far stiffer competition than a particular tournament might draw otherwise.“The players were so engaged and involved in the changes that we were making,” Monahan said. “Their involvement, their belief in this model and this model preparing them to achieve at the highest level, that’s what they’re committed to.”But he also raised his hands and shrugged because at a time when LIV golfers have earned far more at shorter tournaments with no cuts, he can have only so much certainty.Dustin Johnson, who recorded about $75 million in tour earnings over 15 PGA Tour seasons, collected more than $35 million at LIV competitions last year. At one event last year, Charl Schwartzel earned $4.75 million because of his individual and team results. Adjusted for inflation, that lone payday was still a seven-figure advantage over his best tour season.The winner in Arizona on Sunday will earn $3.6 million and tie a tour record that will be eclipsed four weeks later, when the Players Championship’s victor will collect $4.5 million. (As usual, the Tour Championship, which will be held at the end of the season in Atlanta, will award far more, but the money there is considered part of a bonus pool, not a standard tournament purse.)The tour’s pivot toward greater payouts, executives insisted, was in the making long before LIV overtly upended the golf marketplace, with the bigger purses traceable to a new television-rights deal announced in early 2020. They acknowledge, though, that LIV’s emergence prompted them to accelerate and adjust some of their plans, which are being helped along by tour reserves and increased payments from tournament sponsors.The tour, like all professional sports organizations, relies on a gumbo of moneymaking ventures, including television contracts, sponsorship deals and licensing arrangements, which are often becoming much more lucrative. But the tour’s most stalwart supporters, such as Tiger Woods, concede that it will struggle to keep pace with LIV Golf as long as wealth-fund leaders in Riyadh sustain their investment in the new circuit.“We’re running a business here, and the money that our players are playing for are monies that we’re generating,” Monahan said.“You have to operate prudently in the short- and long-term,” he added. “But there are ways to grow within each year, to create more opportunity, and that’s what we’re going to do.”The heightened purses, including one next week at the Genesis Invitational in California, are among the less-disputed strategies the tour has embraced in its quest to preserve its power. Others are entangled in an antitrust lawsuit that will not be tried until at least next year, but LIV has acknowledged that some of the tour’s tactics are having significant effects, even as it has questioned their propriety or legality.In a court filing on Monday, when LIV renewed its objections to the PGA Tour’s indefinite suspensions of players who defected, lawyers for the Saudi-backed league wrote that the tour’s “anticompetitive conduct” had “damaged LIV’s brand, driven up its costs by hundreds of millions of dollars and driven down revenues to virtually zero.”Jon Rahm, who won the PGA Tour’s first designated event last month in Hawaii, during the Phoenix Open Pro-Am on Wednesday.Maddie Meyer/Getty ImagesTour officials are expected to announce future plans for the high-roller events in the coming weeks, but a principal subject of internal debate has been whether the elevated status should rotate among tournaments. In addition to the tournament in Arizona, where the Thursday morning start was delayed because of frost (yes, really), this year’s designated events include the RBC Heritage at Hilton Head Island, S.C.; the Travelers Championship in Cromwell, Conn.; and the Wells Fargo Championship in Charlotte, N.C.Tour officials, though, have made no public commitments that those events will keep their lofty status beyond 2023, and some players have suggested that they want to see an array of tournaments hosting the sport’s headliners.“What I do hope is that some other tournaments that want to put up the resources to become elevated events might get the chance,” Jon Rahm said this week, despite his standing as one of the Phoenix Open’s pre-eminent cheerleaders. “That would be epic. I would love to see this rotating, not always being the same ones every year.”Some players have also worried that tournaments regularly left out of any system, and potentially deprived of many tour stars, will struggle to draw the crowds and sponsorships that make them possible. And there is some anxiety that the PGA Tour is effectively becoming a tale of two circuits — one consistently loaded with A-list players and one routinely populated with everyone else — that periodically overlap.Players said they would approach the elevated tournaments like any other. Rahm, who won the first designated event last month in Hawaii and entered this week’s tournament at No. 3 in the Official World Golf Ranking, suggested “nothing” had changed in his preparations.“I want to perform well in every single tournament I go to,” he said, “no matter what it is.”It is, after all, becoming a much bigger business — especially during Super Bowl week in Arizona, where, as Patrick Cantlay put it, it is “a party for everyone except us.” More

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      Power to Punish LIV Golfers Faces a Legal Test in Europe

