Tuesday Trifles - Wasatch Edition

We're back on Utah time, so expect posts to be up a bit later in the morning.  But, quite the mess, eh?

PIFfing Into The Wind - Yeah, I don't know how this resolves, but one gets the feeling that there's only four events we'll need to watch next year.  Hard to grab onto a place to lede from, so shall we just enjoy Shack roasting a certain Spaniard?  

Here was Jon Rahm throwing out the World Series first pitch in October and lifting the Masters trophy back in April:

Here is Jon Rahm after signing with LIV last week:

 

As caught by Golf Digest’s Ben Walton, note in the top photo of Rahm posing with the old Florida Man bearing a strong resemblance to a former World No. 1, look how the Masters champion adjusted his watch to make sure it’s visible even after he’s been wired $100 million and could buy any man jewelry he wants. Remarkably, product-hawking remained top-of-mind as he began his quest to grow the game.

 I'm just gonna let him rant on:

When offered again he took the silly money. But Rahm also jettisoned the respect he’d built-up at the apparent behest of his new Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia sugar daddies benefactors. Rahm hid behind family needs in the initial Fox News reveal of his shocking decision in endorsing a tour he’d mocked. It only reinforced how everyone has a price and will justify it every way imaginable instead of maintaining some semblance of dignity by saying, “the amount they offered to put the PGA Tour out of its misery proved absurd and I could not say no, so I’ll do my best to earn it while using it to give back somehow.”

During a nails-on-chalkboard appearance with former placekicker and relentlessly-overcompensating-as-a-result bro show host Pat McAfee, Rahm listened to the tank top-wearing windbag ramble on about how this was a show for the little people who work hard and started with nothing. McAfee blabbed on about how annoyed he is by the terrible types who lament athletes taking sportwashed money before telling Rahm how amazing it is to be “changing your family tree forever.”

The family tree?

This would suggest Rahm’s offspring won’t ever have to be hard working types sitting at home watching The Pat McAfee Show. One could try explaining the irony to McAfee and I’m confident someone has spent a few too many hours under the tanning bed lights. (If you want a Monday migraine, here is the full appearance.)

Can you feel the game growing?

Look, we get it: louder, edgier, sillier and angrier is the LIV thing. They even put out a photo of Rahm that looked like a defiant drunk mug shot next to some more unadulterated grow-the-game hogwash. And it’s a “quote” talking about bigger audiences divorced from the reality: LIV has been watched by miniscule audiences despite a massive cash outlay.

Anyone but me think it reminds us of Tiger's mug shot?

Of course, it could have been worse:

Oh wow pic.twitter.com/3pI8dxEOZX

— No Laying Up (@NoLayingUp) December 8, 2023

Amusingly, not that I can find it right now, but Geoff saw the above and tweeted his relief that at least Ohtani had spurned the dreaded Dodgers.....  Yeah, maybe that explains his crankiness.

Your humble blogger has spent the last two years criticizing the Tour's reaction to the LIV threat.  I couldn't understand why they weren't calling the LIV events exhibitions, only to learn that that was because they eanted to play exhibitions as well.  The objections to tainted money were thereby one-dimensional and, now that Jay is cool with Wahabi cash, what is the remaining objection to LIV.

What's most disillusioning is that the one guy making those substantive arguments has now pulled an Emily Litella and said, "never mind."

One last Geoff bit:

But it’s no less agonizing to watch a generational talent look ridiculous. One who had many of us believing he had taken inspiration from class acts of the past and seemed genuine in his pursuit of history above all else. During last Thursday’s rushed rollout, Rahm immediately showed he is not his own man in following LIV’s tacky rollout script. One oddly designed at appealing to angry bros who feel America has wronged them. How they think this will appeal to a larger audience—especially women or a red-white-and-blue core that’s still not wild about Saudi Arabia—is tough to comprehend.

