Did Golf Just Avoid The Messiest Divorce In Sports?

The PGA Tour and LIV Golf's merger offers a counterfactual to what IndyCar racing did in the '90s and 2000s.

I had to do a quick post on this because it is just so stunning. On Tuesday, the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf announced they would be merging, calling it "a landmark agreement to unify the game of golf, on a global basis."

That is quite the turnabout from much of the rhetoric since last June, when the Saudi-backed LIV outfit was launched. The PGA Tour long claimed an implicit moral high ground over LIV, which has been accused of “sportswashing” away Saudi Arabia’s human-rights violations, and the rivalry between PGA Tour and LIV players reached vicious levels at times. The two organizations were even suing each other, further illustrating what appeared to be a deepening civil war in the golf world.

And yet, as of today, all parties will reportedly be moving forward together. I think an unnamed PGA Tour player quoted in ESPN’s story speaks for many of us upon hearing the news: "No f---ing way." On many levels, though, this does make sense for the sport as a whole, especially when you consider history’s cautionary tales of organizational splits that weren’t quickly resolved.

While LIV had a shaky long-term path to profitability and essentially relied entirely on Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund to stay financially afloat during its first season, it also put a tremendous amount of pressure on the PGA Tour by poaching a surprising number of top players — within a few months of operating, LIV had lured roughly one-third of the world’s Top 150 golfers from June 2022 — and forcing the PGA Tour to increase its prize money and offer other perks to those who stayed. LIV even recently scored an important symbolic victory when Brooks Koepka became the league’s first active player to win a major at the PGA Championship.

Between the lawsuits, defections and other escalating intra-sport conflicts, golf seemed due for a long, drawn-out split similar to the one that tore apart American open-wheel racing during the 1990s and 2000s. And the main lesson of that saga was that everyone was going to lose.

There was no foreign-investment angle to it like LIV, but a philosophical and financial disagreement between CART — the dominant U.S. open-wheel sanctioning body of the ‘90s — and Tony George — the president of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway (and with it the Indy 500, the crown jewel of the sport) — led to the creation of the Indy Racing League as a CART competitor. The IRL wasn’t much to behold initially, with only three races in its first season and a 36-driver roster featuring only seven members who’d been CART regulars in either of the previous two seasons (somewhat by design). Practically all the IRL had going for it was the Indianapolis 500 — but that turned out to be a very good card to hold.

While CART continued to reign as the more prestigious and well-sponsored series through the late ‘90s, it struggled to replicate the wider appeal of Indy and eventually began a downward spiral. Between a disastrous series of financial missteps, driver fatalities, manufacturer disputes and internal divisions, CART had lost many of its best teams to the IRL by 2003 and filed for bankruptcy after that season. Meanwhile, the IRL rebranded itself as the IndyCar Series, but its own TV ratings cratered after the split and have never come close to recovering.

By the time the two sanctioning bodies officially reunified in 2008, the sport had lost all of its mid-’90s momentum and had been lapped by NASCAR in popularity among American racing fans, to say nothing of its loss of standing relative to other sports leagues. Over the course of 12 years, one of the messiest divorces in sports history had all but destroyed the future of a property that was once among the hottest in the industry.

I doubt golf’s leaders are as intimately acquainted with the political intrigue of open-wheel racing from the 1990s. But they still appear to have intuited that a prolonged, IndyCar-style split between LIV and the PGA Tour/DP World Tour had the potential to be a similar kind of disaster for the sport overall.

Will anyone come away from this deal feeling ethically perfect? No. Will there be extremely hard feelings that need to be mended? Absolutely. But the financial upside of unification will undoubtedly make those problems easier to smooth over for both the tours and the players involved. And history showed that the downside was too much of a risk to entertain.

Filed under: Golf