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      An arbitration panel will meet next week to weigh whether the European Tour may penalize the men who played on the Saudi-backed circuit.DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Many of the golfers had wandered away one afternoon last week, seeking lunch or refuge from the Emirati sun or something besides the monotony of a driving range.Ian Poulter, though, kept swinging, the consistency nearly enough to disguise that there is almost no professional golfer in greater limbo.Poulter, who has competed on the European Tour for more than two decades, is among the players who defiantly joined LIV Golf, the breakaway circuit bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and faced punishment from the tour. Next week, almost eight months after the first rebel tournament, arbitrators in London will weigh the tour’s choice to discipline defectors.The case is a test for the golf establishment’s response to LIV, which has guaranteed certain players tens of millions of dollars to compete in a league that insists it is looking to revive golf but that skeptics view as a front to rehabilitate Saudi Arabia’s reputation. Executives and legal experts say, though, that the arbitrators’ decision could also ripple more broadly across global sports as athletes increasingly resist longstanding restrictions on where they compete and as wealthy Persian Gulf states look to use the world’s courses, fields and racetracks as avenues for their political and public-relations ambitions.“The impacts of this case are potentially tremendous across all of international sport,” said Jeffrey G. Benz, a sports arbitrator in London who is not involved in the golf case and noted how other leagues and federations have faced opposition to their efforts to stymie potential rivals.Although the issue that next week’s panel will consider is formally a narrow one, dealing only with the European Tour’s conflicting event policy, a ruling in favor of the players could embolden like-minded but wary athletes to plunge into the universe of cash-flush start-ups. A victory for the tour, marketed as the DP World Tour, would reinforce the kind of rules that marquee sports organizers have harnessed for decades to preserve market power. And whichever side prevails will assuredly tout victory as vindication for its approach to professional sports.“There’s the public opinion part, there’s the influence it might have on other athletes, there’s the influence it might have on other rich people who might think, ‘Hey, I’d really love to get into sports. Let’s put a group together and go attack name-the-sport,’” said Jill Pilgrim, a former general counsel for the L.P.G.A. who now teaches sports arbitration at Columbia Law School.“They’re watching all of this,” she added.Poulter has argued that playing with the new circuit was not all that different from the rest of a storied career dotted with appearances across tours.Lynne Sladky/Associated PressThe golf case began last June, when Poulter was among the European Tour players who played in a LIV Golf tournament without the tour’s permission. The tour, wary of undermining the rules that fortify its sponsorship and television-rights deals, responded with short suspensions and fines, modest penalties compared to the indefinite suspensions that the United States-based PGA Tour meted out.The players insist, though, that they are independent contractors and should have greater freedom to pick when, where and for whom they compete. An arbitrator paused the tour’s punishments last summer but did not rule on the substantive arguments that will go before this month’s panel. The arbitrators could announce their decision within weeks of the five-day, closed-door hearing, which will begin Monday.A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 7A new series. More

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      Trump Courses Will Host LIV Golf Tournaments in 2023

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      As the league announced more details of a 14-stop second season, former President Donald J. Trump’s courses remained central to the schedule, deepening his ties to Riyadh.Former President Donald J. Trump’s golf courses will host three tournaments this year for the breakaway league that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is underwriting, deepening the financial ties between a candidate for the White House and top officials in Riyadh.LIV Golf, which in the past year has cast men’s professional golf into turmoil as it lured players away from the PGA Tour, said on Monday that it would travel to Trump courses in Florida, New Jersey and Virginia during this year’s 14-stop season. Neither the league nor the Trump Organization announced the terms of their arrangement, but the schedule shows the Saudi-backed start-up will remain allied with, and beneficial to, one of its foremost defenders and political patrons as he seeks a return to power.Part of LIV’s scheduling approach, executives say, hinges on the relative scarcity of elite courses that can challenge players such as Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith — and the abundance of them in a Trump portfolio that is more accessible than many others to the new circuit. In a court filing last week, LIV Golf complained anew that the PGA Tour had warned “golfers, other tours, vendors, broadcasters, sponsors and virtually any other third parties” against doing business with the rebel league.But Trump, whose courses hosted two LIV Golf events in 2022, has expressed no public misgivings about his company’s ties to the league, which has drawn attention to Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses and prompted accusations that the country was turning to sports to repair its reputation. A confidential McKinsey & Company analysis presented to Saudi officials in 2021 suggested there were significant obstacles to success and underscored the limited financial potential for one of the world’s largest wealth funds.Long before Monday’s announcement, the Trump family was closely entangled with the wealth fund, which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman oversees and the PGA Tour is now trying to draw directly into its legal fight against LIV.A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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      Rory McIlroy Looks for the Magic He Conjured Last Year

