Ending years of rancor and legal disputes, the PGA Tour has agreed to merge with Saudi-backed LIV Golf.
In a joint statement, the two organizations declared it “a landmark agreement to unify the game of golf, on a global basis.”
That’s a sharp turn from the rhetoric after the two had filed dueling antitrust suits, with the upstart LIV maintaining that the decades-old PGA had engaged in anticompetitive practices. The PGA had objected to LIV coming into its turf and luring talent away with hefty payouts, describing that behavior as illegal interference.
As a result of the merger agreement, all legal claims have been dropped by the parties.
The merger will have major implications for golf’s TV partners. The CW, now run by Nexstar Media Group, picked up rights to LIV starting this year as its first live sports programming. The PGA is in business with Disney/ESPN, NBCUniversal and Paramount, all of which took a pass on LIV rights when they became available upon the circuit’s launch in 2022.
LIV, whose name is “54” in Roman numerals, indicates the number of holes its tournaments are contested on, compared with 72 for PGA events. In addition to the Friday/Saturday/Sunday format, LIV allowed players to wear shorts and sought to create a party atmosphere at the host courses, with dance music pumping through speakers throughout play.
The yet-to-be-named merged entity is billed as “a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that delivers maximum excitement and competition among the game’s best players.” PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan said in a statement that the “transformational partnership” brings to an end “two years of disruption and distraction.”
Backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, LIV set out to disrupt the sport of golf and use it as a global promotional platform. The effort has drawn fierce criticism, even from some of LIV’s top players. Phil Mickelson, who defected to LIV after a long and successful PGA career, spoke out against human rights abuses perpetrated by the Saudis in a book interview, calling them “scary motherf–kers.” Mickelson later said he had been speaking off the record to the book’s author. The star was one of several big names attracted to paydays that ran into the hundreds of millions. Tiger Woods was reported to have turned down $1 billion to defect to LIV.
While Woods, Rory McIlroy and other PGA mainstays remained loyal, major tournament winners such as Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and Dustin Johnson switched to LIV. They were then barred from the PGA for life, but did receive permission to play at major tournaments, which are generally run separately from the regular tour. Koepka won the PGA Championship last month, becoming the first LIV golfer to break through at a major since the new league’s founding.
