Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution?

By Michael WeinrebApril 10, 10:30 am UTC • 16 min

Last December, after a professional golfer named Jon Rahm showed up on Fox News wearing a varsity jacket with the LIV Golf logo, a Reddit user going by the name Golfhood started a thread with the subject line: “I’m done with pro golf.”

Golfhood claimed to be a former mini-tour player who had been working in the golf industry for nearly 15 years. The game, to Golfhood, was a way to break free of everyday life for a few hours, talk trash with friends, and eat hot dogs at the turn. But the protracted power struggle between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia–backed LIV Golf over the future of the professional game had shattered that illusion of escape. The joy had been swept away by pointed debates about business and laws and ethics and politics and money … so, so, so much money. Golfhood watched Rahm make his announcement about defecting from the PGA Tour to LIV—after previously pledging his fealty to the PGA Tour and insisting he was in it “for the love of golf”—and saw yet another dude who had embraced hypocrisy for the paycheck.

“This is the first time in my life,” Golfhood wrote, “that I have felt like I don’t love golf anymore.”

Golfhood’s post received over a thousand replies, most of which agreed with the overarching sentiment. Some said they might still watch the major tournaments, such as this week’s Masters, but that they had no reason to watch week to week anymore; some said they’d rather watch women’s golf or amateur golf, which, to them, feel like purer products. Some mentioned that they had long ago severed the relationship between playing golf and watching golf—that their love of the game had become separate from their need for the sport.

“Just watch the big 4 [major tournaments] like the rest of us and then go be a weekend warrior,” someone replied.

Golfhood’s five-paragraph missive—punctuated with a plaintive “fuck”—captured the visceral frustration many are feeling with the sport these days, from the fans to the players to the media members who cover it on a daily basis. And it raised the same questions they’ve been asking for months, like: What the hell is even going on anymore? Will LIV and the PGA Tour ever actually merge? Is there even a right side and a wrong side anymore, or have morals and ethics been rendered irrelevant by the money? When does it end? How does it end?

And will we still care in the same way when it does?

“Everything in golf over the past two years has shouldered this existential weight that no one has been able to shed,” Joel Beall, a senior writer for Golf Digest, told me over email. “For the most part, golf’s stakeholders have taken fans’ attention for granted, assuming it will always be there because it always has been. … I don’t think fans are ignorant to the fact that professional sports are a business. It’s just that this business is also the passion of millions.”

Such is the state of professional golf leading into its most prestigious tournament: mired in arguments about laws and ethics and morality and politics as it faces down central questions about its future. How do we even know what this sport is anymore? And will we recognize what it eventually becomes?

Let us begin by cutting back to last June, which is when it seemed, for a time, like this whole conflict was ending. After more than a year of constant warring, the PGA Tour and LIV Golf appeared to reach a détente: PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan announced, alongside LIV Golf’s leadership, that the two bodies would merge to form one unified commercial entity. LIV players would eventually be invited to reapply to the tour; a binding framework had been agreed upon, they said, though the financial details had yet to be worked out. “How did we go from a confrontation to now being partners?” Monahan told the media. “We just realized that we were better off together than we were fighting or apart.”

This announcement was an utter shock to pretty much everyone involved, including many PGA Tour players themselves. Perhaps most of all Rory McIlroy, who had served as the face of the tour’s supposedly principled stand against a competitor backed by a Saudi regime that has a deeply problematic geopolitical history, including a paragraph-long list of what the State Department calls “significant human rights issues.” For months, McIlroy had fought against LIV’s very existence, against what he saw as the greed of the players who had sacrificed their personal ethics for an admittedly tremendous financial gain. If you make a decision “purely for money,” McIlroy said, it “doesn’t usually end up going the right way.” Over that time, McIlroy presumed the PGA Tour leadership was on his side.

And then, facing the prospect of additional player defections and up against a seemingly endless stream of Saudi money, it appeared as if the tour abruptly caved. Two entities that despised each other—LIV was born out of grudges that former tour pro Greg Norman, LIV’s CEO and commissioner, had carried against the tour for 30 years—would find a way to join forces. All the hard feelings would soon be papered over by a wall of cash. McIlroy, captured behind the scenes on Netflix’s reality series Full Swing, said he’d pretty much reached his breaking point with the tour. “Fuck it,” he said. “Do what you want to do.”

It felt, to many, like one of the most transparently cynical moments in the modern history of sports. “Bought,”’ wrote Sally Jenkins of The Washington Post. “That’s the only word for Monahan and his henchies on the PGA Tour policy board.”

