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      How Will Jay Monahan of the PGA Tour and Yasir al-Rumayyan Work Together?

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      The stunning golf merger announced last week has raised many questions, and one big one is how will the Saudi wealth fund boss and the tour commissioner manage to work together?After more than a year of high-stakes jockeying and long-distance accusations, Jay Monahan and Yasir al-Rumayyan finally met in May, an arranged blind date in some Venice cafe or hotel.Now the oddest of bedfellows will attempt to remake the future of professional golf and repair the damage done by a yearlong civil war they had once waged against each other.The 53-year-olds in charge could not be more different: Monahan, the American commissioner of the PGA Tour since 2017, and al-Rumayyan, the trusted confidant of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and overseer of his country’s massive Public Investment Fund.It is that fund, claiming to be worth somewhere close to $700 billion, that bought its way into golf last Tuesday. It ended a sniping, court-complicated fight between the PGA’s American and European tours and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. It instantly solved the PGA Tour’s financial struggles.Now al-Rumayyan will be chairman of this entity. Monahan will be his chief executive. And among the many complex questions this raises is one of internal logistics. How will this unlikely duo manage — manage the game of golf, both on the course and off it, and manage to get along?“Money can change everything,” the legendary golfer Gary Player said in an email exchange. “And all we can do now is hope the outcome moving forward is positive for all.”Monahan has deep New England roots and a background in sports marketing. His leadership style is as hushed as a golf crowd awaiting a winning putt.“I enjoy all forms of human interaction,” he told Golf Digest in 2017. “Talking with people, listening to them, often just observing them. Even unpleasant people, I enjoy discovering what makes them tick. It’s sort of a requirement of the job I’m in now because the range of people is so broad, their situations so dynamic. Their needs and goals can be material, but it’s the human interaction that gets us there.”Al-Rumayyan, the cash-carrying disrupter with a deep passion for golf, is a stern test for Monahan’s people skills. Certainly his “needs and goals” are material.While al-Rumayyan will hold just one of the (now) 11 seats on the PGA Tour board of directors, he and the wealth fund have the exclusive right to invest in the new entity. That means they control the finances, and they plan to pump in billions of dollars.Yasir al-Rumayyan and Monahan sat side by side during an appearance on CNBC.CNBCIn his only public appearance since the merger was announced last week, a televised consummation on CNBC where the two sat chummily side by side, al-Rumayyan said he would let Monahan lead the operation.The “voting system” and the majority of the board, he noted, “is not going to be with us.”But al-Rumayyan’s very presence — and the deal itself, for now only a framework that could take months to formalize — is a heavy reminder that money can trump it all.“The Saudis will want to dominate this,” said James M. Dorsey, adjunct senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. “They don’t like to play second fiddle. And they believe, not without reason, that money talks.”What kind of takeover leader al-Rumayyan will become is unclear. His PIF portfolio is massive, and he chairs dozens of state-owned firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco and the mining firm Ma’aden. He largely lets executive teams run them as they see fit.But the relationship with Newcastle United, the English soccer team, might provide the best clues for golf.The PIF bought an 80 percent share of Newcastle United in 2021. Fans of the English club immediately welcomed the ownership change, as the prospect of on-field success overrode hard questions. Infused with PIF money, doled out by al-Rumayyan, Newcastle has surged toward the top of the English Premier League.At Newcastle, he has left day-to-day decisions to others, though he has quickly approved expenditures for talent upgrades and has not been invisible.He shows up to matches on occasion. (Compare that with mostly absentee ownership of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates, who made news on Saturday by going to the team’s Champions League final.) He has kicked the ball around the team’s field and been photographed in the dressing room.Al-Rumayyan with the Newcastle players, coaching staff and families after they qualified for the Champions League.Scott Heppell/ReutersYet al-Rumayyan is more passionate about golf. Around LIV, his pet project, he is known as H.E., for His Excellency, and has been a considerable public presence. At last year’s LIV event in Bedminster, N.J., al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump, the course’s owner. For a time, al-Rumayyan wore a “Make America Great Again” cap.But most do not expect him to be an overtly public presence in golf or a familiar figure around the trophy ceremonies. Part of it is his portfolio; he has plenty of other business responsibilities.“How much time does he have to allocate?” Dorsey said. “This is a man at the top of an empire. He oversees a vast array of things. I think you’ll see a lot of his lieutenants and not a lot of him, at least once this settles down.”Part of it is Saudi culture; he has to “walk a fine line,” according to Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, given the autocratic leadership of Prince Mohammed.“If you seem to be too big, and you seem to be Mr. Saudi Arabia, bin Salman doesn’t take well to people stepping on his toes,” Ulrichsen said. “But we’ve also seen that al-Rumayyan is probably the most trusted and most competent member of his inner circle.”Al-Rumayyan was a little-known banking executive in 2015, when King Abdullah died. Power consolidated around Prince Mohammed, who soon started Vision 2030, an ambitious makeover for Saudi Arabia and its reputation. Part of that involved building the PIF as a diversifying vehicle for growing global capital, financially and culturally.At last year’s LIV event in New Jersey, al-Rumayyan hobnobbed with former President Donald J. Trump.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPrince Mohammed, looking to flush out the aging elite that he felt limited the country’s ambitions — locking up and abusing hundreds of them — handed responsibility of the fund to al-Rumayyan.Continued human rights violations and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, on orders, the Central Intelligence Agency has said, from Prince Mohammed, have made the Saudis global pariahs.But under al-Rumayyan’s direction, the investment fund grew exponentially.Investment in sports, in particular, has proved an effective reputation launderer that some call sportswashing. The culmination of that effort may be the takeover of golf, announced the same week Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken visited Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia.