Let us begin this new year with the glass half full (for those of you doing the dry January thing, your intentions are impressive) and believe that commissioner Jay Monahan’s New Year’s Eve memo to players was an encouraging sign that professional golf may be gradually approaching its kumbaya moment.
The Dec. 31 deadline for a negotiated deal between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund came and went with the Times Square ball drop, but the message to tour players was that progress is being made.
It can’t happen soon enough.
If there is a way to bring the splintered pieces of the professional game together – it won’t be perfect from either side’s perspective – there’s reason for optimism.
Fatigue has set in.
For the administrators, the players on all sides and the investors, this is a difficult and meticulous process, fueled less by altruism and more by greed, arrogance and threatened futures. They should take their time to get it right.
The process hasn’t come without a cost, however.
“I feel for the fan. There's been a ton of confusion not only for players out on tour in the last year or two, but I can only imagine for the fan at home,” said Patrick Cantlay, who sits in one of the negotiating chairs as a deep-thinking member of the PGA Tour’s Policy Board.
“I think the fans [are] rooting for the attention to go back squarely onto golf and squarely onto the tournaments that are being played and to forget all of this political non-golf talk, which has consumed a lot of the energy over the last couple years.”
What he said.
We are entering the third year of the great LIV Golf disruption and the evolution continues. It began as a curiosity that sputtered to life before the millions began flowing and stars changed their stripes. It morphed into a golf war – the PGA Tour against LIV – until it became apparent that the tour couldn’t win the long-term fight.
“[The] outcome I hope for, is that those guys eventually find their way back here, and play consistently out here, and we find a way to coexist as LIV and PGA Tour."
Mackenzie Hughes
The earthquake June 6 announcement that the tour and LIV entered a “framework agreement” sent another shudder through the game and, seven months later, the tone of the rhetoric has softened. It’s an exaggeration to say that everyone is playing nice – Jon Rahm’s jump to LIV last month was a punch-in-the-nose reminder of the stakes – but it’s encouraging that the sides didn’t go their separate ways when January 1 arrived.
The PGA Tour still wants what it wants – to be the highest power in the professional game and the place where the best players tee it up against one another. The Saudi side wants a seat at the power table and won’t stop spending until it gets what it wants, which likely means keeping LIV Golf and its team concept alive in some form down the line.
The tour, meanwhile, is bringing in billions from a private-equity consortium to stanch its financial bleeding and strengthen its bargaining position.
Beyond practical solutions, there are emotional elements in play. How does the PGA Tour handle players who chose to join LIV? Not everyone wants them back. Is there a reward for loyalty to the tour? Should there be?
As the level-headed Mackenzie Hughes, a member of the tour’s player advisory council, said last week, the goal should be finding a way to co-exist. That, of course, is easier said than done.
Rory McIlroy recently said that he has softened his views on LIV Golf and credited the organization’s success in exposing flaws in the PGA Tour model.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve lost the fight against LIV, but I’ve just accepted the fact that this is part of our sport now,” McIlroy said on the “Stick to Football” podcast.
On the other side, LIV’s Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman recently have toned down their social-media stridency.
Might the tour be willing to surrender the fall to LIV and allow any players who are interested to be part of a team concept there, no strings attached, while LIV continues on in its current format?
Would the PGA Tour and DP World Tour co-sanction what amounts to a signature event in Saudi Arabia, one that likely would have an eye-popping purse?
Through the tour’s new for-profit entity, how much sway would the PIF have in reshaping the business of the PGA Tour?
It seems unlikely that LIV will vanish. The investment – financial and professional – is too deep.
While the geopolitical elements of working with Saudi Arabia remain, the discussion has moved past that. It may not make the approaching reality any more palatable to many, but the focus has shifted.
“[The] outcome I hope for, is that those guys eventually find their way back here, and play consistently out here, and we find a way to coexist as LIV and PGA Tour,” Hughes said.
“Kind of that bitterness and that rivalry and that divisiveness in golf goes away, and it becomes about who is playing the best golf, who is playing the best golf in the biggest tournaments, and you start talking about major moments in golf, not just major moments in the headlines or on Fox News when Jon Rahm says he’s going to LIV Golf. “I’m just tired of talking about that stuff. So, that’s the outcome I hope we get to someday, but who knows when.”
Sooner rather than later, hopefully.
E-MAIL RON
Top: Can LIV recruit Jon Rahm (left) and PGA Tour stalwart Rory McIlroy reach across divide and forge peace?
andrew redington, getty images