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    PGA Tour Wanted Greg Norman Ousted as Part of Saudi Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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      How the PGA Tour-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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      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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      LIV Golf Wants to Talk About Sports. Donald Trump Still Looms.

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      It was only on Sunday evening that LIV Golf, the men’s league awash in billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, met its greatest athletic triumph to date when one of its headliners, Brooks Koepka, emphatically won the P.G.A. Championship.By Thursday morning, though, LIV’s road show had been reinfused with the political bent that has trailed the second-year circuit as it has convulsed professional golf: the loquacious, limelight-seizing presence of former President Donald J. Trump, who is hosting one of the league’s tournaments this weekend at a course northwest of Washington.Whether LIV can outrun Trump’s shadow, and whether it even wants to, could do much to shape how the league is perceived in the years ahead, particularly in the United States, where it has struggled to gain a meaningful foothold against the PGA Tour.But for now, besides major tournament winners like Koepka and Phil Mickelson who have joined the circuit, there is probably no figure beyond golf more publicly linked to LIV than Trump, who has repeatedly and enthusiastically cheered Saudi Arabia’s thunderous, flashy entrance into sports. At its events, he often seems like an eager M.C. whose role is at once decidedly conspicuous and deeply mysterious — neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events — as the league looks to make inroads in a hidebound sport.The former President Donald J. Trump played with Patrick Reed during a pro-am event Thursday.Trump talked to the news media throughout his round of golf.“They want to use my properties because they’re the best properties,” Trump said on Thursday, when he spent five hours appearing in a pro-am event with the LIV players Graeme McDowell and Patrick Reed (and staging what amounted to a rolling news conference about politics and an infomercial about his property over 18 holes along the Potomac River).The Trump portfolio does indeed feature some exceptional courses, including the Washington-area location, which once held a Senior P.G.A. Championship, and LIV executives have said in the past that they were drawn to them because many top-caliber properties in the United States were not willing to host a circuit intended to rival the PGA Tour. But Trump’s persistent, growing place in LIV’s orbit also invites sustained skepticism of the motives and intentions of the league, which some critics see as a glossy way for Saudi Arabia to rehabilitate its image.The former president is unbothered by the league’s patron, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the kingdom’s budding place in professional golf, despite its record of human rights abuses. He is still casting aside objections from family members of Sept. 11 victims, some of whom believe Saudi Arabia played a role in the 2001 attacks, because, as he said Thursday, LIV tournaments are “great economic development.” He is openly admiring the millions and millions of dollars that the Saudis are raining down onto players and, of course, properties like his, even though he asserted Thursday that hosting tournaments amounts to “peanuts for me.” This year, LIV will travel to three of his properties, up from two in its inaugural season.He has remained steadfast in his loyalty even though a special counsel from the Justice Department, Jack Smith, has subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to LIV.In an interview as he walked between holes on Thursday, Trump described Smith’s aggressive approach as “retribution” because the