“This was part of establishing Saudi Arabia on the global stage,” Ulrichsen said of the Saudi push into international sports. “And in this case, it shows that Saudi Arabia is welcome again at the highest kind of table in the United States, especially after what happened post-2018. That period of isolation is now definitely over.”For Saudis, the golf deal is more a global news event than a national one. Wednesday’s front page of Arriyadiyah, the kingdom’s top sports daily, was dominated by the news of the French soccer player Karim Benzema moving to Jeddah-based Al-Ittihad, the latest prize for the top Saudi league, which already attracted Cristiano Ronaldo, among others. The announcement of the golf merger was nowhere to be found in any of the paper’s pages for that day, and merited only a brief mention on Page 11 on Thursday.But al-Rumayyan is on a one-man mission to use golf for Saudi benefit. He helped establish the Saudi Golf Federation and the Saudi Golf Company, founded in 2019 to promote the game in the country.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive. Tax records obtained by ProPublica show that he was paid $14 million in salary in 2021 for his role as PGA Tour commissioner. He spent most of 2022 and early 2023 trying to fend off LIV through insults and lawsuits.That litigation will be withdrawn, saving the cash-poor PGA Tour money while shielding al-Rumayyan and the wealth fund from depositions and discovery.Was it all gamesmanship that can be forgiven now? Or might al-Rumayyan work behind the scenes to find a leader more aligned with his goals?Monahan wants golf fans, sponsors and his own players to resist the reflexive, collective wince at this new arrangement, painted by many as a money-over-morals transaction, and to think of where global golf can be in 10 years.One uncertainty is the long-term role of Monahan as chief executive.Eric Risberg/Associated PressIt most likely depends on whatever al-Rumayyan wants.It could be mere tweaks in payouts, schedules and formats to lift a sagging, traditional enterprise — the way he has handled Newcastle. Or it could be an overhaul. A possible comparison, without ties to the PIF, is the way international cricket introduced Twenty20 to counter dragging, multiday contests with something shorter, livelier and more consumable, which is similar to what LIV has tried to do.For someone like Player, 87, a nine-time major tournament winner from South Africa, the hope is broad, global growth, not just on the PGA Tour.“The women’s game and the weekend golfer should not be forgotten with all this money pouring in,” he said. “Allow the ladies to earn a better living. Use the money to make golf accessible for the masses. Let’s make it a point to share this new era to all who love our sport.”At the heart of all the possibilities, for now, is the relationship between two men — an impossibly rich backer from Saudi Arabia and a tradition-rich sports executive from Massachusetts.“We just sat down, him and I, in Venice for about two hours, trying to understand each other,” al-Rumayyan said. “He talked about his aspirations, his life. I did the same. Even my family was with me in Venice. We had a lunch with a big group of people. The understanding and the positive thinking is what really unites us in growing the game of golf. The passion that we have, both of us, is what really cemented this kind of agreement.”Springtime in Venice has a way of sparking such enchantment.Skeptics may point out that Venice is a series of islands and an easy place to lose your sense of direction. Cynics might note that it is sinking.Ahmed Al Omran More

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      How the PGA Tour-LIV Golf Merger Came Together

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      Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, had gone unnoticed in Venice last month.With luck, he thought over breakfast near the Palazzo Ducale, his confidential talks in Italy with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s more than $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, might stay secret. A leak would endanger what only a handful of insiders knew: that the PGA Tour was considering going into business with al-Rumayyan’s LIV Golf league, whose monthslong clash with Monahan’s tour had become a fight as much over golf’s soul as its future.Then Stefano Domenicali, Formula 1’s chief executive, strolled into view. He was in town for the same wedding that had brought al-Rumayyan to Venice. If the motor sports executive spotted the PGA Tour’s leader, he would assuredly connect the presences of Monahan and al-Rumayyan, and golf’s greatest secret might get out. All Monahan could do, he told people later, was try to dodge Domenicali’s gaze.But Domenicali never seemed to notice him. What would ultimately amount to seven weeks of clandestine meetings and furtive calls stayed hidden until a stunning announcement last Tuesday: The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s elite golf for decades, planned to join forces with LIV, the upstart that had provoked debate over the morality of Saudi money in the game.The agreement was a singular moment in the history of the professional game. The civil war that had disrupted and defined the once genteel sport — for example, Monahan once publicly asked whether PGA Tour players had ever felt compelled to apologize for competing on the circuit — was abruptly suspended. The tour’s reputation was stained and many of its loyalists were furious, but its coffers were poised to overflow.The deal, though not yet closed, was also a breakthrough for Saudi Arabia’s ambitions in golf. The culmination of a years-old plan called “Project Wedge,” the agreement gives al-Rumayyan, one of the kingdom’s most influential officials, a seat in the sport’s most rarefied rooms. And for a country that has craved a greater global profile, an economy based on more than oil and a distraction from its gruesome human rights abuses, the agreement was another step in its rapprochement with the West.This account is based on interviews with nine people with knowledge of the negotiations. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the lead-up to an extraordinary transaction — one so closely held that most of golf’s eminent bankers, lawyers and broadcast partners had no warning that it was even being discussed.It was not until this spring that even golf’s most connected power brokers grew confident a deal could happen this year, if ever. But there seemed enough conspicuous pressure points, some much more severe than others, that prodded both sides into secret talks.LIV had enticed some of golf’s most talented and bankable stars, including Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson, with contracts that sometimes promised them $100 million or more. The league’s television deal, though, had been meager, and its lawyers had acknowledged that its revenues were “virtually zero.” Federal judges in California added to LIV’s turmoil when they showed limited interest in shielding the Public Investment Fund from the kind of scrutiny it had generally avoided in other court battles in the United States.Brooks Koepka at this year’s Masters tournament, where he tied for second. The LIV golfer won the P.G.A. Championship the following month.