Such was the condemnation. But then the actual resolution never came.

The Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs opened an antitrust probe into the merger and held hearings last summer; Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal condemned it as an attempt by a “repressive” regime to “buy influence” in the United States. To this point, the investigation has been stymied by LIV’s backer, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which reportedly threatened to jail its advisers if they cooperated with the inquiry. The U.S. Department of Justice also said it would investigate the merger over antitrust concerns but has made no announcements on the subject since June. A late-2023 deadline to iron out the details of the merger passed with negotiations supposedly progressing, but nothing concrete was announced. And so, as the bargaining goes on, the struggle for leverage continues.

Rahm—one of the best players on tour—abruptly defected to LIV in December, potentially swinging the momentum of the ongoing negotiations in the direction of the PIF. The PGA Tour, in response, signed an agreement with a deep-pocketed group of American sports team owners and investors called Strategic Sports Group, seemingly trying to wrest back some power from LIV’s endless flow of cash. Monahan appeared at the Players Championship in March and gave an update on the merger that revealed nothing and was most notable for his prickly response to questions about Rahm’s departure. (“I’m focused on every single member of the PGA Tour,” he said.) Asked whether the PGA Tour could go on if the merger didn’t happen at all, Monahan said, “I guess I’ll answer that question if a deal isn’t concluded.”

Now, here we are in April, when we should be talking about the Masters. Instead, we’re still ensnared in speculation about various consortiums of ultrarich people hiding behind a jumble of acronyms—PIF, SSG—that don’t mean a damn thing to the vast majority of people who actually watch the sport. In short, Beall wrote in a March piece, “No one knows anything.”

“It’s like the worst soap opera ever,” says Don Heider, chief executive of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

Last week, McIlroy told the publication Golf Monthly that he believes “we’re probably still quite a long ways from” a merger, if one happens at all. And the longer this push and pull for power and leverage and influence goes on, McIlroy said, the less sustainable this fractured landscape becomes for everyone, from players to sponsors to fans. In the meantime, it feels increasingly like there’s no normalcy to be found anywhere in men’s professional golf. There’s just the cynical view that another crumbling American institution sold out to the highest bidder.

Years ago, Lee McGinnis, a professor at Stonehill College who has studied the culture and fandom of golf, wrote a thesis about the notion of the golf course as a “sacred space.” “You consider the golf time that you have with your friends, your buddies, your associates to be sacred time,” McGinnis says. “There are certain norms you don’t violate in terms of etiquette.”

But over the course of the past couple of years, McGinnis says, that notion has been fractured. The sport’s trials have begun to encroach on the joy of the game. “For lack of a better term,” McGinnis says, “it feels dirty.”

Scroll down on Golfhood’s Reddit thread, and the vitriol is apparent: “I wouldn’t watch LIV even if every top 25 PGA player jumped ship,” one respondent says. “Fuck LIV and the people that own it,” says another. The presumption, among many of those fans, is that there’s no point even bothering to watch. Because what is LIV as an actual product, anyhow, beyond the noise? What does it aspire to be, beyond a money-driven construction?

The team format—13 groups of four, plus two wild cards, with a team championship tournament at the end of the season—has rung hollow. (With team names like Fireballs, Crushers, and RangeGoats, it comes across like a Ryder Cup for loudmouths.) And LIV tournaments themselves have no history. Most Americans don’t care about watching three rounds of golf in Singapore or Mayakoba on a course they know nothing about. David Berri, a professor of economics at Southern Utah University, compared it to the NFL’s employment of replacement players during the 1987 strike. “It was like, ‘What am I watching here?’” Berri says. “‘I’m not watching the Eagles. These aren’t the Eagles. These are just 50 guys you found up the street.’”

You might argue that Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka are not Shane Falco, and that would certainly be fair, but the larger point is that the whole concept still feels artificial. A more apt comparison might be Vince McMahon’s XFL: a brash challenger that deliberately and aggressively tried to shatter the sanctity of the sport in order to wedge its way into the culture. At least for now, it mostly seems to exist just to create chaos.

“Going to the LIV” event in Boston, McGinnis says, “I thought, Oh my gosh, this felt … Vegas-ish or Niagara Falls or something. It felt like, Oh my God, this is supposed to be really nice and pristine. … You get in there, and the pros are wearing shorts. It’s like, no, no, this isn’t some kind of a practice round that you hang out with your buddies. It didn’t feel professional.”

“It didn’t feel like a sanctioned event,” he continues. “It violated golf’s sacred spaces.”

