Phil Mickelson of Team Hyflyers acknowledges the crowd during the second round of LIV Golf Adelaide golf tournament at Grange Golf Club. Mandatory Credit: Mike Frey-USA TODAY Sports
Yasir bin Othman Al-Rumayyan
If you don’t know the name, get to know it. He will be the chairman of the new for-profit structure that will oversee golf including the PGA Tour starting in 2024. Al-Rumayyan is the head of the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which will be the money behind the new deal. Whether he will be a high-profile figure or not is up for debate, but he’s a big winner here.
Phil Mickelson
Mickelson lost plenty of fans when he jumped to the LIV tour, and many of those fans won’t return to Mickelson’s fold. But Lefty walks away a winner here because LIV golf didn’t fold. Comments that Mickelson wanted to change the way the PGA Tour does business seem to be exactly the way things have turned out.
Rory McIlroy
Okay, McIlroy was the loyalist of loyal golfers to the PGA Tour, and the Tour might have flipped the script on him. But fans have embraced McIlroy for his loyalty, and McIlroy didn’t come off as bitter or angry at his first post-merger news conference in Canada last week.
Lawyers
If the PGA Tour was worried about running short of cash because of the LIV battle, we know where the money was going — to lawyers. The same is true of the PIF, which was paying money out to lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic. The longer the battle went on, the more the lawyers won, but even with the fight now seemingly ended, the lawyers walk away with money.
The game of golf
The bickering, the name calling, the absence of top players from big events was hurting the game. So were the lawsuits that threatened to go on for years and the threats of a Department of Justice investigation. Much of that goes away with this deal, and that can help the PGA Tour, its players and its tournaments.
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