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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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      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