Tiger, Rory On Committee For PGA Tour’s Negotiation With PIF

This has been a busy week in the world of PGA Tour governance.

The short summary: Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy have official seats at the table for the Tour’s ongoing negotiation with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund which bankrolls LIV Golf.

Woods, McIlroy and Adam Scott will be among the most critical player voices when it comes to potentially bringing professional golf back together. (Tiger’s role in the game continues to be an intriguing one in 2024.)

The long summary is, well, a lot longer and more complicated.

Woods, McIlroy and Scott are on a “transaction subcommittee” that will be directly involved in negotiations with the PIF. Woods had been appointed to the Tour board last August so this is an extension of that position.

It’s difficult to tell exactly how much influence they will have, although we do know Woods and other players met with PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan in March.

“I don’t know if we’re closer but certainly we’re headed in the right direction,” Woods said of that meeting. “That was a very positive meeting and I think both sides came away from the meeting feeling positive.”

Two months later, there are no rumblings of an official agreement. We’re four weeks away from the one-year anniversary of the Tour-PIF framework agreement that has yet to do anything meaningful except stopping a court battle.

Also on the subcommittee for negotiations are embattled Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, board chairman Joe Gorder, John W. Henry of Fenway Sports Group and Joe Ogilvie, a former Tour player appointed as a director liaison in March.

Fenway Sports Group is a part of private equity firm Strategic Sports Group, which plans to infuse $3 billion into the Tour.

That subcommittee will handle day-to-day negotiations and report back to the board, which includes the Player Advisory Council (PAC).

McIlroy had been a player director on that board but resigned last November, citing the need for a mental health break, given all the events of the past two years. The players on the board unanimously agreed to have Jordan Spieth replace him—that move required those players on the board to be in agreement.

However, McIlroy had a change of heart recently and wanted to come back to the board. Webb Simpson, a member of the board, offered to resign if McIlroy took his place. Other players on the board vetoed the decision so there were, initially, no changes made.

“I think there was a subset of people on the board that were maybe uncomfortable with me coming back on for some reason,” McIlroy said at the Wells Fargo Championship this week.

Speculation was that McIlroy wasn’t welcomed back because his idea of professional golf’s future—perhaps a more global tour with a limited number of players—doesn’t align with protecting all Tour members. Some of the board members, such as Patrick Cantlay, reportedly have different views.

But on Thursday night, the Tour sent out a memo saying that McIlroy and Scott had been added to the newly formed subcommittee—and those appointments apparently don’t need approval from players on the board.

Whew, got all that? I’m already exhausted.

You might be asking what all of this means in terms of a Tour-PIF agreement. I’m not sure anyone really knows that answer. And this situation, somehow, continues to veer more into the dysfunctional every day. How Monahan still has a job is beyond me.

Here is what I will say:

The Tour is a member-run organization. Its entire structure, for most of its existence, has been to treat all members equally. That means it is set up to maximize playing opportunities and dollars for everyone involved.

You eat what you kill. If I somehow entered a tournament and finished tied for fifth with Woods and McIlroy, we’d all get pretty much the same reward despite our value to the tournament being wildly different. If someone gets hurt or plays poorly enough, they can lose their spot. It’s 200-plus independent contractors competing against each other. It’s democratic, and security is limited.

The players make/vote on the rules and those are the rules they have traditionally chose.

That structure worked for decades but remained vulnerable to how other sports operate with an ownership model, guaranteed contracts and paying their players on a sliding scale depending on entertainment value.

And, more than anything, the structure did not prioritize fans. Fans didn’t ask for 48 events on the Tour calendar, spreading the product as thin as possible. The players asked for that to provide the maximum amount of opportunities for the maximum number of players.

Enter the PIF and LIV. Their bottomless pit of money—with no urgency or realistic plan to generate revenue—exposed the Tour badly. They were an irrational actor paying way over reasonable market value for talent but they were able to offer preferential treatment and multi-year contracts to players.

The Tour tried to make tweaks to funnel more money to its best players, such as using FedEx Cup bonuses and the Player Impact Program—but it didn’t change the structural issues with the Tour.

As soon as LIV started to get players, the Tour was in trouble. All LIV had to do was continue poaching talent, slowly weakening the Tour until there was no option but for the PIF to have a seat at the table in the golf world—which was the entire point of its existence from the beginning.

The Tour might have been able to survive a little longer on its own without Saudi money. Perhaps Monahan and others continued to hold the line, convincing the likes of Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton to stay. And with the investment from SSG, the Tour perhaps could have rebuilt its structure—giving players equity, getting its best players together more often and overhauling the fan experience—while LIV toiled in its inevitable obscurity.

But a fractured golf world was never going to be sustainable. As soon as the framework agreement happened, the Tour basically resigned itself to taking Saudi money at some point.

If the Tour wanted to go on its own with the SSG investment, the PIF would still be able to slowly bleed the Tour dry over the long haul. And, given declining TV ratings, that probably wouldn’t be tenable.

The Tour needs a deal. And so does the PIF, which has a losing product in LIV. The PIF wants access to the corporate infrastructure of the Tour, which it can get with an agreement.

What a deal looks like is really tough to say.

It could be one where LIV continues in some form as part of a global tour but that model also comes with its challenges. That is one of many reasons, I’m assuming, why it’s taken so long to get any movement on negotiations.

Whatever it is, the goal will be to get the best players back together in some cohesive system. It’s the only way to move the game forward after a lot of damage has been done.

What a mess.