This was a predictable disaster.
In an interview on Golf Channel, Jay Monahan stumbles though an attempt to defend his hypocrisy regarding the use of 9/11 families as a talking point against LIV Golf. pic.twitter.com/6blmZd8kDg
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 7, 2023
What you’re seeing above is the impossible corner that the PGA painted itself into with its strategy for competing with LIV before they decided, “If we can’t defeat them, let’s join.” This is the danger of using moral arguments in a cynical way, as part of a PR strategy.
Ultimately, for the PGA, the moral argument against taking Saudi money was completely subordinate to the business interests at work. They thought they could use the moral argument to strangle LIV in its crib before it became a true business threat. They encouraged their star players to make that argument.
It didn’t have to be that way. The PGA could have made a less severe version of the argument. Perhaps you could state that “all things being equal” you had moral concerns about being aligned to an outfit controlled by Saudi Arabia. That gives you room to maneuver when the money no longer makes things equal.
FWIW I think there are extremely compelling business and even moral reasons for the PGA to merge with LIV Golf, as distasteful as it may be.
LIV presented an existential threat to the PGA. Once the effort to stop LIV’s creation failed, the PGA had to start thinking very seriously about all its stakeholders — the players, the courses, the traditions of the sport itself, and the secondary businesses that rely on the PGA Tour. Would these stakeholders benefit from a fight to the death between the PGA and LIV? Or was the best strategy to merge before LIV grew large enough to make even more severe terms in a potential merger?
I think obviously the latter — though the course the PGA took to get to this decision leaves a lot of its executives and players with egg on their faces.
Ultimately, if Americans and Brits don’t like what happened here, we have to accept that the Saudis — and even some Russian oligarchs — are too large a problem for institutions such as the PGA or individual sports franchises to handle on their own. In a global market, authoritarian autocracies can be very powerful market players in their own right. We shouldn’t expect firms to be able to handle the competition by merely standing on moral high ground. Markets don’t work like that. Governments have the right and ability to set capital controls that prevent these kinds of mergers, and investments.