There are many questions still to be answered about what the PGA Tour’s stunning merger with Saudi-backed LIV Golf will mean, and perhaps most prominent among them is how PGA loyalists like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm must be feeling after leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table.
The LIV deals were eye-popping when they came out — $300 million for Phil Mickelson, plus $150-odd million apiece for Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Australia’s Cameron Smith.
Meanwhile, Woods, McIlroy, Rahm, Scottie Scheffler and others took what were trumpeted as principled stands, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, only for PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan to turn around and merge forces with LIV in the end.
LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman said last year that Woods turned down an offer in the range of $1-1.2 billion to stick with the PGA Tour.
While LIV Golf executive Majed Al Sorour later said that he “never offered [Woods] that money – not even close to that,” one can assume it was nonetheless a considerable chunk of change.
Last November, Woods excoriated Norman, saying Norman would have to leave LIV before a PGA Tour merger could be considered.
“I think Greg has to go, first of all,” Woods said ahead of the Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas. “Then we can talk, we can all talk freely.”
Woods did not see a resolution on the horizon.
“Not right now, not with their leadership, not with Greg there and his animosity towards the Tour itself. I don’t see that happening,” he continued.
“Greg’s got to leave and then we can eventually, hopefully, have a stay between the two lawsuits and figure something out. But why would you change anything if you’ve got a lawsuit against you? They sued us first.”
McIlroy was more pointed.
“There’s no room in the golf world for LIV Golf,” McIlroy said last July. “I don’t agree with what LIV is doing. If LIV went away tomorrow I’d be super happy.”
He spoke about how money isn’t everything.
“Any decision that you make in your life that’s purely for money usually doesn’t end up going the right way,” McIlroy said last June.
“Obviously, money is a deciding factor in a lot of things in this world, but if it’s purely for money it’s not, it never seems to go the way you want it to.”
He slammed golfers like Koepka who joined LIV after saying they wouldn’t.
“I’m surprised at a lot of these guys because they say one thing and do another – I don’t understand that,” McIlroy said last June. “I don’t know if that’s for legal reasons, I have no idea. It’s pretty duplicitous on their part to say one thing and then do another thing.”
However, by September, McIlroy was calling for a PGA-LIV truce, albeit agreeing with Woods, saying in November that Norman “needs to go” for a resolution to be accomplished.
There has been no indication that Norman would be out in the merger.
Like McIlroy, Rahm also spoke how life was not all about the money.
“Yeah, money is great, but when (my wife) Kelley and I — this first thing happened, we started talking about it, and we’re like, will our lifestyle change if I got $400 million? No, it will not change one bit,” Rahm said last June.
“Truth be told, I could retire right now with what I’ve made and I’d live a very happy life and not play golf again. So I’ve never really played the game of golf for monetary reasons. I play for the love of the game, and I want to play against the best in the world. I’ve always been interested in history and legacy, and right now the PGA Tour has that.”
It’s presumable that McIlroy and Rahm also would have had nine-figure LIV offers.
While we still don’t quite know about the structure of how the PGA Tour and LIV Golf will exist as a combined entity, Woods, McIlroy and Rahm cannot be thrilled with how this all turned out.
This article was originally published by the New York Post and reproduced with permission