The television ratings show how many people would still rather watch the PGA Tour: In February, LIV set a new viewing record of 432,000 people for its tournament in Mayakoba … which was roughly a third of the number of viewers who tuned in to a re-airing of the third round of the rain-shortened Pebble Beach Pro-Am. The vast majority of fans, at least, still don’t understand why or how LIV Golf should be a meaningful force in their lives.

“And that’s why, thus far, LIV Golf has not worked,” Beall says.

But the irony is that the PIF, in backing LIV, may not care about meaning. Not if it can buy that meaning. Not if it can merge its money with the PGA Tour’s legitimacy and, in so doing, perhaps legitimize itself to the world—without the need for the government that backs the PIF to alter its behavior. (This is a concept that experts refer to as “sportswashing.”) The PIF can wait out the final terms for years if the merger continues to stall; it can focus on recruiting the next generation of young talent with lucrative contracts and keep toying with format and location. It can hang around and see if the fans eventually decide to follow its product. This is its leverage in these negotiations: money and time.

“It just appears to me the Saudis really want to be involved in this,” Berri says. “And the PGA [Tour] people are like, ‘We have to let them be involved because they have enough money to take the golfers away, but they also don’t have any ability to create something that replaces us.’”

It is common, in a politically and culturally fraught situation like this, to lose track of who’s right and who’s wrong. In a way, one fundamental answer to that question is simple, says Heider, the ethics expert at Santa Clara: While there is an argument to be made that a competing tour could be good for the players, the golfers who joined LIV made a poor ethical decision by knowingly joining a competing tour that’s tied to the Saudi government. Period. End of story. “If you’re a player,” Heider says, “you have to really hold your nose and understand that you’re taking money indirectly from a regime … [that’s done] all sorts of horrible things.”

Except it’s not the end of the story. If the players are acting unethically, what about the PGA Tour, which appears to be chasing reunification at all costs to discourage the very idea of competition? Here is where Jodi Balsam, a professor of clinical law at Brooklyn Law School and an expert in antitrust law, brings up the concept of a “natural monopoly.”

A natural monopoly is what we conceive of when we think of most professional sports, Balsam says. A natural monopoly means there is one dominant sports league, in which all of the best players compete against each other. As fans, that’s what we want; it creates the purest form of a meritocracy. But a natural monopoly, in terms of antitrust law, is not considered credible, because in the U.S., monopolies are still (theoretically) supposed to be illegal.

A natural monopoly “seems to be sort of a reflexive statement about any market in which a dominant existing firm is trying to block competitive entry,” Balsam says. “And to be fair to the golfers, if you’re measuring how competitive the market is in selling your services, you want many bidders.”

So what does that actually mean?

“Right now in professional golf,” Balsam says, “consumers’ and golfers’ self-interests are in conflict.”

The players who defected to LIV were chasing their own economic interests, which is what we would expect pretty much anyone else in any other industry to do. But these players also accomplished that goal by accepting money from the Saudi regime, which, Balsam says, “is not a rational economic actor.” And yet in every other industry, foreign investment is an acceptable way of growing a company. Why, Balsam asks, do we care that Saudi Arabia invested in golf but don’t care that it has also invested in corporations such as Uber and Meta?

The answer, she says, is because sports are different. It’s because athletes represent these aspirational human ideals. It’s because, frankly, we expect more from them. And when people like Golfhood see that those athletes are just as susceptible to self-interest as the rest of us—when they see these impure concepts encroaching on something they hold in higher regard—it shatters people’s illusions. The burden of this civil war has increasingly shifted onto the consumer, who now has to endure a diluted product that’s been weighed down by the heaviness of geopolitics and whose interests feel increasingly marginalized. There is no escape from it. Not even at Augusta National.

Ideally, this week’s Masters would serve as a sort of Swiss summit, in which the best golfers in the world—regardless of their stance in this civil war—would convene in the placid setting of Augusta National Golf Club and compete for the right to drape themselves in the sport’s most sacred piece of bright green haberdashery. The Masters is itself a throwback, a tournament that, as Golf Digest’s Jerry Tarde wrote in February, has a time-honored strategy of leaving money on the table in exchange for control and sustainability.”

But this year’s Masters is happening as golf is mired in a battle that symbolizes the opposite of that time-honored strategy—one that also resurfaces the issue of golf’s ugly past. “Golf in America is already viewed as an elitist, exclusive game,” says Beall, author of an upcoming book about this era in the sport called Playing Dirty. “Golf is in this position because of entitlement and greed. ... The sport has never been more detached from reality.”