OK, but let's remember that that pledge of "fealty" was no less genuine.... The Tour Confidential panel had thoughts:

1. Adding to a week that already had an announcement of a controversial golf-ball rollback (you can read that special edition of Tour Confidential here), World No. 3 Jon Rahm joined LIV Golf for a deal that’s reported to be well into nine figures. Not long ago Rahm said he had no interest in the up-start league and that crazy money wouldn’t change his lifestyle anyway. So, what happened?

Josh Sens: The big thing that changed is the golf landscape, in which the Tour did a sneaky about-face on doing business with the Saudis (giving players free license to do the same) and the

Saudis, with a deadline to a potential agreement fast-approaching and the Tour talking to other suitors, had all the more incentive to gain added negotiation leverage. What didn’t change is that the Saudis have bottomless financial resources and everyone has a price.

Zephyr Melton: After the Tour showed they were willing to do business with the Saudis, all bets were off. Rahm stayed through the chaos of early defections — watching his colleagues get paid hundreds of millions — and got very little from the Tour in return for his loyalty. With the Tour and LIV looking to merge in the future, he may as well get his bag while he can.

James Colgan: Yeah, LIV offered Rahm a metric ton of cash, which was enough to tip the metaphorical scales. But I also think LIV offered him something the PGA Tour didn’t: the opportunity to be the face (and the voice) of the league. In a world where the Saudis have their hands deep in both leagues, the “legacy” offered by the PGA Tour paled in comparison. Oh, and the eight zeroes helped.

Not sure being the face of THAT tour is such a great thing.... But the money is forever.

2. Rahm seemed to be a player who cared deeply about winning some of the PGA Tour’s marquee events, once saying “There’s meaning when you win the Memorial. There’s meaning when you win Arnold Palmer’s event at Bay Hill. There’s a meaning when you win, LA, Torrey, some of the historic venues. That to me matters a lot.” Does Rahm signing with LIV Golf mean he’s moved on from that previous stance, or is there a chance he knows something we don’t know about the future of the two leagues?

Sens: Possibly. It’s not hard to imagine a merger, or a world where barriers between the two circuits disappear, allowing players to jump back and forth. But what seems more relevant to Rahm is that, with his exemptions and his stature, will still get to play in the events that matter to him most no matter what.

Melton: I find it hard to believe Rahm knows much about the future of the two leagues because it seems like even they don’t know what the future holds. It’s more likely that they made him an offer he simply couldn’t refuse.

Colgan: I think we’ve seen enough evidence from previous defections that declarations of allegiance to either league aren’t worth the air they’re spoken into. Everybody’s got a plan until they’re staring down life-changing money.

Look, he spoke about caring about those PGA Tour events, but I would say at this point we should assume that nothing he says is anything but transactional.

But the bigger issue is one that I've tried to note more than a few times, which is that the PGA Tour itself is marginal.  We think of that golf eco-system as unified, but when you bifurcate the majors from the PGA Tour, the latter struggles for relevance.  

The obvious advantage the Tour has is the history of these events, including their ties to (sometimes) iconic venues.  But then the Tour devalues those events by limiting field sizes and turning them into LIV-lite, so what's the reason to stay?

Tony now says he's staying, but it's domino time:

3. Now the golf world waits for more dominos to fall, especially since Rahm will captain one of his own LIV teams. Do you see more PGA Tour players or big names joining LIV in the coming weeks? Who might be on their radar?

Sens: Recent remarks from Tony Finau’s orbit make it sound like he’s already gone. But other names being bandied about — chiefly Hatton, maybe Hovland?- seem highly realistic, too. Of course, Rory jumping would make me spill my coffee. But at this point, there’s not much news that could cause much shock.

Melton: It sounds like it’s a matter of when, not if, more big names follow Rahm. Tony Finau and Tyrrell Hatton seem like prime candidates.

