No coincidence about it, I’m sure, I just don’t think, “You didn’t prosecute me for breaking this law three years ago!” actually works as a defense.
It’s an open question if the PGA Tour was a monopoly before. The PGA Tour is what’s possibly merging with LIV, and that is separate from the PGA of America, which runs the PGA Championship. Augusta National Golf Club organizes the Masters, and there are other smaller tours as well.
But this merger is explicitly to remove competition, so it opens things up to scrutiny that wasn’t on the PGA Tour previously. And the merger would form a new company, and part of the terms of the agreement are that the Saudi wealth fund would have exclusive rights to invest in the new company. That could cause issues.
And the USGA operates the U.S. Open, as well.
I think this is it from my limited knowledge of antitrust law. This merger is specifically designed to be an anticompetitive act. What about previous mergers like the AFL-NFL? That required a specific exemption to antitrust law by Congress.
From the article ten posts up:
“We were competing against LIV,” [PGA Tour Commissioner Jay] Monahan [said] after the deal was announced. The merger, he explained, was a way “to take the competitor off the board, to have them exist as a partner.”
That’s a very understandable reason to do a deal. In this case, it’s also most likely an illegal one.
The most basic principle of antitrust law is that companies with large market share can’t make agreements to avoid competing against each other. It is very difficult to characterize the PGA-LIV merger in any other way. The antitrust suit originally filed last year by a group of LIV players [alleged] that without “any meaningful competition (prior to LIV Golf’s entry), the Tour has failed to innovate and its product has grown stale.” The PGA Tour, they argued, “has used its monopoly position to extract substantially increased revenues from broadcasters and advertisers” while paying players less “because there is no competition for players’ services.”
LIV Golf eventually joined its golfers as a plaintiff in this very lawsuit. To now claim that a combined PGA-LIV entity is something less than a monopoly would lack any semblance of credibility. The merger would leave just a single, dominant association controlling almost the entire world of professional golf. Even if the PGA Tour was not a monopoly before the proposed merger, the new entity certainly would create one.
So the US Open starts today. I wouldn’t watch anyway other than pausing briefly if I pass a TV that has it on, but I’d typically keep an eye on the leaderboard and read the daily summaries about who passed what feminine hygiene product to which golfer.
But I’m not sure how much mindspace I should give the event this year, and how much guilt I should feel if I follow it. Is it only PGA-sponsored events that are bad, or is all of golf tainted by this mess? I personally lean toward the latter, but am interested in hearing others’ opinions.
Quoting myself rather than typing it again - I think all of golf is tainted, but I won’t lose much sleep about still watching/following non-PGA Tour events.
62, 62, 64…? Is this supposed to be a US Open?
But when I think about it, I’m impressed at how little I care about pro golf. In my yoth, I followed several sports. Then for the past couple of decades it was primarily just golf. Now, I’m very content to just read who is leading/who won in the paper.
How about Tiger Woods & Jack Nicklaus? Both were offered Top shelf amounts. Because of 9/ 11 I have hard feelings towards the Saudi’s, Then again everyone has a price and buy the PGA only pocket change for them.
That’s a valid opinion. I have harder feelings towards my own government for its reaction to 9/11, than to the Saudis. And if the Saudis are supposedly bad, well, why do we buy their oil and sell them F-16s? But that’s beyond this thread.
I’m clearly the exception, because Tiger is one reason I lost interest in the tour. I really dislike the excessive attention he gets - tho I readily acknowledge his incredible skill, and his responsibility for raising the visibility - and income - of modern players.
Many rich people seem to have neverending greed. But my impression is that Tiger is making some token efforts lately to come across as less of an asshole than he used to be. If that is his intent, 'd suspect it is relatively easy for a billionaire to forego an extra couple hundred million if doing so will make him appear a respectable “elder statesman”.
I think the seeds of my disinterest began some time ago, when some pros griped about playing “for free” in the Ryder Cup, and then said they would not appear at the White House. Like almost all pro athletes, they are just after the money. Nothing more. Which is fine. But somehow lessened my interest.
The best thing to come out of golf, by a long salt, is Bryan Regan’s comedy bit about a caller who identifies a non-native bird call that the television show had added to the background noise for atmosphere.
Nitpick: only MLB is specifically exempt from antitrust law, and that is basically an accident of history.
I hope reviving this zombie is allowed. Speculation is that LIV is about to fold.
I didn’t see this thread the first time and so this looked like something that was happening in 2026. My first thought was “anti trust action would probably depend on how much money they can give to President Ineptstein.” Even before I read this post. Upon reading this I was about to post “at least this proposed merger isn’t a football league or the president would definitely have certain feelings on the matter.”
That seems like a very significant update, which the mods have said in the past is a very valid reason to reactivate a dormant thread.
[Moderating]
Yup, it’s significant new information, and it’s relevant to the topic of this thread.
One of the most reliable barometers of how popular something really is: any time there’s reports of serious trouble, how many shrieking denialist YouTube videos pop up in response. I found maybe two, which tells you all you need to know. This thing is cooked. If it isn’t reduced to a blast crater this year, it will the next.
I’ve seen this so many times, from the Goodwill Games to the XFL to all those dumb knockoff yandere games, and the lesson is always the same. Just because the fans have some issues with what they have now doesn’t mean that they’re going to embrace any alternative. You still need challenging courses, a variety of play styles, down-to-the-wire finishes, and, very important, new blood when the current stars get old and stale. Another thing is that while you might catch the big dog off guard and have them scrambling for a few weeks or months, eventually they’re going to settle down and mount a real challenge (possibly even confronting the issues which upset fans in the first place), and then it becomes quality vs. quality, which is death for you unless you’ve gotten your fanbase and course schedule and TV deals and rising stars squared away by then.
The 54-hole team format? A silly gimmick. No serious fan ever bought it. The same faces every time got old, and the last Masters resoundingly vaporized the myth of them being the best in the sport. Even if they wanted new blood, there’s no way they can offer a $70 million deal to every Korn Ferry Tour hopeful who’s looking for an easy promotion. There’s no prestige, no fame, nothing that can carry to any other tour, not even ranking points. It was like two years before I could even watch the matches on FS1. Removing any restrictions on noise or courtesy only attracts rude loudmouths who don’t have a lot to spend. From day one I saw nothing that hinted at even an attempt at long-term survival.
The plan was to spend tons and tons of money, draw away all of the PGA’s biggest stars, make them look old and incompetent, and eventually force them to deal, kinda like what WWE ended up doing to WCW. The problem was that whatever issues the PGA had, they still knew what fans cared about and how to run the business of golf. They still had the biggest events, the most prestigious venues, and the prettiest trophies. The game was never about one star (even at the peak of Tigermania it was never just him), so losing a handful of A-listers wasn’t catastrophic. Jay Monahan briefly entertained the idea of a merger, but get real, he wasn’t going to agree to it unless it made his league stronger; there was no way he’d give up concessions to this brazen upstart.
If only they woud’ve gotten rid of that “GEDDINDAHOOHH!!!” crap, I might feel a twinge of regret, but they couldn’t even do that much.
Ask Red Sox fans what comes to mind when they hear the words “full throttle”. 
LIV Golf seems like one of the projects that are part of “Saudi Vision 2030”, many of which are quite fanciful and ridiculously expensive. Consider The Line, for instance. A linear city that’s 660 feet wide, 1,600 feet tall and 110 miles long. It would have cost trillions but fortunately, it’s been cancelled.
@Dewey_Finn Why does that remind me of the road cities in Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll?