Everyone Is Rich, No One Is Happy. The Pro Golf Drama Is Back
First the PGA Tour and the upstart LIV Golf were implacable enemies. Then they were going to work something out. Now, as the Masters is set to begin, the tension is mounting again.
On the morning of March 18, 2024, a Cessna 750 Citation X departed from St. Augustine, Florida, carrying professional golfers from the PGA Tour to a summit in Nassau, Bahamas. This meeting was a key development in the battle between the Tour and its insurgent challenger, LIV Golf. The tour wars had spilled from the sports page to the business page to the front page because of a juicy mix of geopolitics, cartoonish money, courtroom battles, brand-name protagonists and high-profile trash-talking on Capitol Hill.
Awaiting the Citation’s arrival was probably the most powerful man on the planet who’s not a head of state: Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of Saudi Aramco (the world’s most profitable company) and governor of the Saudi Arabian government’s Public Investment Fund, or PIF, which has an $860 billion war chest to alter economies and disrupt industries. That the PIF has poured billions of dollars into professional golf, of all things, owes much to Al-Rumayyan’s obsession with the game; the Bahamas was chosen for this gathering, in part, to accommodate Al-Rumayyan’s tee time with Tiger Woods, a player-director on the PGA Tour board who likes to spearfish in the Caribbean Sea from his 155-foot yacht Privacy.