Open secret around Hoylake that the PGA and LIV prenup is in rough shape

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The British Open is a fabled, storied tournament; golf’s ultimate examination. It’s obvious to remark that a tournament that’s already been conducted 150 times, is old. The Open matters; it’s important. But the simmering enmity which abounds around Hoylake, where this week’s tournament is being played, almost infects the air.

Is professional golf worse off now compared to a year ago? Then there was speculation whether Cameron Smith would defect to the rebel LIV tour, when instead golf fans should’ve been celebrating him as the Open champion in its sesquicentennial event.

A visit to the practice range is instructive. It’s plain that the schism in professional golf this past year will require much of substance to repair. Much more than a cursory and fundamentally non-binding settlement agreement.

Greg Norman, who hoisted aloft the Claret Jug on two occasions, remains as unifying as kryptonite as far as the traditionalists are concerned. He’s nowhere to be seen.

The PGA Tour’s talisman, Rory McIlroy, has steadfastly and absolutely said he’ll retire before playing in any LIV events. You can hardly blame him, he remained loyal to the PGA Tour and eschewed the opportunity to be paid an incalculable amount of Saudi petrodollars, primarily on matters of principle. It’s conceivable he’ll at some point be forced to take the same money, albeit in a different way.

Add in the febrile tumult which subsists between some of the LIV defectors (present at Hoylake and inhabiting the practice range, notwithstanding their limited automatic qualifying opportunities) and PGA Tour loyalists.

Rory McIlroy hits out of a bunker on the 18th hole during his first round at Hoylake.Credit: Getty

Almost two months has now elapsed since it was surprisingly announced that the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour had come to terms with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund for the overall purpose of reunifying the world professional golf. What was heralded as a defining entente has since been revealed as a settlement agreement devoid of actual reasons to have confidence in whatever the deal that’s been struck.

At the core, there are at least three factors that give the tendency to conclude that what was announced in early June by the PGA Tour and the PIF in actuality isn’t much more than a false dawn. It’s certain that professional golf is greatly more troubled now than the last time the Open was contested.

Firstly, and for absolute clarity, professional golf doesn’t need the involvement of the PIF or the seas of wealth to which it enjoys unfettered access. Golf never needed the Saudis; professional golf was not in terrible shape before the Saudi sovereign wealth fund conjured a scheme for the House of Saud to become involved in a sport, with which it has no history.

In the blunter vernacular, the “framework agreement” executed by representatives of the PGA Tour, the PIF and the DP World Tour epitomises a prenuptial agreement executed by two people entering into an emotionless, forced marriage. The PIF has all the money in the world and yet all that money can’t buy love.

Jon Rahm tees off on the 15th hole in front of a huge opening-round crowd at the Open.Credit: Getty

The second issue though is that a proper, legal examination of the framework agreement struck leads one to deduce that if the proverbial emperor actually has any clothes, they’ve not been removed from the wardrobe. For the agreement, and proclaimed as the Peace In Our Time instrument, ain’t really worth the paper it’s written on in any legal sense.

Almost nothing of substance in the five-page document is a contract of any legally-binding effect. The preamble to the document plainly records that nothing much in it is legally concrete.

The framework agreement isn’t of any enforceable effect, apart from the clauses (a) governing the making of a joint press release announcing the agreement; (b) governing how the binding parts of the document can be terminated down the track; and (c) the settlement of multiple sets of horrendously expensive legal proceedings; and (d) the promise to not poach each other’s players pending the finalisation of proper and watertight legal agreements.

There’s nothing in the framework agreement which any party could litigate on if another of the parties walked away from the negotiating table. It’s written in the framework agreement, but on an entirely non-binding basis, that there’ll be a unification of golf’s warring factions. That statement presently cannot hold water.

It’s also not binding as to who’ll be chairman of the board and who’ll run the show. It’s not binding as to what amount the PIF will invest in professional golf worldwide or what stake the Saudis will forever have, and it’s not written down as to what happens if the House of Saud suddenly loses interest in the whole idea of professional golf. How the game’s players are meant to be meaningfully reunified is anyone’s guess.

Which then brings us to the third issue. The US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is presently conducting hearings into this proposed union. The documentary data dump, released on its website, reveals the US government harbours serious concerns about the proposed Saudi investment in and involvement in the PGA Tour.

The US Justice Department has raised further concerns about the anticompetitive nature of the proposed arrangements, such that all parties to the framework agreement have now abandoned their contractual promises (one of the few, which was binding) to not steal each other’s players.

The Justice Department’s examination centres on whether the framework agreement is pro-competition or whether it’s representative of the archetypal elimination of a competitive threat.

The correct view is that the whole concept of the PIF abandoning the LIV Golf concept to instead fold LIV into the PGA Tour and take an investment stake in it is manifestly anticompetitive. And if that’s a correct assessment, then professional golf is nowhere near achieving its Entente Cordiale.

Standing here this week at Hoylake, there’s much to be fascinated by at this grandest of tournaments. Yet you wonder whether all that’s excellent is a hair-trigger away from being wrecked. Golf exists presently in curious and dangerous times.

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