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut the PGA Tour, a tax-exempt nonprofit with an aging audience and a stiff reputation, was in greater peril. As part of a federal antitrust inquiry, Justice Department investigators were asking questions about heavy-handed tactics the tour used to discourage player defections and examining whether tour leaders were too cozy with other powerful golf organizations, like Augusta National Golf Club, the organizer of the Masters Tournament.More precariously, the tour’s efforts to retain the loyalty of players, which included raising prize purses by tens of millions of dollars, were severely straining its finances. The tour’s television contracts had been constructed before it was facing one of the richest conceivable rivals. And the tour’s legal fees had swelled to more than $40 million a year — up more than twentyfold from the start of the decade — as it waged fights some thought could last until at least 2026.Monahan had foretold something like this.“If this is an arms race and if the only weapons here are dollar bills, the PGA Tour can’t compete,” he said last June in Connecticut.Late in the year, the PGA Tour said a veteran deal maker, James J. Dunne III, would join its board, and some involved in the wealth fund wondered whether he would someday emerge as an emissary.He did on April 18, when a WhatsApp message flashed on al-Rumayyan’s phone. The tone toward one of the world’s most influential financiers, a figure often addressed as “Your Excellency” and close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was strikingly casual.“Yasir,” Dunne began as he introduced himself and asked to arrange a call and, “hopefully,” a visit. He signed the message with equal informality: “Jimmy.”James J. Dunne III, a veteran deal maker, was named to the PGA Tour’s board late last year.Oisin Keniry/Getty ImagesThe approach, as optimistic and unguarded as men’s professional golf had been tumultuous and tense, led to a conversation within hours. Dunne and al-Rumayyan fast found a point of harmony that would shape the negotiations: Neither man insisted on a nondisclosure agreement.‘Let’s see how that would work.’London was neutral ground, only hours from golf’s birthplace in Scotland. The men decided they would meet there less than a week later, joined by Edward D. Herlihy, the chairman of the PGA Tour’s board. Herlihy was not any ordinary board member; more than a half-century after he earned his law degree, he was a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and one of Wall Street’s most sought-after counselors for mergers and acquisitions.Even without nondisclosure agreements, the men concluded that any prospective deal would have to be weighed in private. Most members of the tour’s board, including Rory McIlroy, one of the world’s most renowned golfers and a ferocious critic of LIV, and the former AT&T chairman Randall Stephenson, would be largely shut out. Greg Norman, the two-time British Open winner who had envisioned something like LIV long before he became its commissioner, would not be at the bargaining table, nor would most of the seasoned bankers and lawyers the two parties had worked with over the years.Rory McIlroy with PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan last year. The talks cut out many board members including McIlroy.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockBut the negotiators also knew that an accord would not be reached at the initial gathering in London, in part because Monahan would not be in attendance as some of his allies took stock of the Saudis.In a meeting, and later at dinner and over cigars, Dunne, Herlihy and al-Rumayyan discussed their approaches to golf and their own lives, testing whether their budding rapport would endure across hours of face-to-face conversations.Dunne’s personal history made him an unlikely figure to connect with al-Rumayyan. More than one-third of his investment bank’s employees died in the 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center. Dunne had been out of the office playing golf that Tuesday. More than two decades later, after years of supporting the families of the victims, he was meeting with a senior official from a country many people still accused of having a role in the attacks. But al-Rumayyan and his allies, he felt, should not be blamed.“If someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill him myself,” Dunne told the Golf Channel this past week. “We don’t have to wait around.”The morning after their dinner, al-Rumayyan and Herlihy beat Dunne and Brian Gillespie, a wealth fund lawyer, in a round at Beaverbrook Golf Club.At some point before the men parted ways after lunch, Herlihy said he believed it was essential that professional golf be unified. It was another clear signal that the tour was open to an armistice with the wealth fund that had thrown it, and golf at large, into chaos and acrimony.al-Rumayyan paused.“Let’s see how that would work,” he replied.The PGA Tour men told Monahan that he should meet his Saudi rival.Détentes and nervesal-Rumayyan was due in Venice in mid-May, scheduled to attend the wedding of the daughter of Lawrence Stroll, the billionaire Formula 1 racing titan. The lagoon’s islands were not exactly rife with golf courses, but the sides agreed that Venice would be where al-Rumayyan and Monahan would meet for the first time.Monahan, who had risen through Fenway Sports Group and then the PGA Tour before he became commissioner in 2017, had spent months studying and talking about al-Rumayyan.The tour had capitalized on LIV’s Saudi ties, harnessing American emotion and skepticism to sow moral doubts about the league. But now Monahan would undertake a covert mission to meet the man his team had vilified.Survivors and family members of victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, members of the organization 9/11 Justice, voiced their objections to LIV at Trump National Golf Club in July 2022.