You might argue that a certain detachment from reality is part of the Masters’ charm: The whole event is constructed as a kind of time warp, a step back into a more tranquil era in American life. But for all the cheap sandwiches and reasonably priced souvenirs that Augusta National sells during Masters week—for all the money it really does leave on the table—the club cannot obscure the fact that its insistence on control was why it did not accept a single Black member until 1990 and didn’t have a female member until 2012. And the sport as a whole cannot erase a shameful history of exclusion; even now, a generation after Tiger Woods upended the status quo—and despite efforts to make change—there are still only a handful of minority professional golfers.

“Maybe golf has blinders on about the issues relating to individual rights and persecution of women and minorities because golf has not been as open historically to women and minorities,” Balsam says. “Now, that has certainly changed. And maybe what that means for the PGA Tour is that, in this partnership, they have to be even more vocal going forward about opening up the sport to everybody.”

If you think that sounds like a vision that is slightly detached from the brutal realities of the modern world, I can’t blame you. And neither can the writers who cover the sport on a regular basis, the ones who have witnessed golf’s grand vision of itself completely collapse. “It appears like most of golf’s central actors have cared more about getting paid or taken care of,” Beall says, “rather than where their actions could be taking golf as a whole.”

The origins of the modern PGA Tour date back to the late 1960s, when a group of pros including Jack Nicklaus, dissatisfied with the lack of control and with their cut of the television money from the PGA of America, chose to break off and form their own organization. At the time, the PGA of America oversaw 6,000-plus golfers, the vast majority of whom were teaching pros rather than touring pros. When the PGA of America refused to sanction a $200,000 event sponsored by Frank Sinatra, feeling it would conflict with the existing Bob Hope Classic, the players began an open revolt.

Over the course of a couple of contentious years, pro golf appeared to be crumbling. Arnold Palmer tried to play peacemaker and failed. Boycotts were threatened; a competing entity called American Professional Golfers Inc. began forming a splinter tour (something Max Elbin, then the president of the PGA of America, called “a thirst for power resulting possibly from too much prosperity”). And then in 1968, a settlement was reached. The modern PGA Tour split off from the PGA of America, which still oversees teaching pros and administers the PGA Championship. And the whole thing became a historical footnote, so much so that most of us don’t even know it happened.

Which made me wonder: Are we being overly histrionic about this whole thing?

“This is sort of the problem with being a sportswriter,” Berri, the economics professor, tells me. “I wrote an article years ago about strikes and lockouts and noted that strikes and lockouts don’t have any permanent effect on attendance when the strike ends. But when you listen to the sportswriters write about strikes and lockouts, when these things were happening, it was always, ‘The world is ending,’ and, ‘These strikes are going to ruin the sport permanently.’”

Maybe Berri is right. Maybe this thing will get resolved sooner rather than later, and maybe the next Tiger Woods will emerge and golf will cycle through another boom period, the way baseball did when the Mark McGwire–Sammy Sosa home run chase of 1998 briefly erased the anger over the 1994 strike (at least until we realized none of that was entirely real, either).

“That’s the thing about sports that is so weird compared to every other type of good people consume,” Berri says. “The fans are addicted.”

But this is also where golf is different: Fans like Golfhood and the thousands who responded to that Reddit post can still play the game without caring about the sport. As Beall—a sportswriter himself—wrote in a column for Golf Digest, “Fans don’t need the tour, but the tour sure as hell needs fans.”

It’s a small sample size, Beall says, but television audiences for recent tour events are shrinking, even as interest in playing golf has steadily grown since the pandemic. What if the merger takes place and the Saudis continue to act problematically on the geopolitical stage, and their very presence continues to tarnish the sport? What if the hard feelings between PGA Tour and LIV players still exist even after unification? What if the whole enterprise still feels dirty enough that it fundamentally alters the relationship between the sport and the game?

“This just feels like a huge turning point in pro golf as a product,” Golfhood wrote in that Reddit post. “No other sport is as intertwined between people who play it casually and the top players in the world.”

Maybe Golfhood is right. Or maybe Berri is right, and nothing is sacred anymore, because it never really was. Isn’t this how the addiction to golf works, anyhow? We cycle through periods of frustration and despair, we swear we’re done with it, we curse its very existence—and in the end, we just keep coming back.

Michael Weinreb is a freelance writer and the author of four books.

Michael Weinreb

Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution?

Professional Golf Is at a Crossroads. How—and When—Will It Find a Resolution?

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