IF AMERICA IS AS FEEBLE AS JAY MONAHAN, THEN WE’RE IN BIG, BIG TROUBLE

The PGA Tour commissioner says he couldn’t compete with the Saudis and their abundance of bloody money — his surrender/merger should give us pause about our country’s future in the world order

     So we’re just going to capitulate? Let the Saudis invade America — home of this week’s U.S. Open, Bobby Jones’ Augusta National and the greatest golfers ever — with their sovereign wealth stash of $700 billion-plus? Watch them buy off a few players, tie up lawyers with a federal antitrust lawsuit and force the PGA Tour into a frantic merger while leveraging a cartoonish creation called the LIV Golf League?

     And then let the most feeble sports commissioner of my lifetime, a wimpbag named Jay Monahan, make Saudi Arabia sound like a mash-up of Godzilla and Kong? Have you ever seen a company based in the United States of America portrayed in a weaker light on the global level? To hear Monahan explain why the PGA Tour had to sell out to Saudi’s Public Investment Fund — to avoid an immediate collapse, he said — it seems we’re not living in the world’s greatest country anymore, as we’re led to believe during every national anthem.

     Not only did the Tour lords surrender, they asked the Saudis if they could shine their shoes, soap their bodies and, well, use your imagination. It is time for Elon Musk to develop a new planet instead of wasting his time on Twitter?

     “We cannot compete with a foreign government with unlimited money,” Monahan told his employees Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal. “This was the time. … We waited to be in the strongest possible position to get this deal in place.”

     There was no attempt to fight back or raise investment capital for the court battles. There was no thought of recruiting very rich Americans who might want to fund a new for-profit venture on our shores. There was no effort whatsoever to keep the “America” part in what always has been the Professional Golfers of America. Sorry, but I must ask: Were there threats of corporal punishment? A thousand body lashes? Beheadings, maybe? A chopped-off hand or leg? Human rights abuses, after all, have been part of an abhorrent Saudi monarchy. This might sound like a wise-ass comment; it isn’t intended as such. The PGA Tour submitted last week like a beaten, bloodied fighter in the octagon. At the least, it’s fair to wonder if the White House feared economic consequences with any consideration of stonewalling the merger.

     What’s next? Will the Saudis swoop in and buy Apple, Amazon and Alphabet? Miami and Los Angeles? Will Taylor Swift drop her U.S. tour and do a 10-year residency in Riyadh? Or just move there? As it is, the Saudis have used more than golf to sportswash their horrific image. They bought the Newcastle United club of the English Premier League. Futbol stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema signed whopping deals to play in Saudi Arabia, before Lionel Messi rejected $1.3 billion and opted for Major League Soccer, oddly. They tried to buy WWE. There was an attempt to buy Formula 1 — the entire circuit. They stage the world’s richest horse race. They built an arena to attract major boxing events. They want the World Cup in 2030 or 2034. It won’t be long before they seek our sports franchises, too. Before you wonder if Jerry Jones or Bob Kraft would cash out, the NFL doesn’t allow governments to own franchises, thankfully. But the NBA would listen.

     At least Kendall and Roman Roy duked it out by the conference room before succumbing to a “Succession” takeover. Monahan and the Tour’s policy board, led by dealbroker Jimmy Dunne, couldn’t have opened the door wider for a power play in an “alliance” yet to be named or thoroughly explained. And to be clear: Contrary to what Monahan and Dunne are selling in their ongoing media tours, the Saudis aren’t installing Yasir al-Rumayyan as chairman of the board to be a cabana boy for Monahan, who for now will be CEO. Al-Rumayyan will negotiate the major broadcasting deals — all you need to know. The Saudis didn’t agree to end all legal warfare, which reportedly has cost the PGA Tour more than $100 million, to be a mere addendum to an existing paradigm. I would assume the Saudis want blood, their drink of choice at breakfast, lunch and dinner, then before bedtime.

