Saudi Arabia
Subterms
More stories
- in Golf
LIV Golf Threw a Sport Into Chaos. It Also Changed It.
The Saudi-backed golf series, which will expand next year, has forced the PGA Tour to redesign its economic model. The drama between the two golf entities seems far from over.DORAL, Fla. — To hear the 52-year-old Phil Mickelson’s account, whatever happened this year in his golf career — a greed-fueled rupture, a simply-business parting of ways, an inevitable estrangement, a lucrative exercise in denial and downplaying — has yielded something close to sublime.“I see LIV Golf trending upward, I see the PGA Tour trending downward and I love the side that I’m on,” Mickelson said this month in Saudi Arabia, the country whose sovereign wealth fund bankrolled the new LIV Golf circuit, including a Mickelson contract believed to be worth about $200 million.As the series closes its first season Sunday, when its team championship event is to be decided at Trump National Doral Golf Club and a $50 million prize fund divided, it can credibly claim that it has disrupted men’s professional golf more than anything else since the late 1960s, when what would become the PGA Tour emerged.It has done so with a checkbook that seems boundless, nearly unchecked brazenness and self-assurance, and the political cover of a former American president who has looked past Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights. It has not, though, been a romp without resistance or an instantaneous and definitive dethroning of the old order.The PGA Tour, now redesigning its economic model so urgently that it is tapping reserve funds, still commands the bigger roster of current stars and the loyalties of the tournaments that matter most to history. The tour, less tainted by geopolitics, has lucrative television deals; LIV Golf is on YouTube. Players earn world ranking points at PGA Tour events; they drop in the rankings the longer they compete in the new series. Dustin Johnson knows this well, as he is now No. 30, down from No. 13 when he signed with LIV in May. (But perhaps Johnson does not mind all that much: He captured LIV’s individual championship and has won at least $30 million on the circuit this year, after accruing about $75 million in career earnings during a PGA Tour tenure that started in 2007.)Dustin Johnson’s world ranking has fallen to No. 30 from No. 13 when he joined LIV Golf in May.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesWhat many golf executives are figuring out, though, is that it is possible to revile much about LIV, from its financial patron to its devotion to 54-hole tournaments to its defiant dispensing of starchy atmospheres, and yet recognize that the PGA Tour had left itself vulnerable to at least a spasm of drama. Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who ascended again to the world’s No. 1 ranking after a tour event last weekend, have been two of LIV Golf’s foremost critics — and two leading architects of a new strategy to fortify and reinvent a PGA Tour that had some popular players feeling undervalued and some younger ones struggling for financial breakthroughs.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More
- in Golf
Trump Criticizes PGA Tour and Praises Saudis for Backing LIV Golf
The former president, who is hosting two LIV Golf events, including one this week at his course in Bedminster, N.J., made the remarks before teeing off in the pro am.BEDMINSTER, N.J. — Donald J. Trump praised the Saudi Arabian backers of a controversial new golf tournament Thursday, calling them his friends, while criticizing the traditional PGA Tour.The former president, wearing a white golf shirt and his signature red baseball cap emblazoned with his familiar campaign slogan, spoke briefly before teeing off in the pro-am segment of the LIV Golf event at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., which he owns.“I’ve known these people for a long time in Saudi Arabia and they have been friends of mine for a long time,” Trump said after taking practice swings on the driving range. “They’ve invested in many American companies. They own big percentages of many, many American companies and frankly, what they are doing for golf is so great, what they are doing for the players is so great. The salaries are going to go way up.”The LIV Golf series is bankrolled by the sovereign wealth fund, which is overseen by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In 2018, during Trump‘s presidency, American intelligence officials concluded that Prince Mohammed had authorized the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist with the Washington Post. Trump, who criticized the Saudis on the campaign trail before his election in 2016, resisted their conclusions.The Bedminster club had previously been scheduled to host the P.G.A. Championship in 2022, but the P.G.A. of America moved it to Oklahoma after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, saying that holding it at Bedminster would be “detrimental to the P.G.A. of America brand.” (The P.G.A. of America, which is separate from the PGA Tour, later reached a settlement with the Trump Organization.) Since then, Trump has sided with the upstart golf tour.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More
- in Golf
Why Do LIV Golfers Struggle to Explain Why They Left the PGA Tour?