Colgan: We’ve seen Finau and Hatton’s names tied to Rahm, which makes some level of sense (and also gives LIV a team filled with three of golf’s all-time good guys). I think the bigger news, after Rahm, is that nobody is off the radar anymore.

Tony made perfect sense, as he's not so good at the golf thing lately.  But Mr. Rahm will need a team, and I don't see him grabbing Matthew Wolff.

Wither The Tour - What a bizarre moment in golf.  The TC panel takes a crack at where this leaves things:

4. Where do the PGA Tour, and commissioner Jay Monahan, go from here? And what does Rahm leaving for LIV mean for the ongoing merger talks with a deadline for a deal looming later this month?

Melton: I’m not sure where Monahan goes from here. It doesn’t look like he’s got many cards left to play. As for the merger, plucking off Rahm (with others sure to follow) gives the Saudis that much more bargaining power.

Colgan: In signing Rahm, the PIF ostensibly puts a gun to Monahan’s head as it relates to merger conversations. His best option is to pray these negotiations finalize before another star jumps ship — as everyone at the table now knows. I think we can feel confident things are going to get moving quickly, as the Tour’s new partnership of billionaires indicates.

Sens: I have a holiday fruitcake that I suspect will be around longer than Monahan. I’d be surprised if he’s still commish next year. As James says, the urgency for talks is greater than ever, but any merger would still have to pass muster with regulators. The short answer is, another year of a divided professional game, even if the court fights are done.

Jay seems to have become a eunuch, and we should expect him to remain in place only as long as he's useful, though the question of useful to whom will remain pending.

That last bit from Josh Sens refers to this development:

A story posted on pgatour.com said: “The PGA Tour Policy Board has unanimously selected an outside investment group to further negotiate with as talks with the PIF continue to progress. The decision to advance discussions with Strategic Sports Group (SSG) was announced Sunday in a memo to Tour members.”

Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard first reported the memo the board sent Sunday.

The memo states that the board has been reviewing proposals over the last few days and that negotiations with SSG will continue. SSG is headlined by Fenway Sports Group but includes Marc Attanasio, Arthur Blank, Gerry Cardinale and Cohen Private Ventures.

This has not shut the door on Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as the board wrote that “we anticipate advancing our negotiations with PIF in the weeks to come.”

 It seems like the unspoken conversation has gone about like this:

Jay:  We don't need your stinking money.

Yasir: Fine, we'll just write the checks directly to your players.

Just after I last posted on this topic, this Sports Illustrated item dropped, with two notable revelations, this being the first:

Whatever LIV Golf is paying Jon Rahm to leave the PGA Tour, it is an enormous number. Here is a larger one: Last summer, after the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund announced their framework agreement, PIF indicated a willingness to fund a $1 billion equalization pool for the PGA Tour players who turned down LIV offers before the framework agreement, people familiar with the discussions tell Sports Illustrated. The number wasn’t final; nothing was final, obviously. But that’s where this was headed: A $1 billion-dollar equalization pool on top of a $2 billion PIF investment in the PGA Tour.

The numbers could have gone down—but they also could have gone up.

Those are rather large numbers, yet we're hearing that PIF is dragging its feet in the negotiations.....  This is the more incendiary revelation:

What has happened since should outrage the Tour’s rank and file. It is a story of political maneuvering and bruised egos obstructing common sense, with Patrick Cantlay seizing control and somehow turning himself into arguably the most powerful person on the PGA Tour, including the commissioner. Cantlay has formed an alliance with fellow Tour Policy Board members Tiger Woods and Jordan Spieth, and that group, along with Colin Neville of Raine Capital, is now driving the Tour’s negotiations with PIF and other investors.

How is that going? Well, multiple sources tell SI that Neville assured bidders no players from the Tour’s much-discussed meeting in Delaware in August 2022 would defect to LIV. Rahm was in Delaware, he might be the best player in the world, and he just left. What are those bidders supposed to think now? (A spokesperson for Raine declined comment on behalf of Neville.)

