Monahan folds the PGA Tour's winning hand

In merging with LIV and the European Tour, the commissioner invalidated months of hard-lining and angered his own players.

The sad reality is that the PGA Tour probably has to be run by a politician. Sadder still when the commissioner of the PGA Tour turns out to be not a very good one.

When confronted with the challenge of LIV Golf, Jay Monahan went with the iron glove. He barred the defectors from the PGA Tour. He campaigned to get them excluded from the Official World Golf Rankings, which has an outsized role in determining eligibility for major championships.

The inevitable response was a restraint-of-trade suit from LIV Golf, the renegade organization funded by the Saudi government, that was so ominous and threatening that Monahan, on Tuesday, swallowed every foul, and accurate, thing he’d ever said about LIV. 

Sitting with Public Investment Fund administrator Yasir Al Rumayyan in a CNBC studio, Monahan announced that the PGA Tour, LIV and the DP World (European) Tour would join forces, in exchange for the disappearance of all suits and countersuits. 

There will be a mechanism that will allow Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Cam Smith and other highly competitive LIV contestants to return to the PGA Tour, and maybe even Phil Mickelson too.

This was a cannonball into the punch bowl, the most shocking development in professional golf since Tiger Woods backed his career into a hydrant on the day after Thanksgiving, 2009. Not that the rapprochement itself was that shocking. The timing was, particularly to PGA Tour pros who have a Player Advisory Council that regularly meets with Monahan, but had no clue about the seven-week process that led to this.

But then Greg Norman, who administered the LIV Golf plan and convinced players to leave the PGA Tour, didn’t know until Monahan and Al Rumayyan were walking onto the set at CNBC, where they gave out the news. None of the tournament directors knew either.

Over the past year or so, Monahan has called LIV Golf “an irrational threat to the game” and challenged players to name a time when they’ve ever felt embarrassed to be PGA Tour members. The implications was that Saudi history, particularly its financing of 9/11 attackers, its torture of gay citizens and its unspeakable murder of journalist Adnan Khashoggi, should have embarrassed anyone who took as much as an oil-soaked dime.

“I think you have to ask yourself the question, why?” Monahan said a year ago. “Why is this group spending billions of dollars recruiting players and chasing a concept with no possibility of a return? How is this good for the game that we love?”

Cut to Tuesday, and Monahan is smiling and saying that the merge is very good for the game that he loves. What has changed? Nothing on the surface, but one can only surmise that the PGA Tour’s lawyers have sensed that the LIV lawsuit had a chance to be successful and, at the very least, would expose details of the PGA Tour during its discovery phase that Monahan didn’t want exposed. It also could have endangered the Tour’s tax-exempt status.

There is no other reason to let the LIV Tour off the canvas. Despite Koepka’s capture of the PGA Championship and the bragging rights involved, LIV was still losing. It remains invisible on TV and its “teams’ haven’t lured many sponsors. The PGA Tour responded to LIV’s dollar diplomacy by creating “elevated” tour events that would guarantee better fields, and paying accordingly, and LIV hasn’t convinced a quality player to cross the line since Smith at the end of last year..

Now the schedule for 2024 and beyond is a mystery. Will there be an upper crust, like the Champions League in soccer, that would lure the best from all three tours? What happens to the loyal, decades-old PGA Tour events that would be deprived of the best talent?

All we do know is that PGA Tour players were not at all soothed by their meeting with Monahan on Tuesday, as they prepared for the Canadian Open in Toronto. One called him a “hypocrite,” and tour player Johnson Wagner estimated the anti-Monahan sentiment in the room as 90-10. According to Golf Digest, when a player suggested Monahan resign, everyone else in the room stood and applauded.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to be Jay today,” Geoff Ogilvy said.

It’s estimated that Rickie Fowler turned down $72 million of Saudi blood money to stay on the PGA Tour, only to watch the refugees be welcomed back into the fold. Rory McIlroy, of course, has been a PGA Tour evangelist and has badly damaged his relationships with some LIV Tour players. When LIV-bound Patrick Reed accused McIlroy of acting this way because he was having trouble winning the Masters and thus completing the Grand Slam, McIlroy retorted, “The only Grand Slam he can get is at Denny’s.” Shortly afterward, Reed flung a tee in McIlroy’s direction on the practice range.

