Dustin Johnson's Decision to Play LIV Golf Event is Now the PGA Tour's Problem

The former world No. 1 is the biggest PGA Tour star so far to sign up for the Saudi-backed league's first event. So, what will the Tour do now?

Dustin Johnson has always been the simplest of golfers, not just in on-course attitude (see the ball, hit the ball, rinse, repeat) but in professional outlook: In a world where most guys primarily want to play golf, make money, and have fun, DJ only seems to want to play golf, make money, and have fun. He has never claimed to stand for anything else. He is friends with Donald Trump, but that seems to be because Trump is a golf guy. He can respond to a 37-word question with a six-word answer, not because he is being rude but because six words is all he has to share on the topic.

This is presumably why Johnson changed his mind and entered the LIV Golf event in London, which is funded by the Saudi Arabian government. He can play golf here for money, or he can play golf there for more money. I’d be surprised if the calculation went much deeper than that. Heaven help the journalist who starts grilling Johnson on Saudi Arabia’s human-rights violations. It’s hard enough to get him to explain why he hit a 9-iron.

Nonetheless, a publicly simple man is, for the moment, the face of an increasingly complicated problem. The PGA Tour must grapple with two of the most vexing words in the English language: Now what?

Commissioner Jay Monahan has done everything possible to cripple LIV Golf. He has warned players not to play in any LIV events, implied they will forfeit their PGA Tour membership if they do, and ultimately denied releases to players who requested them. He created the Player Impact Program to spoon-feed millions of dollars to his biggest stars. (Johnson earned $3 million for finishing 7th in PIP last year; Phil Mickelson, LIV’s biggest public advocate thus far among current players, got $6 million for finishing second.)

Monahan tried to make this a simple choice: Stay or Go. For the most part, it worked. Almost all of the Tour’s biggest stars – Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Jordan Spieth, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa – pledged allegiance to the Tour. But now Johnson, who has played as well in non-major PGA Tour events as anybody over the last decade, has gone – and not for an entirely new tour, which doesn’t exist at the moment, but for a single event.

As I have written, the LIV events are an unseemly money grab. The Saudi government is using golfers to launder its image as an oppressive regime, as Mickelson has acknowledged. But Monahan and LIV Golf frontman Greg Norman have been posturing, with Monahan taking the hardest line he can and Norman insisting his lawyers say he can win any suit. That all sounds good until you have to do what you claimed you would do.

What if Johnson plays one event and asks to come back? What if he says he regrets it? Is he really going to be banned from the PGA Tour for life for playing one golf event?

If Johnson loves the LIV life (because he can play golf and make a bunch of money), he will surely still want to play the Masters, which is not run by the PGA Tour. Is Augusta National, with its relentless emphasis on tradition, really going to ban four former champions? (Johnson, Sergio Garcia and Charl Schwartzel all signed up with the Saudis; Mickelson hasn’t yet but has indicated he would.) If ANGC lets Johnson play and he wins again, does the PGA Tour count that as a PGA Tour win?

Then there are the two World Golf Championship events, which draw some of the strongest fields in the sport. They are co-sponsored by the Asian Tour. The Asian Tour is already in bed with LIV Golf; the last five spots in the London LIV event will go to players from the Asian Tour. What if Johnson qualifies for the WGC through the Asian Tour? Will the PGA Tour try to keep him out?

What if, for whatever reason, LIV Golf folds? Most new sports ventures do. If the Saudis decide this isn’t worth it for them, there goes Norman’s attempt to save golfers from PGA Tour oppression, or whatever he is claiming to do. Will Johnson and his fellow rebels be in exile forever? At some point, public opinion will start to soften.

Any answers to these questions are just temporary answers and should be taken that way, no matter what Monahan and Norman say. This is business. Everything is subject to negotiation.

We don’t even know if Johnson really can play golf and make more money with LIV, as straightforward as that might sound to him.

The Saudi guarantees are surely enormous, especially for Johnson. But he is also risking an enormous amount of money. In 2020 Johnson won $15 million for winning the FedEx Cup. (The PGA Tour does completely control that.) Forbes estimates that he earns $20 million a year from endorsements; the blowback to this decision could cost him sponsors, and who knows if he will get them back?

His marketing appeal is based entirely on him being an unobjectionable person who plays extraordinary golf on TV all the time. If he is now an objectionable person who doesn’t play golf on TV all the time, how much is he worth to RBC, to adidas, to TaylorMade? And if he loses those deals now, on the verge of turning 38, he might not have a ton of time to sign new ones.

What Johnson and others are doing is wrong. The PGA Tour and the players who support it are right. That’s the simple part. But this big, ugly mess just got bigger and uglier, and it is not clear how anybody can clean it up.