When history finally tells the story of the war between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, few of its moments will call for laughter.
But there will be at least one: a Wall Street investment banker tapped to negotiate a multi-billion dollar deal with human rights nose-thumbers, outwitted by a pro golfer who started an international incident by trying to avoid a tan line on his face.
The former of those, Jimmy Dunne, resigned from the PGA Tour Policy Board on Monday after months of stalled efforts to produce a merger between the Tour and LIV. In the end, Dunne’s dignity will go down as the only thing he successfully sold to the Saudis’ Public Investment Fund.
“[N]o meaningful progress has been made towards a transaction with PIF,” Dunne lamented in his resignation letter. “[M]y vote and my role is [sic] utterly superfluous.” Finally, some good news.
Regrettably, unlike his L, Dunne is not taking all notions of a merger with him. The goal of lowering the PGA Tour’s drawbridge across its moat now finds an unlikely champion: Rory McIlroy.
History will recall the same thing that anyone else will recall with an attention span longer than 15 minutes — that in the earliest days of the Saudi-funded golf rival’s ascendence, no one saw and articulated its danger more pointedly than McIlroy. “I didn’t really like where the money was coming from either,” he said flatly in March 2020. “I wanted to be the first one to speak out against it. I’m glad that I have. I’m glad that I’ve done that.”
At some point along the way, something changed. In 2022, during Netflix’s filming of Full Swing’s first season, McIlroy defiantly cried “Fuck you, Phil!” in the series’ most memorable moment — a glimpse at McIlroy’s deep-seated scorn toward the Saudi-backed golf upstart and at its most prominent, soulless ghoul. A year later, though, the Tour’s announcement of a framework merger plan soured McIlroy on his own defiance. “Why the fuck did I spend 12 months of my life fighting for something just for it to come back together?” he asked in one episode. In another: “I’m almost at the point where it’s like, ‘Fuck it, do whatever you want.’”
On No Laying Up’s May 12 podcast, Kevin Van Valkenburg summarized McIlroy’s view more elegantly:
So, this is kind of based off some conversations that I’ve had with various people. I am — and I feel pretty comfortable that this position is true, this is not just conjecture with me — Rory ultimately feels like, “Hey, we fought as hard as we could against the PIF. And I was out front, I was willing to put my neck on the line…” He was willing to be the face of it all. And you know what? As soon as the framework shit happened, it took a while for them to kind of, like, for the dust to settle and to understand it, but I think Rory knew that they had lost the war. And so at this point, his perspective is like, “OK, we could continue to fight this. And then an entity with billions and billions of dollars is still adamant, ‘We are going to do everything we can to basically ruin your business.’ Or, we could invite them and figure out a way to make this work. Because they’re gonna be involved in golf one way or the other.” And there are other people — I think it’s fair to say, like, Patrick [Cantlay] and Jordan [Spieth] and Tiger — who, honestly, held the position that I held for a long time, which is, like, “This is not something we want to do. We can find a way to make this work and we can outlast the PIF and we can not have to join this.” And Rory’s kind of looking at it logically like, “Guys, you’re not reading the room. It’s over. You think I want to shake hands with Phil [Mickelson] and Greg [Norman] and Bryson [DeChambeau] and Patrick Reed and all those people, and play on the same tour with them? Of course not. But as a businessperson, I realize the big picture probably means that if we’re going to grow this into some larger thing, those people need to be involved.”
A golfer valued at $170 million needs no lessons on what is good for business. But if McIlroy ever rooted his opposition to LIV in anything other than business, then now would be a good time for him to confront a threshold question:
What the fuck, man? What was any of this ever about?
Either one of two things has happened for McIlroy.
First, perhaps — in keeping with the cynicism that has saturated every step of this tale — McIlroy never saw the Saudi government’s involvement with LIV as anything but a convenient excuse to gesture at the moral high ground. God knows he wouldn’t be the first.
Second, and more generously — perhaps McIlroy simply has lost the plot in the most fantastic way imaginable.
Ask yourself: why is reunifying men’s pro golf so important? To be sure, Sunday afternoon TV would be more fun. But the cost of that entertainment — surrendering the sport to an authoritarian regime whose only goal is using golf to distract from human rights abuses — is no different today than it was in 2022. If any notion resembling “this whole LIV Golf thing wouldn't be such a bad idea if someone else was behind it” ever crossed your mind, then you should be aware that the someone else hasn’t changed. Anyone with a lasting interest in the Tour’s credibility — say, someone who claims 26 career wins in its events — should think twice before assuming there’d be no cost to handing over control to a group even less interested in competitive golf than the Tour’s current leadership.
Even before Dunne’s exit from the stage, the framework agreement was not a crossing of the Rubicon. Presuming otherwise amounted to having the debate on LIV’s terms. Nothing had changed, because the only important part of the whole story hadn’t changed. And if any doubt about that existed before Monday, it doesn’t anymore: by his own admission, Dunne lost.
I don’t presume that Patrick Cantlay and other PGA Tour partisans opposing a LIV merger are doing it solely from the kindness of their hearts. Whatever their motivation, though, they are the last line of defense against a moment that no longer seems inevitable. For the moment, they remain on the right side of history. McIlroy would do well to consider rejoining them.
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