PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monaghan said he met President Donald Trump this week at the White House as the Tour approaches the final decision on a long-standing investment deal with rival Rival Golf Saudi Arabian supporters.
Monaghan on Thursday asked him and Adam Scott, one of the PGA Tour Committee's player directors, to meet with Trump and join the negotiations. All countries involved. ”
“We are grateful that his leadership has brought us closer to the final deal and paved the way for us to unify professional golf for men,” Monaghan said.
The statement was signed by Monaghan, Scott and Tiger Woods, vice-presidents of Commercial PGA Tour Enterprises. He didn't say Woods was in the meeting, and it was not clear who asked for the meeting.
The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia's public investment fund first agreed to the agreement in June 2023, ending the antitrust laws between them. However, the framework contract attracted attention from the Department of Justice and ended in the year without a transaction.
The tour and PIF have been meeting for almost a year. Just ten days after he was elected, Trump invited Monaghan to play golf at Trump International in West Palm Beach, Florida on November 15th.
“It'll take most of the 15 minutes to get that deal done,” Trump said on the eve of the election, “Let's go!”
“I'm really going to work on something else, be honest with you,” Trump said on the podcast. “I think there's a much bigger problem than that. But we should have one tour and they should have the best players on that tour.”
The tour has continued to inform the Department of Justice of negotiations for the past few months as it advances in its investment contract with PIF.
After the original framework agreement with PIF expired at the end of 2023, the tour signed with Strategic Sports Group, a consortium of North American sports owners led by Fenway Sports Group, and PGA tour companies potentially invested $1.5 billion in the investment. Because that would double.
PGA Tour Enterprise is separate from the Tax-Free PGA Tour, which deals with competition.
The latest negotiation is that PIF will become a minority investor in the commercial sector. It is still unclear how it will patch the broken golf scene.
PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are the financial muscles behind Liv Golf. Breakaway spent around $2 billion to recruit top players and was later suspended on the PGA Tour. The group included Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Bryson Dechambeau and Jon Rahm. They combined to win 17 majors, with three being number one in the world.
They are now only in time where the best competition in the world is four majors.
Rory McIlroy, who works for the trading subcommittee for tour negotiations, said last week that she felt the new administration at Pebble Beach would be “a little more rewarding.”
“From an investment perspective, I think that transaction should and should be done,” McIlroy said. “But that doesn't solve the question of what the golf landscape will look like in the future. I think the biggest obstacle might be a different vision of what golf should look like in the future.”
Trump's involvement in golf dates back to more than 20 years when he began building a portfolio of high-end golf courses and began purchasing Scotland's famous Turnberry golf clubs.
He also bought a Doral resort in the suburbs of Miami. Miami is the venerable PGA Tour stop that held the World Golf Championship until 2016 when it became difficult to find a title sponsor for Trump and his ubiquitous presence. .
Three of the Trump courses are hosting LIV events, including one at Doral this year.