Biden administration wants “to do something to take the spotlight off what’s taken place.” He said he did not know why his ties to LIV had drawn the special counsel’s scrutiny.Trump’s affection for LIV can be traced, at least in part, to years of friction with golf’s establishment.Graeme McDowell, right, who played with Trump Thursday is among the past major champions to have left the PGA Tour for LIV.Neither the Trump Organization nor LIV have disclosed how much money the former president’s company is making for the events on his courses.In 2016, the PGA Tour ended a longstanding relationship with Trump’s course in Doral, Fla., near Miami, because of what its then-commissioner described as “fundamentally a sponsorship issue.” And in 2021, after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, the P.G.A. of America — which is separate from the PGA Tour — abandoned its plan to host its flagship men’s championship at a Trump property in New Jersey in 2022.Trump has not fared much better abroad. The R&A, which organizes the British Open, has signaled it does not intend to take the tournament back to Trump-controlled Turnberry, where LIV’s commissioner, Greg Norman, won one of his two Opens.LIV has embraced Trump, though, and in return gotten a former president’s imprimatur, along with bursts of news coverage for events that might have gone unnoticed otherwise. He brings prestige and power, diluted as both might be by the divisiveness in which he revels.“They have unlimited money and they love it,” he said Thursday, “and it’s been great publicity for Saudi Arabia.”But for every day Trump appears at a LIV event, it is a day that LIV might as well write off as one in which it will not escape the pointed questions that it has spent a year trying to move past, or at least saying it wants to move past.It has been hard enough for the league, even on a day when Trump is not playing a round, not to have its players confronting questions about the morality of accepting millions in Saudi money.“We’re contracted to play golf,” Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner who finished in a tie for fourth at the P.G.A. Championship last weekend, said on Wednesday. “I think the most important part is to provide great entertainment wherever possible on whatever platform that is, whatever platform that provides it. When you can talk about ethics, that’s people’s perception. I completely disagree with it, but everybody has the right to their own opinion, and I’d say, was it worth it? Absolutely.”Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But DeChambeau hardly has the same megaphone or presence as a former occupant of the Oval Office. When Trump appears at a LIV event, even winners of the Masters Tournament or the U.S. Open are relegated to supporting actors.LIV executives have generally brushed aside questions about whether the former president is good for business, or merely essential for it, given their troubles landing quality venues. They seem convinced that, at some point, sports will overtake politics, which might be wishful thinking since Trump suggested Thursday that nothing — not even a return to the White House — would easily dissuade him from doing business with the league.But LIV’s strategy still involves a gamble that the presence of one of the nation’s most polarizing figures will not scare off even more of the sponsorship contracts and television rights that are already proving hard to come by for the operation. And Trump can just as easily alienate prospective fans as he can entice them.Trump himself insists that LIV craves him at its events and that he is not a distraction from the league’s proclaimed goal of growing the sport and giving it doses of needed energy.“They wanted me to be here, and I said sure,” said Trump, who said that LIV’s contracts with his properties did not require his appearances in events like the pro-am.Perhaps all of that is true. But as long as it is, LIV will linger in the political thicket, no matter how well Koepka plays on the game’s biggest stages. More