     They couldn’t have liked Monahan’s response to the Journal report, which highlighted his surrender speech to employees at PGA Tour headquarters in Florida. A Tour spokesperson said in a statement to ESPN: “To characterize that this agreement was made due to litigation costs and other use of reserves is an oversimplification. With the end of the fractured landscape in the world of men's professional golf, the PGA Tour has never been a more valuable property. The Public Investment Fund (PIF) has recognized that value and the opportunity for (return on investment) with their investment in the tour. Additionally, this transaction will make professional golf more competitive with other professional sports and sports leagues.” A substantial financial infusion means the Saudis will want control. They aren’t giving gifts at the holidays.

     Nor could they have appreciated Dunne’s vow to “kill” any Saudi official — at least those engaged in their recent negotiations — who knew anything about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Dunne was out of his 104th-floor office that day at the World Trade Center, playing golf, but 66 employees of investment bank Sandler O’Neill died in the massacre.

     “Every day, the first thing that I think about is (Sept. 11). Several times during the day, I think about it. And the last thing I think about at night is that,” Dunne told the Golf Channel. “That has not changed since that day. And I’m not alone in that. I would guarantee every one of those family members has that same condition. It is just a reality of how unbelievably sad and awful that day was. I understand that. And I am quite certain — and I have had conversations with a lot of very knowledgeable people — that the people I’m dealing with had nothing to do with it. And if someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill them myself. We don’t have to wait around.”

     So why do deals with murderers? Why did Dunne initiate the talks? Why not think about the families first? I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard this, but money talks, and never more disgustingly than in this case. If Dunne wanted to save the PGA Tour, he should have pounded the phones and assembled his big-money buddies to help. Instead, he slept with the bad guys. Amazing how so many men who assailed the Saudis during the civil war could come around so quickly. Two days after saying, “I still hate LIV and hope it goes away,” Rory McIlroy abandoned his bullish support of All Things PGA Tour. Praising al-Rumayyan, he said Friday, “He’s a very impressive man. Harvard Business School, runs 700 or 800 billions worth of dollars, and invested in a ton of different companies. He’s a very smart, impressive man. … He sort of, he runs in the same circles as a lot of people that I know.”

     Ohhhhh. Not long after accusing LIV Golf of “legitimizing” Saudi Arabia’s place in the world, McIlroy now admits to hanging out with the director of the Public Investment Fund. The collective hypocrisy isn’t worthy of our vomit. Once, we wondered if we ever could look at Phil Mickelson the same way after he defected for $200 million. Now, how will we look at McIlroy, having talked from both sides of his mouth? One of Monahan’s employees asked how he’ll explain, if asked by his daughters, about the Saudis’ poor treatment of women.

     “I understand all the human rights conditions,” he responded. “I’ve had them myself.”

     Until it’s time, that is, to break bread and shake hands and sit with Yasir al-Rumayyan on a CNBC studio set.

     Don’t expect any such camaraderie at Los Angeles Country Club, where the mood will be contentious in the U.S. Open locker room and on the course. The players who rejected nine-figure fortunes and stood by the Tour — including McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Hideki Matsuyama and Patrick Cantlay — have every right to be bitter. That won’t stop Mickelson, a LIV ringleader, from doing a repulsive victory dance. He’ll be joined by another prominent defector, Brooks Koepka, who will keep picking fights with Brandel Chamblee and other merger critics even as he tries to win his second straight major. Chamblee, the Golf Channel analyst, is among those who think the deal will be “blocked” by the Department of Justice. Not if the Saudis can help it.

     “We’re looking for a harmonious world of golf. That’s not going to be overnight,” said veteran Justin Rose, who remained on the Tour. “If it would just be a straight, “Hey, (LIV) boys, come on back,’ that’s not going to sit well with anybody out here necessarily.”

     “For the guys that did turn down significant amounts of money, then that’s probably a tough one to swallow and I feel for them,” said Matt Fitzpatrick, the defending U.S. Open champion, who never was invited by LIV Golf.

     Smiles will be visible, though. They’ll be wide on the faces of cowards who kissed the rings — the players and officials who’ve taken the dirty money of the Saudi Kingdom. How do they sleep at night?

###

     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.