The Saudi Arabian government did not wind up buying out the top tier of men’s professional golf, but it did buy into it, permanently. A year after the Saudis fractured the sport with the debut of LIV Golf, a child of their Public Investment Fund, the PGA Tour made peace on Tuesday with its sworn enemy. The American tour
with both with both the PIF and the European Tour to form a unified global center for the elite of the elite players.It looks more like a merger than an acquisition of one by the other. The parties will stop suing each other, as they’ve been doing for the better part of the past year. The PGA Tour’s nominally nonprofit arm will keep running the tournaments it puts on now, and the tour will have a controlling voting interest on its new postwar council with the PIF.
Viewed only through the lens of making golf tournaments more entertaining, a LIV–PGA Tour–European Tour trio is good news. For 50-some years, the best men’s golfers in the world got together not just at the four major championships but for several other tournaments on the PGA Tour calendar. When LIV cannonballed in, it diluted golf’s talent pool.