Almost Two Years On, Golf's Merger Is Finally About to Happen - and President Trump's Hands Are All Over It
A deal could be announced in the next three weeks, and the golf world might never truly be the same again.
First off. I promise double-promise cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die that I won’t be writing about the PGA Tour-LIV Golf divide every time here on The Wedge.
I did that for a couple of months in that crazy summer of 2022, and it led to one of the longest series of essays I’ve ever written on anything. It went to some strange and interesting places, from the standard (the business models of the two tours) to the political (a short history of sportswashing) to the sorta crazy (a deep-dive into psychology and the century of the self).
[You can find all seven parts of that series in the archive.]
There’s been precious little progress to report for a while — February 2025 is more than 20 months since the announcement of the so-called “merger” in June 2023 when Jay Monahan, the chief executive of the PGA Tour, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and head of the LIV Golf organization, appeared together on CNBC to talk about golf’s bright and unified future.
When the bombshell of “the merger” dropped, some on the PGA Tour side called it the end of LIV.
Some on the LIV side called it a validation of the new tour by the PGA Tour.
People in the middle just wanted to wait and see what happened. And for a well over a year, the answer to that has been “not much”.
Of course, lots was clearly happening behind the scenes, and like so many things related to America these days, things seem to happen fast when Donald Trump takes up the reins of power.
And Trump’s tentacles seem to be in almost every part of whatever deal is about to be done.
It’s hard to overstate the US President’s influence here.
Firstly, Trump-owned courses have been a staple of LIV over the past three years. Trump National Doral in Miami will host its fourth LIV event in April, while Trump National in Washington DC and Trump National in Bedminster, New Jersey have also hosted LIV tournaments.
Bedminster, remember, is the course that was scheduled to host the 2022 PGA Championship before organizers moved it following the January 2021 Capitol riot because hosting a tournament at a Trump venue “would be detrimental to the PGA of America brand”.
Four years is a long, long time in politics.
A little over a year after that Capitol riot, a report in the New York Times in April 2022 revealed that Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the Saudi crown prince and therefore the topmost power-broker in the PIF, had personally intervened to approve a $2 billion investment by the fund into a new private equity firm set up by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former White House staffer, months after the end of Trump’s first term in office.
Because it wasn’t a straightforward investment.
A key part of that NYT piece read (emphasis mine):
“A panel that screens investments for the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund cited concerns about the proposed deal with Mr. Kushner’s newly formed private equity firm, Affinity Partners…
…
Those objections included: ‘the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management’; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for ‘the bulk of the investment and risk’; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them ‘unsatisfactory in all aspects’; a proposed asset management fee that ‘seems excessive’; and ‘public relations risks’ from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.
But days later the full board of the $620 billion Public Investment Fund — led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler and a beneficiary of Mr. Kushner’s support when he worked as a White House adviser — overruled the panel.”
Now, you wouldn’t be the first to accuse the New York Times of bias, especially related to Trump, but still … something is afoot, right?
The revelations sparked calls for an investigation into the closeness of Trump’s links to the Saudi Arabian royal family, who through the PIF are reputed to own more than 90% of the LIV organization.
Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of DAWN, or Democracy for the Arab World Now, the organization founded in 2018 by US-resident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi months before his murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
She told a Newsweek report published in January 2023:
“The revelation that a fund controlled by Crown Prince MBS actually owns almost all of LIV Golf means that MBS has been paying Donald Trump unknown millions for the past two years, via their mutual corporate covers.
“The national security implications of payments from a grotesquely abusive foreign dictator to a president of the United States who provided extraordinary favors to him are as dangerous as they are shocking.”
Now, with two more years in the rearview mirror, Trump back in the White House and Saudi Arabia’s appetite for influence and depth of financial reserves still both running deep, the stage is set for the US President to be the go-between for pro golf’s coming-together.
The deal first mooted in June 2023 now looks to be getting close to the finish line.
PGA Tour chief executive Monahan and players’ representative Adam Scott met with Trump recently, with Scott telling Golf Channel last week:
“It’s just a positive thing that the President of the United States is such a lover of the game of golf and understands some of the challenges facing the professional game at the moment.”
That was in advance of the weekend’s PGA Tour event, the Genesis Invitational hosted by Tiger Woods, and by the time that tournament came to a close on Sunday evening, it appears that things were about to be tied up in a neat little bow, with Trump’s hands all over the knot.
The whispers started on Sunday morning, with talk emanating from Adelaide, Australia, where the second LIV event of the year was coming to a close, that an agreement was weeks away from becoming public knowledge.
They gathered pace later on Sunday evening when Woods joined Jim Nantz in the CBS commentary booth and, after the standard ego-stroking, Nantz asked him about what might be around the corner in terms of a deal.
Tiger: “The fans want all the top players to play together, and we’re going to make that happen.”
Nantz: “I know there’s so many things to be figured out but it could be this year, or very soon this year, sounds like?”
Tiger: “Yes and yes.”
Nothing big happens on the PGA Tour without Tiger’s tacit or explicit approval, and when Tiger says “yes and yes”, that carries weight.
What that deal actually looks like in practice, and what it means for the current make-up of the PGA Tour and the LIV Golf League, well right now that’s sort of anyone’s guess.
And, the Internet being the Internet, everyone is having a guess.
Some seemed plausible, such as one that said LIV star players — like Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cam Smith — would be invited to participate in some of the PGA Tour’s flagship events, including the Players’ Championship at Sawgrass, which takes place each March.
Others seemed much less likely. Does anyone really expect to see a new PGA Tour team taking part in LIV events with rolling representation — a four-man line-up including, say, Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler one week and Tiger and Justin Thomas the next?
But no matter how the spin doctors spin it, there’s a strong chance that what actually happens will profoundly tip golf’s powerbase forever, away from the US where it’s been centered since Deane Beman transformed the PGA Tour in the 1970s, and towards Saudi Arabia and its never-ending billions.
All things considered, the reality in our world — your world, my world and yes, the Saudi crown prince’s world too — is that money talks and money walks, and when one party in the negotiations seems to have an almost bottomless pit of the stuff, that party usually gets to call most of the shots.
And when you have the President himself in your pocket corner, the chances of getting things done from substantial to certain.
Truly, the art of the deal never dies.
Thanks for reading.
Till next time.
Shane