The latest golfers to join the Saudi-backed series were vague and defensive in the face of hard questions about guaranteed money and human-rights issues.BEDMINSTER, N.J. — Last month, Justin Thomas, the world’s seventh-ranked men’s golfer, summed up the feelings of PGA Tour players like himself who have rejected the sumptuous money offers of the rival, Saudi-backed LIV Golf series to remain with the established tour.Thomas just wants his former tour brethren now aligned with LIV Golf to say they jumped for the money. “Like, I personally would gain a lot more respect for that,” Thomas has said. “But the more the players keep talking and saying that this is for the betterment of the game, the more agitated and irritated I get about it.”On Wednesday, Thomas, who made his comments on the “No Laying Up” podcast, would have been repulsed anew by the words of the three latest defectors to the rebel tour who appeared at a news conference for a LIV series event that begins Friday at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey.“No, money was not a factor,” said Charles Howell III, 43, who was once ranked No. 15 worldwide but has slipped to No. 169. Howell insisted instead that he joined the breakaway circuit because golf “can be a force for change and good.”Paul Casey, ranked 31st in the world, also lamented that the focus of the new circuit’s successful recruiting efforts has been the bountiful money paid to jump ship.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More
- in Golf
Trump Embraces LIV Golf, Backing a New Saudi Strategy
After decades of failure and rejection in sports, the former president’s New Jersey course will host a LIV Golf tournament this weekend, but the event is not simply about the golf.Donald J. Trump has long toyed with becoming a sports baron.He tried for years to buy an N.F.L. franchise and was a face of a second-tier football league that collapsed. He backed a would-be rival to Major League Baseball that never materialized and briefly put his name on a race for elite cyclists.Now, after decades of failure and rejection in sports, the former president is embracing an athletic gambit with an urgent craving for credibility: LIV Golf, the invitational series that has upended professional golf and, flush with money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, is seen as another Saudi effort to use sports as a reputation sanitizer.Coming as the former president weighs another White House campaign and as diplomats navigate a complex relationship strained by Saudi Arabia’s human rights record — including the 2018 murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a source of international outrage that Trump has repeatedly played down — the Trump family’s choice to welcome LIV Golf to two of its courses this year carries the starkest geopolitical overtones of any of Trump’s sports forays.It could also undermine the get-tough message that many Republicans have sounded on Saudi Arabia, and it is making some of the Trump family’s ties to the kingdom decidedly, and defiantly, public.They roared into view as Trump, who has long been associated with golf and who was critical of Saudi Arabia as a presidential candidate, publicly pressed top athletes to defect from the PGA Tour to the LIV series, which has lured top players with offers of millions of dollars in guaranteed money. They will be displayed again this weekend, when the Saudi-backed series will hold a tournament at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster in New Jersey. And they are expected to surface again in October, when a Trump course near Miami is scheduled to host the final event of the year.LIV Golf’s logo outside the club house at Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, N.J.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOutside the pro shop at Trump National in Doral, Fla., where LIV’s final event of the year will be held.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesLike much in Trump’s orbit, the deepening relationship, which could ultimately pose concerns about conflicts of interest if the former president ever returns to public office, is one of mutual convenience and murky provenance. It is not clear how much the Trump Organization will make from hosting the Saudi-financed events.Beyond any money, though, the company’s portfolio of courses is gaining fresh attention and, crucially to a former president who seeks adulation, a record of hosting some of the world’s finest golfers.And as Trump takes his place, for the moment, as a figure adjacent to big-time sports, the Saudi fund is picking up a former American president’s imprimatur on a strategy that has sometimes been condemned as “sportswashing.”“I think it’s money, it’s greed, it’s power,” said Brett Eagleson, the president of 9/11 Justice, which has raised questions about whether any Saudi officials had a role in the 2001 attacks.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 6A new series. More
- in Golf
Furious at LIV Golf Defections, British Open Could Change Entry Rules
The R&A’s chief executive issued a stark warning to the players and did little to disguise his disdain for the new Saudi-backed series.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The British Open’s organizer pointedly warned on Wednesday that it might change its entry rules for future tournaments — potentially complicating the claret jug prospects of players who defected to the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf series.Although the R&A, which runs the Open, has not made a decision about how players will be able to join the 156-man field in 2023 and beyond, the organization’s chief executive, Martin Slumbers, left open the possibility that the pathway to one of golf’s most hallowed tournaments could soon shift.“We will review our exemptions and qualifications criteria for the Open,” Slumbers said at a news conference at St. Andrews on the eve of the Open’s start on the Old Course. “We absolutely reserve the right to make changes” from past years, he added.“Players have to earn their place in the Open, and that is fundamental to its ethos and its unique global appeal,” said Slumbers, who did little to disguise his disdain for the LIV series, which he condemned as “entirely driven by money” and threatening to “the merit-based culture and the spirit of open competition that makes golf so special.”Still, he signaled that a wholesale ban of players was “not on our agenda.”Slumbers denied that the R&A was coordinating with the organizers of golf’s other major tournaments to potentially exclude LIV players, whose ranks include Brooks Koepka, Sergio García, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed. But the chief executive of the United States Golf Association, which controls the U.S. Open, said in June that the group would “re-evaluate” the criteria it uses to set that tournament’s field.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 5A new series. More
