Today's announced merger between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf League has stunned the golf world including Minnesota native, University of Minnesota grad and former number one ranked golfer in the world Tom Lehman.
Lehman, who is the 1996 British Open champ, joined WCCO Radio's Chad Hartman and minced no words in saying LIV commissioner and CEO Greg Norman should have absolutely no involvement with the merger moving forward.
“He’s the ultimate selfish, you-know-what,” Lehman said about Norman. “That’s just who he’s always been. He wanted to do this a long time ago and it wasn’t for the good of golf, you know. It was simply because it was something he wanted to do and he would benefit from it.”
Lehman added there are still far too many questions to be answered when it comes to how the merger impacts players especially those on the PGA Tour.
“If I’m just a regular PGA Tour member right now, I’m just going to be sweating wondering what are my opportunities going to look like a year from now, or two years from now,” asks Lehman. “Is the world that I tried to achieve to get into, are my goals going to be attainable?”
According to Lehman, by the looks of it, LIV Golf and those who bolted for the league backed by big money from Saudi Arabia are reaping the rewards.
“The first blush is that, you know, LIV Golf has basically just scored a huge coup,” says Lehman. “They are getting everything they want. The players that left are getting everything they want. They having their cake and they’re eating it too. It’s just hard to understand what this world of golf is going to look like, and what the PGA Tour is going to look like.”
From the commercial side, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund joins the PGA Tour board of directors and leads the new business venture as chairman, though the PGA Tour will have a majority stake.
“This is a huge development and obviously upends a world of golf, which has been perhaps more tradition-bound in the past,” said Kristian Ulrichsen, a Middle East fellow at Houston’s Baker Institute.
Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund has made a point of seeking out investments, like LIV, where it could shake up existing industries, Ulrichsen said.
“That’s sort of one of their mantras, is to try to be disruptive and to take on the status quo,” she said. “And in this case, they seem to have succeeded.”
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan has his toughest work ahead of him. There is a planned player’s meeting Thursday afternoon at the site of the RBC Canadian Open.
He sought loyalty from his players against a league accused of taking part in sportswashing, an attempt by Saudi Arabia to shift focus away from its human rights abuses, such as the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Now the very group that posed such a threat is now the PGA Tour’s commercial partner.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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