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe group from the United States arrived behind schedule, after its plane required a diversion to Farnborough, England. A series of boat rides later, Monahan at last greeted al-Rumayyan and the Saudi executive’s wife and daughters before the men settled into a private session for about two hours.In the evening, al-Rumayyan went to the wedding, a glitzy gathering dotted with movie stars and world-class athletes. The Americans, preparing for serious negotiations the next day with al-Rumayyan, met for dinner. The trip would also include a meal with al-Rumayyan’s family and some of his closest lieutenants.To the tour’s negotiators, the meetings in Italy were the most pivotal of the conversations that would continue in video conferences, phone calls and gatherings in San Francisco and New York over less than a month.During Memorial Day weekend, the PGA Tour’s Cessna Citation X jet hopscotched from New York to San Francisco. Takeout burgers were brought aboard during a brief stop in Omaha, instigated by Michael Klein, the well-connected banker who was working with al-Rumayyan and invited on the trip.Most of the flight, which also included Monahan, Dunne and Herlihy, was devoted to ironing out some of the remaining details. The men were hoping to finalize things in San Francisco, where al-Rumayyan would attend meetings related to the wealth fund’s other business dealings.An agreement was close, its terms detailed across mounting pages of legalese, with the new company known simply as “NewCo.” Some of the negotiators were still nervous. A leak before a deal was signed, they were certain, would cause an uproar: How could the PGA Tour consider taking the Saudi money it had denounced?“What changed?” Monahan would say after the deal became public. “I looked at where we were at that point in time, and it was the right point in time to have a conversation.”“It was the right point in time to have a conversation,” Monahan said after the deal was announced.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock“I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” he said. “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.”In the early hours of May 30, after a bargaining marathon, a dozen or so people gathered at a Four Seasons hotel to sign and toast the deal behind closed doors.The PGA Tour contingent did not linger long. Monahan was due at an Ohio tournament that Jack Nicklaus, who had helped found the modern tour in the 1960s and rejected an offer worth more than $100 million to work with LIV, was hosting.A signed pact, intended to bring the moneymaking components of the PGA Tour and LIV, like television and sponsorship contracts, into a new company expected to be flush with Saudi cash, did not mean the deal was complete. No one had agreed on how to value assets since the litigation had left the rivals unable to delve into each other’s books. The deal did not demand a specific investment from the Saudis, but promised them the exclusive rights to inject cash into the new company. The PGA Tour would get Monahan as the company’s chief executive and a majority of board seats, including ones filled by Herlihy and Dunne. But al-Rumayyan would be the chairman.Many antitrust experts expect the agreement will intensify the Justice Department’s scrutiny of professional golf, in part since Monahan said the deal would “take the competitor off of the board.” On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have raced to condemn it.The tour, though, is expecting an investment well into the billions of dollars. The jockeying with a wealth fund aiming to be worth $1 trillion in the next few years will be over.Yasir al-Rumayyan, during a pro-am LIV event last fall, is set to be chairman of the combined organization.Jonathan Ferrey/LIV Golf, via Getty ImagesOn Tuesday morning, after a session in New York to finalize the deal’s rollout, Monahan and al-Rumayyan sat beside each other for a television interview. Around the same time, the cellphones of players around the world lit up with the news.Monahan soon flew to Toronto to face a gathering of golfers that he called “intense” and “heated.”Dunne and al-Rumayyan retreated to Long Island’s Deepdale Golf Club for another round.al-Rumayyan won again.Mark Mazzetti More

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      Analysis: LIV Golf-PGA Tour Merger Is About Profit Above All

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      The PGA Tour’s merger with LIV is the perfect union of the tour’s lack of principle and LIV’s paucity of character.They said it was about principles, but it was always about money.Despite vows from the leaders of the PGA Tour that they would not permit their game to be sullied, men’s professional golf is now in thrall to Saudi Arabia, a nation engaged in a full-tilt attempt to distract the public from the abuse of its citizens through the glitz, gloss and worldwide appeal of sports.Human rights, it turns out, are a bore, and an obstacle. “Sportswashing,” as it is known, is powerful and effective.That’s the message between the lines of the merger between the once venerable PGA Tour and what until Tuesday was its insurgent competition — LIV Golf, born just last year and fueled by billions from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund, which the oil-rich kingdom uses to gild its global image.Profit is what matters most. Above all. That is the message.It reigns over the morals, values and traditions that the PGA Tour, now swaddled in rank hypocrisy, trumpeted during a seemingly fierce but apparently phony conflict that pitted the biggest names in golf against each other.“It’s my job to protect, defend and celebrate” the PGA Tour, Jay Monahan, the outfit’s commissioner, said approximately one year ago, after announcing that any golfer who played for LIV would be ostracized by his circuit. The tour simply could not associate itself with the nation known for rights abuses and presumed to be behind the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, and the other golf stars who joined LIV were branded defectors and pariahs. Human rights formed the sturdy moral foundation of the PGA Tour’s stand.Fans bought merchandise during a LIV Golf event last year at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Doug Mills/The New York TimesAsked about protests against the LIV tour from families of Sept. 11 victims angered by the role Saudi Arabia is said to have played in those attacks, Monahan pantomimed his empathy, saying, “My heart goes out to them.” He asked golfers who had left for LIV tournaments or were considering it a rhetorical question: “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”Those comments look like disinformation now. The high-minded fight is over (unless the PGA Tour policy board, which was kept in the dark, declines to ratify the deal). With the merger, which also includes the DP World Tour (formerly the European Tour), men’s professional golf as we know it will be an artifact of history.The governor of the Saudi investment fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, now is set to become chairman of the board of a worldwide umbrella company so new it has not even been given a name.The merger is about sports, yes, but also about power and values in the world.In Saudi Arabia, citizens do not enjoy the right to free assembly. The legal system is not independent. Due process is a farce. To speak against the government is to risk being