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      Rory McIlroy’s ranking survived a weekend scare. With Scottie Scheffler close behind and Jon Rahm surging, his outing in Dubai might suggest a lot about how long it will last.DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Since Rory McIlroy arrived in the United Arab Emirates over the weekend, he has seen his No. 1 world ranking preserved by virtue of another man’s missed putt in California, been drawn into a driving-range drama over whether he ignored a defector to LIV Golf and had a tee thrown his way in retaliation, and mentioned how he was served a subpoena on Christmas Eve.But on Thursday, after one of the more bizarre tournament preludes in recent memory, McIlroy is expected to play a competitive round for the first time in 2023 and give his sport a glimpse at whether he has the form that last year rekindled some of the fever that followed him earlier in his career.“I’ve been obviously practicing at home and practicing well, but it’s always first tournament of the year, getting back on to the golf course, just trying to get comfortable again with shots on the course and visuals and all that sort of stuff,” McIlroy said Wednesday in Dubai, where he had a debacle last January but a good-enough showing in November to win the season points crown for the DP World Tour, as the European Tour is currently marketed.“I’m sure it will be a little bit of rust to start the week, but hopefully I can shake that off,” he continued.In some respects, the scrutiny has never been greater. When McIlroy last won a major championship, he was 25 years old and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund was not underwriting a splashy rival to the world’s top men’s golf tours. He is now 33, with a frustrating record of close calls but newfound stature as arguably the golf establishment’s pre-eminent spokesman against LIV.He has spent much of the past year publicly answering questions about the Saudi-backed circuit — in response to one on Wednesday, for instance, he effectively called Greg Norman, LIV’s chief executive, weak — and privately crafting a response to it. He played exceptional golf, nevertheless, winning the European Tour points title, capturing the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup and finishing no worse than eighth place in 2022’s majors. The price, he suggested Wednesday, was exhaustion and a decision to “sort of distance myself from the game of golf” for a spell.After he played an exhibition event with Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas and Tiger Woods on Dec. 10, he stashed his clubs and only picked them up again this year. Holding to his preference to start a calendar year’s competitions in the Middle East, he exercised his right to skip the PGA Tour’s Tournament of Champions in Hawaii. He has held the No. 1 ranking, which he reclaimed in October, anyway, but Scottie Scheffler nearly took it back on Sunday, and Jon Rahm is threatening, having won two tournaments this year, both of them at 27 under par. (Rahm could essentially seize the top ranking on Saturday, when the PGA Tour’s event at Torrey Pines, where he won the 2021 U.S. Open, will conclude.)A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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      PGA Tour Seeks to Add Saudi Wealth Fund to Lawsuit Over LIV Golf

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      A federal judge will decide whether one of the tour’s leading avenues to investigate and challenge a new rival can be expanded.The PGA Tour intensified its legal fight against LIV Golf on Tuesday, when it asked a federal judge in California to let it add Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to a lawsuit that has become one of its principal ways to investigate — and try to undercut — the circuit that has assaulted the tour’s customary dominance.The request, filed in the Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., where LIV and the PGA Tour have argued for months over matters like antitrust law and contract interference, came as the two sides braced for a ruling about whether tour lawyers might depose Yasir al-Rumayyan, the wealth fund’s governor. The fund, formally known as the Public Investment Fund, effectively owns most of LIV.But with a judge’s decision pending and potentially months of appeals ahead, the tour sought another way to examine and retaliate against Riyadh’s entry into men’s professional golf. In Tuesday’s filing, the tour also asked to add al-Rumayyan to its suit.“Documents produced by LIV reveal that P.I.F. and Mr. al-Rumayyan were instrumental in inducing players to breach their tour contracts,” the tour told the judge Tuesday, when it complained that the wealth fund and its leader had been “exercising near absolute authority” over the circuit.The wealth fund has previously rejected the tour’s accusations that it and al-Rumayyan dominate LIV, which has used condensed schedules and enormous contracts to entice players such as Bryson DeChambeau, Sergio García, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith to leave the PGA Tour for the league. LIV, which announced a decidedly modest American television rights deal last week, is expected to begin its 14-stop 2023 season next month in Mexico.Phil Mickelson, left, with al-Rumayyan during LIV Golf’s inaugural tournament last year at Centurion Golf Club near London.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockJudge Beth Labson Freeman will consider the tour’s request and weigh factors such as whether the tour acted with sufficient haste to amend its lawsuit and whether its request is in good faith and not a mere stalling tactic.A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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      LIV Golf Series Reaches TV Deal With The CW

