Opinion | Dirty money ends blood feud between PGA Tour and LIV Golf. We shouldn’t be surprised

There were plenty of unanswered questions in the wake of Tuesday morning’s announcement that golf’s global blood feud was finally and abruptly over — that the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian backers of rival LIV Golf were merging along with the DP World Tour to create one global golf superpower.

Will LIV rebels such as Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka be welcomed back to the PGA Tour as though nothing happened? Will they get to keep all their oil-soaked millions if they return? And what’ll golf’s impending new world order mean for tournaments like the RBC Canadian Open, which for the second year in a row is being overshadowed by the sport’s bigger concerns.

But one thing at least was crystal clear. This was an unvirtuous U-turn, an amoral 180. After PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan spent most of the past year demonizing LIV Golf defectors for taking their share of Saudi Arabia’s seemingly bottomless bank account when it was offered to them, Monahan announced he was doing precisely the same thing.

Which, taking a step back from a chaotic day, ought to surprise no one. If you’ve been following the plot line of global sports, you can easily get the idea the rules go something like this: There is no concern for morality when it comes to making money. There’s no such thing as good or bad, only what’s good or bad for business.

That reality seems to be met with a shrug in other sports. The investment arm of the Saudi Arabian regime has long been accused of so-called sportswashing — that is, attempting to take the world’s eye off its abysmal record on human rights by pumping billions into endeavours that celebrate human triumph, everything from Formula One to English soccer, from tennis to wrestling.

What’s problematic for Monahan is that he spent the last year playing multiple morality cards. It was just last summer that he publicly shamed golfers who jumped to LIV, and no doubt tried to dissuade others from jumping, by admonishing Saudi involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks while courting the support of 9/11 Families United, an organization for people who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center atrocities. Monahan, in a nationally televised interview with Jim Nantz, even brought up his close ties to two families who’d been thusly affected.

“I would ask any player that has left or any player that would consider leaving: Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?” Monahan said.

It was worth repeating those words: Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?

“They do now — as does (Monahan),” Terry Strada, chair of 9/11 Families United, wrote in a statement. “PGA Tour leaders should be ashamed of their hypocrisy and greed. Our entire 9/11 community has been betrayed by commissioner Monahan and the PGA (Tour) as it appears their concern for our loved ones was merely window dressing in their quest for money.”

There were no such apologies rendered Tuesday, when golf’s global merger was spun as a “mission to unify the game.”

And there wasn’t a lot of argument about the root of the switcheroo. As Monahan made clear, this was about money — specifically about infusing the sport with billions in Saudi investment. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, will be chair of the as-yet-unnamed global monolith. Monahan will be CEO.

So the PGA Tour will hold a majority voting interest, while the Saudis will hold the purse strings. You be the judge of who’ll be in charge.

“This is an opportunity we’ve never had before,” Monahan told CNBC. “And to have this capital at this point in time, with the strength of this game, there’s so much opportunity. And it’s opportunity we have not been able to activate. But we will now.”

As they say, cash is king — or in this particular case, crown prince.

Who’ll benefit most? Lip service was paid to “growing the game.” But if recent trends hold, it’ll be the game’s biggest stars who bank most of the profit.

At least it won’t be the lawyers. There’s no doubt the merger was also designed to put a stop to potentially damaging legal proceedings between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf that could have dragged on expensively while airing no end of dirty laundry in discovery.

Still, speaking of uncleanliness, Tuesday was a PR disaster: a hasty announcement that some speculated was made in advance of an expected leak, and one that caught even those who thought they were on the inside of the sport off guard. And while most players declined to comment as they emerged from an afternoon meeting with Monahan in the clubhouse at Toronto’s Oakdale Golf and Country Club, where the Canadian Open begins Thursday, the ones who did speak acknowledged there was disgruntlement.

“There’s some grumpy players in there,” Geoff Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion, told reporters. “Just, they feel a little bit sort of, not lied to, but that the tour kind of changed its position kind of quickly, and dropped it on us like that really fast. So maybe there’s a feeling of a lack of trust a little bit in the leadership … That’s not everyone in the room.”

Monahan, said Ogilvy, was called a “hypocrite” in the meeting and “he took it.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t Jay today,” Ogilvy said.

As PGA golfers will remind you, it was just last summer that Monahan stood before them at the 3M Championship in Minnesota and vowed that no LIV defector would be allowed back on the PGA Tour so long as he was commissioner.

“The players here just want the loyal players rewarded,” Ogilvy said. “It sort of feels like there may be an avenue back (for LIV golfers) now, but it didn’t really sound like there was an easy avenue back.”

So, plenty of unanswered questions. Among them: If the PGA Tour is indeed a players’ tour, why were the players apparently blindsided by the news?

“Nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with,” Mackenzie Hughes, the PGA Tour player from Dundas, tweeted.

If the deal is so good, why was it concocted in tight-circled shadows? And if LIV Golf just spent parts of the past year making legal arguments that the PGA Tour is an illegal monopoly, how is this coming together of the world’s three biggest tours not an even more egregious example of one?

It was only a year ago that Greg Norman, the LIV Golf CEO who didn’t appear central to the merger, bragged about the benefits of introducing competition into the sport’s marketplace: “Free agency has finally come to golf,” he said.

If this deal goes through — and you’d figure the U.S. Justice Department, which has investigated the PGA Tour on antitrust accusations, would be interested in a look under the hood — free agency is effectively gone from golf.

And as for morality — as Strada said — Monahan used it as window dressing when it was convenient, and pulled down the shades to count the money. As the titans of billion-dollar business will tell you, it’s not about whether Monahan’s amoral 180 is good or bad, only that it turns out to be good for business. Call him a hypocrite, sure. Just assume he stands to become a far richer one soon.

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