jailed, tortured or killed.When Khashoggi, a journalist for The Washington Post, dared to speak against the repressive state, he was lured to a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A United Nations report described how he was drugged and cut into pieces.Who did it? According to the C.I.A., thugs operating on orders from Mohammed bin Salman — the crown prince who oversees everything in his kingdom, including the investment fund that will wield enormous influence over world golf.The United States has its own moral failings, plenty of them, and has since the nation’s founding. But we confront them publicly. We protest. We march. The press speaks up. We vote.Plenty of golfers and fans will block out the seamy side of this story and look purely on the bright side. The new tour hopes to make golf more global, more accessible, less fusty and more exciting. The same golfers ostracized by many of the sport’s star players and banished from the regular PGA Tour upon leaving it — including Mickelson, the chief renegade, and Koepka, recent winner of a major tournament, the P.G.A. Championship — could return to the fold.And indeed, none of that can be bad for fans — or sponsors.But to look only on the bright side is to condone the hypocrisy.This is as disruptive a move as the sports world has seen in a long while — arguably, ever. In the American context, the N.F.L. and American Football League combined forces in the 1960s. The N.B.A. and American Basketball Association joined in the 1970s. But at the time, those moves did not affect global sport, nor provide cover to oppressive nations.This makes those mergers look like tiddlywinks.Get used to a world in which the Middle East, with its many authoritarian governments, is a dominant player in sports.Qatar’s hosting of the men’s World Cup in 2022 was an example of unseemly truths scrubbed clean by a thrilling tournament seen around the world. The golf merger gives the staging of that event some company.Significant competitions in golf, tennis, auto racing, and mixed martial arts, to name four, have been hosted by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia for some time now. The N.B.A. plays exhibition games in the region.The Saudis are hardly done: They’re bidding for soccer’s 2030 World Cup and using their wealth to attract expensive talent to their national league. Cristiano Ronaldo now plays for Al-Nassr. On Tuesday, the French striker Karim Benzema joined another Saudi team, Al-Ittihad, for a nine-figure contract. Lionel Messi — who already has a contract to promote tourism in the kingdom — had been pitched on playing there but said Wednesday he planned to go to M.L.S.“We are interested in all sports,” al-Rumayyan said in a television interview on Tuesday. Not just golf. Not just soccer or basketball. But “many other sports,” he said.It’s not hard to imagine the Saudis further engaging the N.B.A., offering billions to purchase N.F.L. teams or even financing the sponsorship of college athletes. Nor is it hard to imagine the L.P.G.A. Tour coming into the fold.The PGA Tour presented itself as the guy who calls a penalty on himself if he accidentally moves his ball a quarter-inch. Turns out it was the guy who makes a double-bogey and marks it down as a par. More

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      Backing Saudi Deal, McIlroy Reprises His Role as PGA Tour’s Backstop

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      McIlroy, however, reiterated his lingering opposition to LIV Golf, saying: “I hate LIV. Like, I hope it goes away.”Rory McIlroy is still seething, still edgy, still eager to bludgeon LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed league that he has spent much of the past year denigrating as a compromised interloper.“I hate LIV,” McIlroy, one of the new circuit’s most fearsome critics, said on Wednesday. “Like, I hope it goes away, and I would fully expect that it does.”He also appears begrudgingly accepting of what PGA Tour executives believe is reality, bruising and humbling as it might be: that the surest way to defang LIV is through a partnership that positions the tour to collect the kind of Saudi money it has denounced.McIlroy’s calculation, which he detailed a day after the tour and Saudi executives blindsided the golf world with the announcement of an agreement that had been hammered out in secret, is not the final word on a pact that is still formally tentative. But his acquiescence instantly fortified the deal’s prospects, not least because McIlroy, one of the most prominent players in the world, is one of the handful who sit on the PGA Tour’s board.Despite McIlroy’s quest to banish the burden of being one of the tour’s eminent spokesmen, he is still one of its most dependable backstops.It is a role he has said has distracted from his game. Given the tumult into which the PGA Tour lurched this week, he might be in the gig for a while.Beyond removing a prospective boardroom barrier, McIlroy’s endorsement of the deal — which would create a PGA Tour-controlled, Saudi-funded company to handle the business dealings of the rival circuits — means that he has effectively signed up for the task of persuading a disoriented public that the PGA Tour remains a worthy, defensible venture.He conceded Wednesday that the tour’s lucrative shift was “hypocritical.” He confessed to a sense of betrayal, saying, “It’s hard for me to not sit up here and feel somewhat like a sacrificial lamb and feeling like I’ve put myself out there and this is what happens.” He acknowledged “ambiguity” in the deal and said he did not “understand all the intricacies of what’s going on.”But his sales pitch for the agreement, qualified as it was, was perhaps the least muddled glimpse of the tour’s playbook for the weeks and months ahead. It may not quell the storm inside the circuit on which he staked his reputation. After all, few people take pleasure in being out of the loop, and hardly anyone inside the tour knew of its leadership’s private dealings with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.Although McIlroy’s guarded support does not guarantee the deal’s path, it assuredly eases it, even if, as the world’s third-ranked player, he is already finding himself trying to explain the nuances of corporate structures.Peering a decade into the future, McIlroy predicted that the agreement would be “good for the game of professional golf.”“There’s a lot of things still to be sort of thrashed out,” McIlroy said Wednesday in Toronto, where a tour event is scheduled to begin Thursday. “But at least it means that the litigation goes away, which has been a massive burden for everyone that’s involved with the tour and that’s playing the tour, and we can start to work toward some sort of way of unifying the game at the elite level.”The finer points of the new partnership between the PGA Tour and the Saudis are still unclear. But once the new company is built out, the tour is expected to hold a majority of the board seats. The upshot for the Saudis, besides the promise of exclusive rights to invest in the company, is that al-Rumayyan is in line to be the company’s chairman.The Saudi wealth fund, which is slinging cash all over global sports, effectively forced the tour’s hand — and, by extension, McIlroy’s. By Wednesday morning, not much more than a day after McIlroy had received his initial briefing about the arrangement, he said he had “come to terms” with the prospect that Saudi money would underwrite golf well into the future.