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      After its debut season was relegated to internet platforms, the circuit that includes Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith will be on the CW network in 2023.LIV Golf, at last, has a television deal.The new circuit, bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and the catalyst for a year of turmoil in men’s professional golf, said Thursday that its 54-hole, no-cut tournaments would air on the CW network and its app beginning next month.Although the arrangement is a milestone for LIV Golf, whose tournaments last year were relegated to internet streams even as it showcased stars like Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith, the deal also underscores the circuit’s short-term limitations and the challenges any alternative league faces in gaining entry into the American sports market.America’s top broadcasters were unlikely candidates for LIV Golf. CBS and NBC appeared unwilling to consider airing its events because of their close ties to the PGA Tour, and Disney-owned ABC was seen as a seemingly improbable landing spot because ESPN, which Disney also controls, streams many tour events. Another potential suitor, Fox, has stepped back from golf coverage in recent years.LIV Golf and CW officials did not immediately disclose the financial terms of the agreement, but a person familiar with the arrangement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the contract’s details were confidential, said LIV had not purchased airtime from the network. Instead, the person said, the terms offered both sides mutual financial benefits.“Our new partnership between the CW and LIV Golf will deliver a whole new audience and add to the growing worldwide excitement for the league,” Dennis Miller, the network’s president, said in a statement. “With CW’s broadcasts and streams, more fans across the country and around the globe can partake in the LIV Golf energy and view its innovative competition that has reimagined the sport for players, fans and the game of golf.”The agreement is a reprieve for LIV, which has spent recent months staring down its skeptics who have criticized the new tour’s absence of a television deal, its limited attendance at tournaments and the PGA Tour’s retention of many of the world’s top players. LIV Golf is hoping that its second season, which will begin with a tournament in Mexico in late February, will lead to fan and financial breakthroughs, especially as it more fully embraces a model that emphasizes franchises..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.In December, when The New York Times disclosed a confidential McKinsey & Company analysis from 2021 that suggested that a Saudi-backed, franchise-filled golf league would face a tricky path to profitability and relevancy, a spokesman for the circuit said LIV was “confident that over the next few seasons, the remaining pieces of our business model will come to fruition as planned.”The McKinsey analysis considered a television deal a vital ingredient for a league’s success and suggested that the concept that became LIV could earn as much as $410 million from broadcast rights in 2028, if it settled into what it called a “coexistence” with the PGA Tour. But if the league remained mired in “start-up” status, the consultants wrote, it could expect no more than $90 million a year for its broadcast rights in 2028.In its antitrust case against the PGA Tour, which is not scheduled to go to trial before next January, LIV Golf has used its struggles to secure a television deal as evidence of what it sees as the long-dominant tour’s monopolistic behavior.The tour, which has television deals that will pay it billions of dollars in the coming years, has denied wrongdoing. But in a filing in August, LIV Golf’s lawyers asserted that the tour had “compromised” the new league’s prospects to reach a rights agreement and said that the tour had “threatened sponsors and broadcasters that they must sever their relationships with players who join LIV Golf, or be cut off from having any opportunities with the PGA Tour.”LIV also said that CBS officials had said “they cannot touch LIV Golf even for consideration” because of the network’s ties to the PGA Tour. (Paramount Global, which controls CBS, holds a minority stake in the CW. The tour also has a contract with Warner Bros. Discovery, another minority stakeholder in the CW.)LIV’s pursuit of a television deal proved more turbulent — or at least more public — than the last time its chief executive, Greg Norman, tried to build a rival to the PGA Tour. In 1994, when Norman rolled out plans for a new tour, he had buy-in from Fox, which had extended a 10-year commitment. The uprising ended quickly anyway.Despite the headwinds this time, Norman had projected confidence for months that LIV would secure some kind of contract. In November, he called a television deal “a priority” and predicted that one would be locked down “very, very soon.” More

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      Tony Jacklin Reflects on His Career and on LIV Golf

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      He was on top of the world in 1970 after winning the British and U.S. Opens. And while he lived well, he said making money was never his top goal.The members of the DP World Tour, whose next event kicks off on Thursday at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship on Yas Links in the United Arab Emirates, owe a great deal to the European players who helped make the tour what it is today.That includes Tony Jacklin, the winner of the 1969 British Open, the 1970 United States Open and eight tournaments on the European Tour, now the DP World Tour.Jacklin, from England, also played a huge role in the Ryder Cup. A four-time captain from 1983 to 1989, he led Team Europe to two victories, including the first over the Americans since 1957.Jacklin, 78, reflected recently on his career, on the controversy over the Saudi-financed LIV Golf tour that guarantees entrants six-figure payouts and the game that has meant so much to him.The following conversation has been edited and condensed.When you won your two majors, what did that fame feel like?A Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More

