LIV Golf

Tuesday

Cockburn

To Pride or not to Pride?

How are you marking Pride Month? This weekend in the DC area, there are really only two ways to go about it. First, despite concern that the second Trump administration would scythe wholesale through gay rights, America’s capital is hosting World Pride, a two-week-long festival of rainbow-patterned frivolity.  Though there may be fewer corporate sponsors than in the Biden era, DC remains as gay as it ever was. In Northwest, 15th St is painted in rainbow colors and the gay bars are packed to the rafters. In Northeast, a two-day music festival kicks off tonight at the RFK Festival Grounds, headlined by Jennifer Lopez and a nice young man called Troye Sivan.

donald trump pga-liv
Cockburn

Flashback: Donald Trump predicted the PGA-LIV merger a year ago

The PGA Tour will officially merge with LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed golf league, in a shock bid to squash the antitrust lawsuits brewing between the two corporations. It’s a surprising move considering the PGA Tour executives and some of their high-profile players, such as Rory McIlroy, spent the past year morally shaming the pros who defected. But one man who was not shocked was former president Donald Trump, whose organization hosts LIV events at his courses. In July 2022, Trump wrote on Truth Social: All those golfers who remain "loyal" to the very disloyal PGA, in all its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big "thank you" from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year.

Wednesday

Amber Duke

Sorry haters, Trump is really good at golf

Hello everyone and welcome back to Culture Shock! We took a couple weeks of off because I went on vacation and then was in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention.  We’re going to kick off this edition by hopefully settling the years-long debate as to whether Donald Trump is as good at golf as he claims. Trump said earlier this year that he won both the Club Championship and the Senior Club Championship at his course in West Palm Beach, and last year said he won the Club Championship at his course in Bedminster by firing off a 67, which is five strokes under par. However, sportswriter Rick Reilly claims Trump routinely cheats at golf, which has given some haters the impression that Trump isn’t actually any good.

Wednesday

William D. Cohan

How does Michael Klein do it?

Soon after the stunning news broke on June 7 that LIV Golf and the PGA were burying the hatchet, dropping the litigation between them and joining forces, my phone started blowing up. My Wall Street sources were nearly dumbstruck. The deal itself was a stunner, of course, conducted so secretly by the leaders of both the PGA and LIV that the professional golfers who make the two warring organizations possible had been clueless about what was happening. But that’s not what my people wanted to discuss. All they wanted to talk about was how Michael Klein — a longtime Wall Street investment banker with an eponymous advisory firm, M. Klein & Co. — had once again tapped into his deep relationships with Saudi leaders and was representing them in the LIV merger with the PGA.

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Tuesday

Michael Bachmann

What was the point of the PGA-LIV show trial?

The media buzz surrounding the PGA-LIV Golf merger just won’t stop — and the Senate’s investigation on Tuesday did little to help. The hearing came across as more a show trial of moral posturing on an issue that few outside of the golfing community have been following. After nearly three hours, one question still remained unanswered: why should anyone care?  Senator Richard Blumenthal, who announced the investigation last month, appeared to be the only one in the room invested in the hearing, which included testimony from PGA Tour chief operating officer Ron Price and board member Jimmy Dunne. The other committee members came with a few obligatory questions for PGA’s executives or outright supported them.

pga-liv

Tuesday

Ben Domenech

Congress doesn’t like the PGA-LIV merger

Will the biggest merger in golf history fall apart because of politics? From the moment the PGA Tour and LIV Golf shocked the world of sports by announcing their years of negging would end in marriage, questions about the nature and structure of the secretive deal have been raised not just by players, reporters, and fans, but by politicians as well — particularly from a pair of Democratic senators from Connecticut, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, both longtime Saudi critics. Now, it seems Congress is prepared to get seriously involved in whether this deal goes through, and what it means to have this level of investment from a foreign power in what they viewed as an American sport. https://twitter.

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Wednesday

Kevin Cook

Is the PGA-LIV merger sports’ biggest betrayal?

What just happened to golf?  On Tuesday, PGA Tour commissioner Joseph William “Jay” Monahan IV announced that the PGA Tour will merge with LIV Golf, creating a new super tour along with Europe’s DP World Tour.  So much for the war between golf’s establishment and LIV, the upstart league backed by Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion sovereign wealth fund. Starting next year, Monahan will be the super tour’s CEO, answering to its chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan, a close ally of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.  So much for moral posturing. Just last year, with LIV critics citing the Saudi regime’s ugly human-rights record, its links to 9/11 and Saudi thugs’ murdering and dismembering columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Monahan claimed the high ground.

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