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

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

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      2023 Masters: Rory McIlroy Looks to Make Up Ground as First Round Begins

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      Plus, N.C.A.A. champions will be invited to play the Masters, and Larry Mize and Sandy Lyle are preparing to say farewell to the tournament.AUGUSTA, Ga. — In the last five years, Rory McIlroy has spent 27 weeks ranked as the world’s best men’s golfer. He has earned nine PGA Tour victories, including at the Tour Championship and the Players Championship. He was on a Ryder Cup-winning team. In the final round of last year’s Masters Tournament, he carded an eight-under-par 64.But the last time he shot par or better in a Masters first round? April 5, 2018.2019: 73.2020: 75.2021: 76.2022: 73.At least the trend line is improving? It stands to reason that if McIlroy is to become the sixth modern player to achieve the career Grand Slam, he is very likely going to have to refigure out Thursdays at Augusta National Golf Club. (When he made his Masters debut in 2009, he shot a first-round par 72.)“It’s been tentative starts, not putting my foot on the gas early enough,” McIlroy said this week. “I’ve had a couple of bad nine holes that have sort of thrown me out of the tournament at times. So it’s sort of just like I’ve got all the ingredients to make the pie. It’s just putting all those ingredients in and setting the oven to the right temperature and letting it all sort of come to fruition. But I know that I’ve got everything there.”McIlroy is keenly aware that Augusta National, where he has lately played more than 80 holes of practice, is “a very difficult course to chase on.”“You start to fire at pins and short-siding yourself and you’re missing in the wrong spots, it’s hard to make up a lot of ground,” he said.Dottie Pepper, the CBS commentator and a two-time winner of women’s major championships, said she thought McIlroy had made some of the shifts necessary to contend, like switching putters and drivers. But Thursday, she said, may well reveal if it will be enough.“He has played himself out of the tournament year after year on Thursday, and all of a sudden, gets it in gear and it’s a gear too late,” she said. If he can sort out the first round, she predicted, “it could be a pretty spectacular movie come Saturday and Sunday.”McIlroy, who will play with Sam Burns and Tom Kim for the first two rounds, is scheduled to tee off at 1:48 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.A new pathway into the Masters: the N.C.A.A. titleGordon Sargent, the reigning Division I men’s individual champion, was invited to this year’s field before Augusta National announced that N.C.A.A. title winners would be automatically invited next year.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesAugusta National announced the entry criteria for the 2024 Masters, and although the standards did not change much for professionals, America’s male college golfers have a new incentive to win the N.C.A.A.’s Division I individual title: It now comes with a Masters invitation.“That is a major amateur championship, and I thought it was time that we acknowledged it,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said of the N.C.A.A. competition. Gordon Sargent, a sophomore from Vanderbilt University who is the reigning Division I champion, is in the 88-man field this week, having received an invitation from tournament organizers before the new policy was announced.“It really goes back to our roots, and that is that Bobby Jones was the greatest amateur of all time,” Ridley said, speaking broadly about the place of amateurs at Augusta National. “He believed in the importance of amateurs in the Masters. I had the personal experience of enjoying that on three different occasions, and I can tell you that it changed my life.”Past N.C.A.A. individual champions include Bryson DeChambeau, Luke Donald, Max Homa, Phil Mickelson, Curtis Strange and Tiger Woods.Sargent, who is from Birmingham, Ala., has reveled in the experience, even if he has been mistaken around Augusta National for, say, a participant in the youth Drive, Chip and Putt competition.“I’m walking around, and no one is with me,” Sargent said. “I don’t even know if I had my badge with me — I think I probably still had it in the car or something. I was like, ‘Can I have player dining?’ They’re like, I don’t know, player?”He eventually made it inside.“It was pretty funny,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Where are your parents? Like, did they send you by yourself?’ I was like, ‘No, they’re coming in. I can travel by myself sometimes.’”Ridley also said Wednesday that the winner of the N.C.A.A.’s individual women’s championship will be invited to play in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Stanford’s Rose Zhang, the reigning Division I champion, won that tournament over the weekend.Two past champions are ending their Augusta National careers.Larry Mize, the 1987 Masters victor, is the only Augusta, Ga., native to win the tournament.David Cannon/Getty ImagesRidley, ever diplomatic, did not identify Larry Mize as a reason Greg Norman was not invited to this year’s Masters. But it was Mize who hit a brilliant chip — from 140 feet away — at No. 11 in 1987, making Norman a Masters runner-up for a second straight year.Mize, 64, has played every Masters since, and this one will be his last. It will be also be the final Masters for Sandy Lyle, 65, who won in 1988.“Club head speed lowers down without you even trying sometimes, and then the course is getting longer and I’m getting shorter,” Lyle said. “Not a good combination. The young ones are so good these days that I can’t really compete against that.”Mize, the only Augusta native ever to win the Masters, has spent part of the week doling out counsel to newcomers.“Trust your talent, believe in it, and just let it go,” said Mize, who added, “You’ve got to respect this golf course, but you can’t fear it. You can’t play in fear out there, or it’s going to be a long week.”Mize, Lyle suggested, struggled to get through his remarks at Tuesday’s private dinner for past champions. He had figured Mize would be at ease. He was not.“He clammed up like a clam shell,” Lyle said. “He just stood up there and had a glass of water and another glass of water.” As it turns out, Lyle said, “He’s tough enough to win a Masters, but when it comes to that kind of emotional thing, we’ve all got feelings.” More

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      The Major Players Behind LIV Golf: From Trump to the Crown Prince

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      Diagram of the major investors, fixers and political allies and patrons that are connected to LIV Golf. Public Investment Fund Trump World Performance54 LIV Golfers PLUS 45 OTHERS CONSULTANTS McKinsey & Company Public Investment Fund Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan White & Case M. Klein & Company Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Majed al-Sorour Newcastle […] More