Jay Monahan’s Mistakes Led to Deal With LIV Golf, and Now He’ll Have to Answer for Them

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf have done an unlikely deal, and why the Tour needed it goes back to how Jay Monahan handled LIV Golf from the beginning.

So, it turns out Yasir Al-Rumayyan doesn’t have three heads and four arms.

We also learned Tuesday that partnering with LIV Golf is not like jumping into a swamp of alligators.

To say that PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan made a stunning reversal is kind to the word “stunning.”

As a fan of war history, it made me think of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who stepped off a plane in September 1938 and said, "My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time ... go home and get a nice quiet sleep."

Monahan wasn’t reading from a worthless document as Chamberlain did, but on Tuesday he spun the framework of his deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia to anyone who would listen.

It’s impossible today to judge the worth of the PGA Tour–PIF deal, just as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Chamberlain agreement that carved up Czechoslovakia. Monahan said it’s a “framework” deal on CNBC Tuesday morning and shared the same message for the rest of the day.

When asked about a pathway back for LIV golfers to rejoin the newly created league, Monahan said again: “We’re under a framework agreement. To complete this, we've got to get to definitive.” Shortly before that meeting with the media, Monahan presided over a players-only meeting where many Tour pros called for him to resign.

Monahan was asked afterward by the press why he chose not to involve the PGA Tour Policy Board, as the Tour is a players-run organization. Monahan’s answer: “Because this is a framework agreement. The binding element to it is the drop of the litigation, and ultimately everything that we've discussed in the framework agreement is subject to the approval of our Policy Board.”

Even when asked why he didn’t involve Tiger and Rory as part of the tight circle, Monahan again mentioned the framework agreement.

With that all said, it’s clear that in the months leading up to the deal, the PGA Tour was on a path that was unsustainable.

Jimmy Dunne apparently felt the same. He’s a newly appointed PGA Tour board member and a major player in investment banking as a founder of Sandler O’Neill. Looking back, it’s easy to connect the dots from Al-Rumayyan to Dunne to Monahan.

Dunne reportedly took the first meeting with Al-Rumayyan and was there every step of the way.

Monahan had said that the Tour was dipping into its reserve fund for annual operational costs—including its increased purses—without additional revenue coming in.

Also, the cost of litigation against LIV was monumentally expensive and was only going to increase as a trial was on the horizon.

Monahan confirmed Tuesday that the PGA Tour was on an unsustainable path.

“To make the changes in ’23 and ultimately to make the changes in ’24, we’ve had to invest back in our business through our reserves,” Monahan said. “But you hit it: Between our reserves, the legal fees, our underpin and our commitment to the DP World Tour and their legal fees, it’s been significant.”

He says “significant”; I say unsustainable. Tomato, tomahto.

I chatted last week with Andy Pazder, the PGA Tour’s head of operations, and he said that to fund the Tour’s new designated events, which offer purses of $20 million, the money came from contributions from the Tour, its sponsors and to a limited degree the host organizations. But in 2024 those elevated purses would be mostly funded by sponsors while the Tour would no longer fund prize money.

Pazder also confirmed that increasing the designated event purses to $22 million in 2024 was off the table.

Connecting the dots, it’s clear the PGA Tour was walking down a path of financial hardship, which was paved with Monahan’s inability to properly read the room when the PIF and LIV Golf first came calling.

Let me first say this: At first blush, the deal seems positive for the PGA Tour and its members and in 10 years what happened Tuesday and what occurs over the next year or so may be viewed more positively than it is today.

But how did the PGA Tour get in this position? And why should the architect of this catastrophe be rewarded?

Monahan is both fireman and arsonist.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the commissioner said that he began to trust Al-Rumayyan in Venice “10 minutes after sitting down with him.”

Mind you, at that point the Tour was burning hundreds of millions of dollars that it didn’t have in the normal course of business through legal fees and player incentives to keep the upper echelon of Tour pros from jumping to LIV.

If Monahan had simply spent those 10 minutes with Al-Rumayyan back in 2019 or ’20, would we be where we are today?

Would PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan have lied to his players, stabbed some directly in the back, trashed his reputation and put the PGA Tour on the road to financial malfeasance?

Would Rory McIlroy, one of golf’s few needle movers, have felt like a sacrificial lamb, as he said in Canada on Wednesday?

There’s no way to know what would have happened if Monahan had taken an early phone call from the Saudis, but I do know that many both inside and outside the PGA Tour were urging engagement. It took far too long for that to finally occur.

Many are talking about the moral issues of the Tour accepting Saudi money. To me the more fundamental question is whether Jay Monahan should be the commissioner of the PGA Tour after demonstrating a lack of forward thinking and his inability to run the organization effectively. His constituency, the PGA Tour players, are angry. Monahan has a lot more explaining to do.