McIlroy’s game has suffered during all this. He was tied for the third round lead at Memorial last weekend and shot 75 on Sunday. True to himself, he was angry yet measured on Wednesday when asked about Monahan.

But it could have been so different if Monahan had left the door open.

Instead of banning the LIV players from PGA Tour events, Monahan might have said they were still welcome as long as they met the 15-event minimum. Those who could have used their Past Champion exemption, or were eligible because they were among the top 50 career money-winners or had made 300 cuts, could still do so.

The question of OWGR points would have been left to the OWGR. The question of Ryder Cup eligibility would have been left to its overseers at the PGA of America. But if a LIV player wanted to participate in the FedEx Cup playoffs, the Presidents Cup or the Players championship, he would have to play 15 Tour events (which includes major championships). Once the PGA Tour buffed up its purses, it would have been difficult to abandon ship, particularly since LIV requires attendance at all 14 of its events.

That probably would have reduced LIV’s chances of prolonging its existence through litigation. It certainly would have lowered the temperature among the rival players, although Mickelson seems addicted to Twitter mischief these days. He posted a picture of 2021 Masters champ Hideki Matsuyama, boarding a Spirit Airlines flight. God knows why Matsuyama was lowering himself that way, but Mickelson noted, “The HyFlyers don’t fly like that,” referring to his LIV “team.” Matsuyama had already turned down LIV’s money, but Mickelson hadn’t given up..

No technicality or trash-talk can obscure the treachery of the Saudis and the extended treachery of playing for their money. The 9-11 Families United put out a statement that blistered Monahan’s announcement.

Yet there was U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Jeddah on Tuesday, meeting with Mohammed bin Salman, the Bonesaw Prince himself, and thanking him for helping rescue American citizens from Sudan, and helping stabilize Yemen.

This is why people in certain parts of the world shake their heads when Americans board the high horse. They wonder why the only civilized nation to allow indiscriminate gun violence is telling anyone anywhere how to do anything.

One of the few who knew what was going on in the seven-week window was Jimmy Dunne. He is on the PGA Tour board. He is also beloved by administrators and players alike. Tom Brady is a close friend.

Dunne made his fortune as a trader on Wall Street and is welcome at virtually every prestigious golf club in America and the United Kingdom. He was a partner at Sandler O’Neill, a firm that had offices in the World Trade Center. On Sept. 11, 2001 Dunne was at Bedford Golf and Country Club, north of the city, trying to qualify for the USGA Mid-Amateur. A stranger found him on the seventh hole and told him to call home.

Sixty-six of the firm’s 171 employees perished that day. Dunne organized a drive to send the 76 children of those 66 to college. As one would expect, he drew the hardest line against LIV Golf. He is president of Seminole Golf Club in Florida, which holds a member-pro event each year, a must-play event for many pros. This year Dunne barred the LIV group.

“I don’t like it when they say they’re ‘growing the game,’’’ Dunne said last year. “That’s crap. I don’t even like it when they say, ‘I have to do what’s best for my family. I really wonder how many of those guys , the lifestyle that they were living was so terrible that their family needed them to do this.

“Just say, ‘I’m at a point in my career where I want to make five times as much money against much weaker competition and play less.’ Just tell the truth. Don’t cover it with a lot of crap.”

And, somewhere Tuesday, Dunne found himself listening to Monahan and Al Rumayyan talk about growing the game.

What needs to grow are opportunities to play. Nothing that happened Tuesday addresses that. The betting is that the top players, once their emotions cool, will see this as a chance to make money rivaling the NFL and MLB players who would kill to play golf the way they do. 

But there’s also the possibility that the Department of Justice will frown upon what certainly looks like a monopoly, since the PGA Tour also runs the Canadian and Latin American Tours as well as the developmental Korn Ferry Tour. And what happens then?

For decades professional golf has floated along on a cloud of bonhomie. The most disruptive controversies involved equipment and uncontrolled distance. As a result, golfers developed a benign image, playing in PGA Tour events that devoted millions to charity, calling penalties on themselves when warranted, developing friendships with their rivals. Money’s corrosive power changed all that. The PGA Tour/LIV split exposed their pettiness, vindictiveness and avarice. In other words, they became just like the rest of us. And who wants that?

A player called Monahan a hypocrite at the Tuesday meeting. Monahan did not deny that he certainly looked that way. It’s also true that he’s better at hypocrisy than politics.