No word on whether Patrick has found a hat that fits, but word on the street was that he wanted to blow up the Saudi deal in order to keep them as leverage.  In other words, he wants Saudi money without the unpleasant aroma, so good luck with that.

So, how's the terrific penis' plan working out?

There is still the possibility this all ends happily for everybody, but the Tour is in a worse negotiating position than it was this summer, with no clear endgame in sight. Rahm’s departure is not just a blow to the Tour; it is the strongest public indicator yet of how poorly the ship has been steered.

Go back to the framework announcement in June. The rollout was a disaster, but the principles of the agreement were clear: PIF would invest in the Tour. PIF chairperson Yasir Al-Rumayyan would be chairperson and get a seat on the PGA Tour Policy Board—but the PGA Tour commissioner would get to decide the fate of the Tour and LIV. LIV agreed to drop all lawsuits against the Tour with prejudice.

Less noticed at the time: While the sides set Dec. 31 of this year as a target to complete the deal, there was no exclusivity window. The PGA Tour was free to talk to any and all other investors while it negotiated with PIF. One attorney who has worked on mergers and acquisitions for decades and had no connection to this deal told SI that was extremely unusual: Normally, “once it’s public, you’re locked into the deal until either the deadline for closing passes or some condition that can’t be met.” Another attorney with a similar background concurred.

More fundamentally, it's unclear as to whether Yasir knew they would be trying to dilute their influence by including other financing sources, since money is all the Saudis bring to the table.  We might view Yasir's signing of Rahm as an indication that he's not planning to play well with the others.

The framework agreement also included a clause in which LIV and the Tour agreed not to poach each other’s players as they negotiated. This meant that the Tour could solicit bids from other investors, and LIV could not retaliate by—just for example here—throwing a half-billion or so dollars at Jon Rahm.

There were indications the Justice Department might view the no-poaching agreement as an antitrust violation, and so as a show of good faith, the Tour and LIV removed it. But the rest of it remained. Al-Rumayyan had been very clear that he wanted it to go through.

The Tour had a chance to use the nonexclusivity to either find other investors—lowering PIF’s stake and possibly clapping back at critics who said the Saudis would run the Tour—or simply use the possibility of it to get the best possible deal from PIF. That is also a critical point: The sides had not yet agreed on what the Tour and its assets were worth. Would a $2 billion investment buy 20 percent? Fifty percent? Ten percent? It would be whatever both sides thought it was. The last three years in sports have taught us that the Saudis do not worry about the numbers after the decimal point.

Good faith?  Hey, why start now?

Back to the TC gang:

5. Rahm leaving was a dagger to the PGA Tour, not only because he’s well known but because he just won the Masters, is in his prime and was supposed to be a core piece the PGA Tour builds around. If you are a PGA Tour player, what are you most curious about regarding the future of your league?

Sens: So many things. Who will be left to compete against week in and week out? How tough will it be to retain sponsors? What’s going to happen with world rankings, gateways to the majors? What happens to prize money? Should I look to start earning my living in pickleball?

Melton: I’d be asking if the league will even exist in five years. If they keep hemorrhaging stars, there won’t be much of a product to sell in the future.

Colgan: I’m wondering at what point we start asking if all the best players in the world are still on the PGA Tour.

It's not going to be a hemorrhage, because they can't absorb that many, so it's clearly more about the specific players involved.  There aren't too many Jon Rahm's, but reasons for tuning in on any given Sunday are diminished.

But the bigger issue is that those still on the PGA Tour, Patrick Cantlay most notably, refuse to ply their trade for the amount the golf ecosystem can support, at the same time we see that ecosystems value diminished by the defection of a key player.  I'm sure it'll all work out, for Patrick that is.

Gonna leave you there and get on with my day.  No blogging tomorrow due to a conflict, but we'll catch up the Father-Sone, PGA-LPGA later in the week.