“I see what’s happened in other sports, I see what’s happened in other businesses, and honestly, I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that this is what’s going to happen,” McIlroy said. “It’s very hard to keep up with people that have more money than anyone else.”A measure of control over how Saudi money might race through golf, McIlroy and others figured, was worth something — particularly if McIlroy, as he said Wednesday, was desperate to “protect the future of the PGA Tour and protect the aspirational nature of what the PGA Tour stands for.”“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?” McIlroy asked. “At the end of the day, money talks, and you would rather have them as a partner.”McIlroy, not particularly giddy about meeting a band of reporters the day after the tour’s public gut punch, said he would soon turn his attention back to golf, pounding balls on the driving range and looking for a victory ahead of next week’s U.S. Open in Los Angeles.A win could come there, or in Toronto this weekend.But the tumult is not over, not by a long shot, not while McIlroy’s prized tour tries to figure out what to do with the circuit he despises. Until it does, McIlroy is most likely stuck with two tests: conquering golf tournaments — and somehow defending a tour that suddenly looks a little more like the one he so often lashed. More

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      The PGA Tour and LIV Golf Merger, Explained

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

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      PGA Tour and LIV Golf Agree to Deal to End Fight Over Sport

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      The PGA Tour, the dominant force in men’s professional golf for generations, and LIV Golf, which made its debut just last year and is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Saudi money, will together form an industry powerhouse that is expected to transform the sport, executives announced Tuesday.The rival circuits had spent the last year clashing in public, and the tentative agreement that emerged from secret negotiations blindsided virtually all of the world’s top players, agents and broadcasters. The deal would create a new company that would consolidate the PGA Tour’s prestige, television contracts and marketing muscle with Saudi money.The new company came together so quickly that it does not yet even have a name and is referred to in the agreement documents simply as “NewCo.” It would be controlled by the PGA Tour but significantly financed by the Saudi government’s Public Investment Fund. The fund’s governor, Yasir al-Rumayyan, will be the new company’s chairman.The deal, coming when Saudi Arabia is increasingly looking to assert itself on the world stage as something besides one of the world’s largest oil producers, has implications beyond sports. The Saudi money will give the new organization greater clout, but it comes with the troubling association of the kingdom’s human rights record, its treatment of women and accusations that it was responsible for the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic.The agreement does not immediately amount to a Saudi takeover of professional golf, but it positions the nation’s top officials to have enormous sway over the game. It also represents an escalation in Saudi ambitions in sports, moving beyond its corporate sponsorship of Formula 1 racing and ownership of an English soccer team into a place where it can exert influence over the highest reaches of a global game.“Everybody is in shock,” said Paul Azinger, the winner of the 1993 P.G.A. Championship and the lead golf analyst for NBC Sports. “The future of golf is forever different.”Since LIV began play last year, it has used some of the richest contracts and prize money in the sport’s history to entice players away from the PGA Tour. Until Tuesday morning, the PGA Tour had been publicly uncompromising: LIV was a threat to the game and a glamorous way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its reputation. The PGA Tour’s commissioner, Jay Monahan, had even avoided uttering LIV’s name in public.But a series of springtime meetings in London, Venice and San Francisco led to a framework agreement that stunned the golf industry for its timing and scope. Monahan, who defended the decision as a sound business choice and said he had accepted that he would be accused of hypocrisy, met with PGA Tour players in Toronto on Tuesday in what he called an “intense” and “certainly heated” exchange.The deal, though, proved right the predictions that there could eventually be an uneasy patching-up of the sport’s fractures. The PGA Tour’s board, which includes a handful of players like Patrick Cantlay and Rory McIlroy, must still approve the agreement, a process that could be tumultuous.It was only a year ago this week that LIV Golf held its inaugural tournament, prompting the PGA Tour to suspend players who competed in it. But by the end of the year, even though the circuit was locked in an antitrust battle with the PGA Tour and its stars were confronting uncertain futures at the sport’s marquee competitions, LIV had some of the biggest names in golf on its payroll. Its players have included the major tournament champions Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson and Cameron Smith.LIV Golf’s chief executive, Greg Norman, left, applauded Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, at LIV’s tournament near Chicago in September.Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated PressThe players were familiar, but LIV’s 54-hole events — the name derives from the Roman numerals for that number — were jarring, with blaring music and golfers in shorts not facing the specter of being unceremoniously cut midway through. The PGA Tour, meanwhile, defended its 72-hole events, where low performers do not compete into the weekend, as rigorous athletic tests that adhered to the traditions of an ancient game.The less-starchy LIV concept drew plenty of headlines, and the league won even greater attention because of its links to former President Donald J. Trump, who hosted LIV tournaments and emerged as one of its most enthusiastic boosters. The league, however, was still largely dependent on the largess of a wealth fund that had been warned that a rebel golf circuit was no certain financial bonanza. It stumbled to a television deal with the CW Network, and big corporate sponsorships were scarce.The league accrued some athletic successes, even as its players faced the risk of eventual exclusion from golf’s major tournaments, which are run by organizations that are close to, but distinct from, the PGA Tour.Last month, Koepka won the P.G.A. Championship, which was organized by the P.G.A. of America. Koepka, Mickelson and Patrick Reed were among the LIV players who fared especially well at the Masters Tournament, administered by Augusta National Golf Club, in early April.Within weeks of the Masters, though, after a run of mutual overtures and months of bravado, PGA Tour and Saudi executives were convening in secret to see if there was a way toward some kind of coexistence, in part, Monahan suggested, because he did not think it was “right or sustainable to have this tension in our sport.” The result was an agreement that gives the tour the upper hand but is poised to make permanent Saudi Arabia’s influence over golf’s starry ranks.Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, is in line to be the chief executive of the new company, which will include an executive committee stocked with tour loyalists. But al-Rumayyan’s presence, as well as the promise that the wealth fund can play a pivotal role in how the company is ultimately funded, means that Saudi Arabia could do much to shape the sport’s future.In a memorandum to players on Tuesday, Monahan insisted that his tour’s “history, legacy and pro-competitive model not only remains intact, but is supercharged for the future.”That was hardly a consensus view. Mackenzie Hughes, a PGA Tour player, acidly noted on Twitter that there was “nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with.” And Terry Strada, the chairwoman of 9/11 Families United, who had assailed the Saudi foray into golf because of misgivings about the kingdom after the 2001 terrorist attacks, said Monahan and the tour had “become just more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation.”Jay Monahan, the tour’s commissioner, will be the chief executive of the new company.Rob Carr/Getty ImagesThe tour and the wealth fund both had incentives to forge an agreement, besides the prospect of concluding a chaotic chapter marked by allegations of betrayal and greed.LIV had faced setbacks in civil litigation against the PGA Tour that threatened to drag al-Rumayyan into sworn testimony and force the wealth fund to turn over documents that could have become public. The tour has been under scrutiny from Justice Department antitrust investigators, who had examined in recent months whether the tour’s tactics to counter LIV had undermined golf’s labor market.The litigation between the tour and LIV will end under the terms of the agreement announced Tuesday. The fate of the antitrust inquiry was less clear — experts said the new arrangement would not automatically immunize the tour from potential legal trouble — but LIV’s standing as its leading cheerleader evaporated.For this year, the world’s professional golfers are unlikely to see seismic changes in their schedules or playing formats, with LIV and the PGA Tour expected to hold competitions as planned. There may be far more consequential changes later, though, chiefly because the new PGA Tour-controlled company will determine whether and how LIV’s team-oriented format might be blended with the tour’s more familiar offerings.LIV players are expected to have pathways to apply for reinstatement to the PGA Tour or the DP World Tour, circuits from which some had resigned when faced with fines and suspensions, but they could face residual penalties for leaving in the first place. Through a spokeswoman, Greg Norman, the two-time major tournament champion who has been LIV’s commissioner, declined to be interviewed on Tuesday.No matter what comes of the LIV brand or style, Tuesday’s announcement is a singular milestone in the Saudi quest to become a titan in global sports. With the deal, the kingdom can move, at least in golf, from a well-heeled disrupter to a seat of power at the establishment’s table.Saudi officials have repeatedly denied that political or public relations motives undergird their eager pursuit of sports investments. Instead, they have framed the investments as necessary for shoring up the resource-rich kingdom’s finances and to enhance its standing on the world stage.Professional golfers on both the PGA and LIV tours are unlikely to see changes in their schedules this year.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBeyond its imprint on golf, the wealth fund previously purchased Newcastle United, a potent English soccer team, and a company with close ties to the fund has eyed investments in cricket, tennis and e-sports. And Saudi Arabia has tried to become a host of major sporting events, from boxing matches to its pending bid to host the World Cup in 2030.But when Saudi Arabia barged into golf last year, it was nearly unthinkable that al-Rumayyan would so swiftly become a formal ally of Monahan and the sport’s other power brokers.“Anybody who thought about it logically would see that something was going to have to happen,” Adam Hadwin, a PGA Tour player, said on Tuesday. It was inconceivable, he suggested, that the world’s best players would only compete against each other at the four major tournaments, but an armistice “happening this quick and in this way is surprising.”For much of the last year, LIV players have deflected questions about Saudi Arabia’s history on human rights and other matters that helped make the kingdom’s surge into golf an international flashpoint. They were, they often said, merely golfers and entertainers.Until Tuesday, Monahan had tried to use the stain of Saudi Arabia to undercut the new league and its golfers.“I would ask any player that has left, or any player that would ever consider leaving: Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” he said last year.On Tuesday, when Monahan declared that the leaders of golf’s factions had “realized that we were better off together than we were fighting or apart,” it was his tour’s players facing questions about lucrative connections to Riyadh.“I’ve dedicated my entire life to being at golf’s highest level,” Hadwin, the tour player, said. “I’m not about to stop playing golf because the entity that I play for has joined forces with the Saudi government.”Reporting was contributed by More

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      Forged After a Tumultuous Era, World Golf Championships Fade in Another