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      Masters Tournament Will Let LIV Golf Players Compete in 2023

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      The decision by Augusta National Golf Club is an interim victory for the upstart circuit, but other troubles loom.Augusta National Golf Club will allow members of the breakaway LIV Golf league to compete in the Masters Tournament, the first men’s golf major of 2023.The decision by the private club, which organizes the invitational tournament and has exclusive authority over who walks its hilly, pristine course each April, is an interim victory for LIV, the upstart operation bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to much of the golf establishment’s fury.“Regrettably, recent actions have divided men’s professional golf by diminishing the virtues of the game and the meaningful legacies of those who built it,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said in a Tuesday statement. “Although we are disappointed in these developments, our focus is to honor the tradition of bringing together a pre-eminent field of golfers this coming April.”But the approach announced by the club on Tuesday — continuing to rely on qualifying categories that often hinge on performances in PGA Tour competitions or other majors, or on certain thresholds in the Official World Golf Ranking — threatens to limit access for LIV players as more years pass, which could ultimately make it more difficult for LIV to attract new golfers.Ridley said Augusta National evaluates “every aspect of the tournament each year, and any modifications or changes to invitation criteria for future tournaments will be announced in April.”LIV declined to comment on Tuesday.The organizers of the British Open, the P.G.A. Championship and the U.S. Open have not said how or whether they will adjust their 2023 entry standards in the wake of LIV Golf’s emergence this year. Augusta National, though, has now offered what could be a template for LIV’s short-term relationships with the major tournaments.Augusta National, for instance, did not abandon its tradition of offering past winners lifetime entry into the tournament, a reprieve for the six LIV players who have already earned green jackets: Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Charl Schwartzel and Bubba Watson. Recent winners of other majors will still qualify for the 2023 Masters, clearing the way, for at least a little longer, for players like Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith.And Augusta, which has become entangled in the Justice Department’s antitrust inquiry into men’s professional golf, will continue to admit players who are in the top 50 in the world rankings at certain times.The world ranking system is a weapon that is as subtle and technical (and disputed) as it is consequential and, for some golfers, determinative. LIV players do not currently earn ranking points for their 54-hole, no-cut events, and they have fallen in the rankings as other golfers have kept playing tournaments on eligible tours. In July, LIV applied to be included in the rankings, and more recently, it partnered with the MENA Tour, which is a part of the system, to try to keep its players in the mix.But the board that oversees the rankings includes golf executives whose reactions to the breakaway series have ranged from skeptical to hostile, and the group has not embraced LIV’s requests. If major tournaments like the Masters continue to use world ranking points as a qualifying method, at least some players will see their entry prospects evaporate. A sustained reliance on PGA Tour events as other qualifying avenues will also stanch access for LIV players.Whether LIV golfers can play the majors may be crucial to the upstart’s prospects in the years ahead. Beyond golfing glory, major championship winners earn heightened public profiles, and they are more likely to attract lucrative sponsorship arrangements. If LIV’s players face extraordinary constraints on their chances simply to reach a major tournament field, much less to win the competition, the league may have trouble recruiting new players.The possibility of exclusion from the majors was enough to warrant a brief legal spat over the summer, when the LIV players Talor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford asked a federal judge to order their participation in the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup playoffs. Gooch, Jones and Swafford had all failed to qualify for the 2023 majors through other means, and their lawyers warned that keeping them from the playoffs would probably end their chances at doing so. Heeding the arguments of the PGA Tour, which said that “antitrust laws do not allow plaintiffs to have their cake and eat it too,” the judge turned back their request.Augusta National’s decision on Tuesday, fleeting as it might ultimately prove, is still a milestone for LIV, which has not signed a television contract or attracted marquee sponsors. Those symptoms of trouble have only deepened concerns about the long-term viability of the new tour, which many critics regard largely as a means for Saudi Arabia to sanitize its reputation as a human rights abuser. Last week, the circuit acknowledged that its chief operating officer, who was widely seen as integral to its business ambitions, had resigned.In recent months, Greg Norman, LIV’s chief executive, urged major tournaments to “stay Switzerland” and allow his circuit’s players to participate.“The majors need the strength of field,” Norman, a two-time British Open victor and three-time runner-up at the Masters, said last month. “They need the best players in the business. They want the best competition for their broadcasting, for their sponsors, all the other things that come with it.”But LIV stands to benefit, too. A victory in a major by one of its players, LIV supporters have said, would give the circuit greater legitimacy.“If it is a LIV player who wins a major next year,” Norman said, “that goes to show you how we work within the ecosystem.” More