WHEN THE PGA TOUR CLIMBS INTO BED WITH TERRORISTS, AMERICA FAILS
Rather than battle Saudi-funded LIV Golf to the bitter end, commissioner Jay Monahan surrendered to the massive wealth of a convenient merger — a shameful, spineless moment in U.S. sports history
Money always wins, even when soiled by the blood of executions and the contempt of human rights atrocities. What the PGA Tour has done here, with historic cowardice, is lay up in the fairway instead of attacking the green and burying the Saudi overlords of LIV Golf. The good guys let the bad guys win because the commissioner wanted filthy billions from a merger, which reduces him to a bad guy, too, while the sport’s new chairman of the board becomes one Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
And you thought the kings of golf were named Woods and Nicklaus. They’re afterthoughts now, with all the sport’s previous legends, in “a new, collectively owned, for-profit” entity that should make us all reach for vomit bags. So much for the acrimonious legal battles and vicious verbal crossfire between the rival parties. When in doubt, put down your swords, combine operations and make love with the terrorists, a result that shames every badass general who ever defended America at war.
The Tuesday announcement was described as “stunning” and “shocking” in frantic news reports but, really, it was neither. When the truth was crystalized for PGA Tour boss Jay Monahan — not willing to outlast Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in its squalid quest to sportswash the Gulf nation’s sins — he chose to join the evil forces as business bedfellows and take their fortunes. His entity still controls more board seats and how events are conducted, for now, and no one knows if LIV will carry on or LIV golfers will rejoin the PGA Tour and DP World Tour. But a partnership is in place, and the Saudis have a substantial footprint in golf’s future. The alliance made winners of creepy LIV defectors such as ringleader Greg Norman and greed-grabbing Phil Mickelson, who took his $200 million and won. And it made patsies of those who remained loyal to 21st-century humanity and rejected the Saudi bribes, including Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm, Justin Thomas and, of course, Tiger Woods, who said no to almost $1 billion because he believed in the traditional path that propelled his career.
No wonder Monahan’s afternoon meeting with Tour players was “heated,” as he put it. No wonder he was asked to resign by a group said to be 90-10 against the new deal. On the sly, in a reprehensible betrayal, he has been meeting with the enemy in locations across the globe — London, Venice, San Francisco — in a backroom deal that renders him un-American and worthy of penal banishment if he didn’t have the constitutional freedom to be a double-crosser. He gave a mulligan to a gang of murderers, if you can believe it. “There's been a lot of tension in our sport over the last couple years," Monahan said. "What we're talking about is coming together to unify the game of golf, and to do so under one umbrella. We’ve recognized that together, we can have a far greater impact on this game than we can have working apart. The game of golf is better for what we've done here today.”
Never mind that the game of life is much worse. Never mind that America — where more than 30 million people consider themselves active golfers and the four majors are watched with keen interest — isn’t better off in any way. Who thought the PGA Tour could bend over and impact a 2024 U.S. presidential campaign and also validate the Saudis? No wonder the families of 9/11 victims, with the terror of Osama bin Laden burning in their souls, are among the livid. “The PGA and Monahan appear to have become more paid Saudi shills, taking billions of dollars to cleanse the Saudi reputation,” said Terry Strada, chairman of the 9/11 Families United group. “PGA Tour leaders should be ashamed of their hypocrisy and greed.”
This compromise is so much more significant to the world than other sports amalgamations, including the NFL-AFL merger and NBA-ABA merger. This one further enables the Saudis in their sick attempts to use sports as a geopolitical image-changer. This one gives Donald Trump a LIV feather in his re-election cap and defies President Joe Biden, who branded Saudi Arabia a “pariah” after the 2018 assassination of Saudi journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi. And this one makes Monahan look like the biggest of all hypocrites in a sports industry of increasingly flagrant duplicity at the top, recalling the day he dropped 9/11 as a reason he never would succumb to the Saudis. “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” he asked players last year.
Now his head is on a Bobblehead swivel, unapologetically, about a moral stance that now constitutes a big lie. How does Monahan plan to sleep after reversing course and cutting an agreement with mass murderers? “I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” he said. “Anytime I said anything, I said it based on the information I had at the moment, and based on someone trying to compete for the PGA Tour and our players. I accept those criticisms. But circumstances do change.”
All that changed is that LIV Golf, led by the repulsive but relentless Norman, didn’t go away. The rival league is a clown show, watched by a few thousand eyeballs on the obscure CW network, and even when a defector such as Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship after nearly winning the Masters, it didn’t create appointment viewing for the shlock. But Saudi money effectively wooed rabble-rousing stars, from Koepka to Mickelson to Bryson DeChambeau, who took the massive payoffs and willingly dealt with the backlash. The LIV Way — guaranteed money, 54-hole tournaments, private jets, champagne — challenged the bank accounts of PGA Tour loyalists. When former Masters champion Hideki Matsuyama flew low-budget Spirit Airlines last weekend, after rejecting a reported $300 million from LIV, Mickelson jabbed him with a tweet.
“Hideki should come fly with us,” he wrote.
By Tuesday morning, Phil was tweeting, “Awesome day today.”
This as the Public Investment Fund governor, Al-Rumayyan, was saying, “There is no question that the LIV model has been positively transformative for golf. We believe there are opportunities for the game to evolve while also maintaining its storied history and tradition.”
And Trump was celebrating on his Truth Social platform, writing, “Great news from LIV golf. A big, beautiful glamorous deal for the wonderful world of golf.”
And Koepka was engaging in a social-media war with LIV Golf’s biggest critic, Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee, who said, “This is one of the saddest days in the history of professional golf. I do believe that the governing bodies, the entities, the professional entities, have sacrificed their principles for profits.”
Those with sensibilities only can agree with Chamblee. What happened Tuesday is the sporting equivalent of fighting a world war, calling a truce and letting the soldiers find out about it on Twitter. Monahan will continue to posture as the leader of the combined venture, but Al-Rumayyan made it clear that LIV will control the television deals and sponsorships that generate annual revenues. “The way we’re doing our partnership, it’s gonna be really big in many senses,” he said. “We will be investing in the game of golf and doing many new things that I think will have better engagement from the players, the fans, the broadcasters, the sponsors, everyone else.”
How much investment? “Billions of dollars,” he said. “Whatever it takes.”
This is why the PGA Tour boss laid up. This is why he compromised and settled for the easier chip shot. America is mortified by his spinelessness.
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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.