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      A match play event in Texas may be the last W.G.C. event, ending an international competition that preceded golf’s high-rolling present.AUSTIN, Texas — It was not all that long ago — Tom Kim, after all, is only 20 years old — but before Kim emerged as one of the PGA Tour’s wunderkinds-in-progress, he would watch the World Golf Championships.“For sure, 100 percent,” Kim cheerfully reminisced as he clacked along this week at Austin Country Club, the site of the championships’ match play event. “There was W.G.C. in China. There was Firestone before. You had Doral. You had this.”Had, because once one man wins on Sunday, the championships appear poised to fade away. An elite competition forged, in part, because of another era’s tumult has become a casualty of this one’s.“Everything runs its course and has its time,” said Adam Scott, who has twice won W.G.C. events. Barring a resuscitation, which seems improbable given the PGA Tour’s business strategy these days, the W.G.C.’s time was 24 years.The W.G.C. circuit was decaying before LIV Golf, the Greg Norman-fronted league that is cumulatively showering players with hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, cleaved men’s professional golf last year. Two W.G.C. events vanished after their 2021 iterations, and a third, always staged in China, has not been contested since 2019 because of the coronavirus pandemic.And as the PGA Tour has redesigned its model to diminish LIV’s appeal, even the Texas capital’s beloved match play competition has become vulnerable to contractual bickering and shifting priorities.“We’ve had great events and great champions, but the business evolves and it adapts,” Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, said this month, when the tour reinforced its decision to wager its future on “designated events” that should command elite fields and, in some cases beginning next year, be no-cut tournaments capped at 80 players or less. (LIV, whose tournaments always have 48-man fields and no cuts, responded with a wry tweet: “Imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Congratulations PGA Tour. Welcome to the future.”)With a $20 million purse, doubled in size from five years ago, the match play competition that began on Wednesday is a designated event under the 2023 model. Next year, though, it will not be on the calendar at all, winnowing the W.G.C. to one competition. And Monahan has said it would be “difficult to foresee” when his circuit’s schedule might again include the HSBC Champions, the W.G.C. event in China that will be the last remaining event formally existing in the series.The Chinese tournament’s website has had few updates in recent years, and an inquiry with the event’s organizers went unanswered. HSBC, the British banking powerhouse that is the tournament’s title sponsor, declined to comment.But the PGA Tour’s freshly calibrated distance from the Shanghai competition is fueling what looks to be an unceremonious end for the W.G.C., which were announced to immense fanfare in 1997, when the tour and its allies were smarting over Norman’s failed quest to start a global circuit for the sport’s finest players. The events, which debuted in 1999 with a match play event that sent some of the game’s best home after the first day, were intended to entice and reward the elite without challenging the prestige of the four major tournaments, as well as to give men’s professional golf a greater global footprint.It worked for a spell, and five continents hosted W.G.C. events, many of which Tiger Woods dominated. With the exception of the Chinese tournament, though, the circuit had lately been played in North America.“The ‘world’ part of the World Golf Championships wasn’t really in there,” Rory McIlroy, the four-time major tournament winner whose W.G.C. résumé includes a victory in the 2015 match play event, mused in an interview by the practice putting green.McIlroy, among the architects of the tour’s reimagining as Norman’s unfinished ambitions proved more fruitful this time around, said he had also worried that the W.G.C. events had come to lack “any real meaning,” even as they had been “lovely to be a part of, nice to play in and nice to win.” The tour’s emphasis on select tournaments, many executives and top players like McIlroy believe, will lend more consequence to its season and make it a more appealing, decipherable and concentrated product that can fend off the assault by a LIV circuit bent on simplifying — its critics say diluting — professional golf.“Your casual golf fan knows the majors, the Ryder Cup and maybe the events that are close to their hometown,” said McIlroy, who is among the players devising a new weeknight golf competition that is expected to start next year. “I get it: Professional golf is a very saturated market with a ton of stuff going on, and people have limited time to watch what they want to watch.”The Austin tournament’s end will, at least for now, reduce match play opportunities on the circuits that have been aligned with the W.G.C. Though the Austin event — which has three days of group-stage play, followed by single-elimination rounds — has a field of only 64 players, less than half of the size of last year’s British Open, it has been larger and more accessible than other signature match play tournaments.Rickie Fowler hits from the rough during the first round of W.G.C. match play.Eric Gay/Associated PressBut given the format’s popularity, it will linger, if a little less, on the international golf scene. The Presidents Cup, Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup will remain fixtures — the Solheim will be contested in Spain in September, with the Ryder decided soon after in Italy — and more modest events, such as the International Crown women’s tournament that will be played in May, still dot the calendar.Some players this week appeared more mournful than others about the erosion of the W.G.C. and the decline of match play. Scott said he hoped the tour’s new system would be able to accommodate the next generation of ready-for-stardom players from around the world, as the W.G.C. did, even as he said he was not insistent that match play be a staple.“We don’t play much match play, so the kind of logic in me questions its place in pro golf, but also we’ve got to entertain as well, and if people like to see it and sponsors want to see it, yep, I’m up for it,” Scott said.He grinned.“Maybe we should have some more, get a bit more head-to-head and see if guys like each other so much after,” he offered mischievously. “The year of match play!”The PGA Tour has not ruled out a return to the format, though it would assuredly be limited. LIV could also eventually try to tap into interest. At an event in Arizona last week, Phil Mickelson, a LIV team captain, said that match play was “certainly something that we are discussing as a possibility for the season-ending event.”But the W.G.C. appear effectively finished. Kim, the youngest player this week, was delighted that he had arrived just in time.“I played once before it all goes away,” said Kim, who has six top-10 finishes in his early tour career and expressed confidence in the circuit’s direction. “I played once in my life.”He wandered off to practice. A round against Scottie Scheffler, the reigning match play champion and the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking, loomed soon enough. More

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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