There’s an old saying that’s especially apt in the wake of Tuesday’s news that the PGA Tour and LIV Golf have settled, a purportedly “stunning” announcement.
It’s stunning only if you believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or unicorns.
Because, as ever, money talks and BS walks.
Here’s the saying:
When you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. When you have the law on your side, argue the law. When you have neither, holler.
Phil Mickelson hits from the bunker to the ninth green during Day One of last month’s LIV Golf Invitational - DC // Rob Carr/Getty Images
People, there are two parties that were especially not smart in this matter.
One: those PGA Tour pros that didn’t jump and take the tens or hundreds of millions in LIV cash, purportedly out of “morality.” Anyone who know the least bit of history in the ways of these sorts of sports mergers – AFL-NFL, ABA-NBA – could have predicted that the lawsuit at the root of this thing was going to settle, and sooner than later.
The pros are independent contractors. Each one wasn’t looking out for himself and his family, especially with millions that meant generational wealth – because?
Two, almost every single sportswriter, journalist or analyst in North America who not only vouched for the PGA Tour but aggressively took its side, either because he or she bought the “morality” tune or because he or she doesn’t understand the first thing about finance or about the law, in particular the way the monopoly rules work in the United States of America.
It’s been hilarious to read sportswriters suggesting that some big-time golf pro ought to be turning down a $125 million or $200 million deal for the chance to miss a cut. As if. This from the perch in a business – journalism – that is contracting like crazy.
Moreover, the law and legal process scares the bejesus out of most sportswriters and journalists. Most couldn’t tell you the first thing about the Bill of Rights – much less the Sherman Act, which controls monopolies.
It’s possible, always possible, that the “framework agreement” announced Tuesday could collapse. But since money talks, and there’s a lot of money out there to see that ultimately this deal gets done, you have to like the odds of a “definitive agreement” finally making it to ratification. A separate Department of Justice antitrust inquiry? That has to do with allegations of past PGA conduct. Let’s leave that for another day.
Let’s make this easy:
The case at hand was filed in federal court in San Francisco. The first clue that LIV Golf might have been on to something was that its lawyers retained a guy named John Quinn, who is based in Los Angeles. Before I went back to covering sports in 1998, I wrote for several years for the Los Angeles Times about the courts and the law in Southern California. For what it’s worth, I am a licensed – inactive – member of the State Bar of California. I have known Quinn for some 30 years. He is unquestionably one of the smartest, most formidable lawyers in the 50 states. You hire him when you’re confident you have the goods.
The argument that LIV Golf put on is straightforward and compelling. From the core legal filing:
Formed in the 1960s, the PGA Tour “evolved into an entrenched monopolist with a vice grip on professional golf.”
Over the past 60 years, as its monopoly power grew – that is, without any significant competitors – it used its “dominance” to “craft an arsenal of anticompetitive restraints” – that’s legalese – to protect its monopoly.
How? Via an “intentional and relentless effort to crush any nascent competition …”
This next part explains everything, and in the filing itself is one block paragraph. It’s broken apart here for ease of reading:
1/ “ Members of the Tour receive a substantially lower percentage of the tour’s revenues than professional athletes in other major sports, even though the tour is a tax-exempt non-profit organization and other major sports leagues are for-profit enterprises.
Harold Varner III with his trophy for winning the LIV Golf Invitational - DC. How much was the victory worth? $4 million // Rob Carr/Getty Images
2/ “This control has also given the Tour the power to impose restrictions on players – who are independent contractors but are denied independence by the Tour – that make it risky and costly for players to affiliate with another promoter and prohibitively difficult for any would-be entrant to challenge the Tour’s monopoly.
3/ “And in its response to LIV Golf’s competitive challenge, the Tour has exercised this power by punishing the players to choke off the supply of elite professional golfers – an essential input to LIV Golf’s competitive challenge – and cement its dominance over the sport. The Tour’s monopoly has also allowed it to preside over the demise of golf itself, by its failure to innovate and broaden the game’s appeal and bring the game into the 21st century.”
In response, what did the Tour say?
Holler!
“LIV is not a rational economic actor, competing fairly to start a golf tour. It is prepared to lose billions of dollars to leverage Plaintiffs and the sport of golf to ‘sportwash’ the Saudi government’s deplorable reputation for human rights abuses.”
And:
“LIV is the most recent example of ‘sportwashing,’ a strategy by the Saudi government to use sports in an effort to improve its reputation for human rights abuses and other atrocities.”
The settlement Wednesday completely belies the notion that LIV is not a rational economic actor. A rational observer would also reasonably conclude there’s something worth exploring at some depth in the allegations in the lawsuit about the Tour and monopoly. Otherwise, why settle?
As for “sportwashing” – please.
We in the United States have a perspective on the world, rooted in our notion of exceptionalism, that borders on the absurd. Too, we permit ourselves a ridiculously short collective memory. Others do not. Before we proclaim ourselves the mansion on the hill:
Who, under false pretenses, invaded Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars, provoking untold misery? Who invaded Afghanistan, spending more than $2 trillion over 20 years, only to pull out suddenly and leave millions of Afghan girls and women to the fate of the Taliban? Defend the morality in that. Human rights? Hello? Who has held detainees at Guantanamo for more than 20 years without due process under law – the very thing at the core of our Constitution? It’s widely acknowledged that prisoners at Guantanamo have been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In plain English, we would call that torture. That is state-associated human rights abuse.
In one of his most recent Substack posts, the veteran reporter Seymour Hersh writes that one Guantanamo detainee was tortured this way: CIA officers “put a sack over his head and filled it with fire ants and watched him turn into a vegetable.” Hersh also reported that the CIA’s inspector general had conducted an “official inquiry” and found “nothing happened.”
We are willfully blind to any manner of things right in front of us. We don’t want to acknowledge our own human rights abuses – instead, we would rather take aim at others for theirs. Who wants to visit the inside of the LA County Jail? The DC jail? Who wants to walk the homeless encampments of downtown Los Angeles?
Unlike other nations, we don’t have a federal ministry of sport. All the same, we do an amazing job of “sportwashing” our own abuses – or what do you call the B-1 or B-2 bombers over a given year’s Rose Bowl? The jets, including the F/A-18, that flew over this year’s Super Bowl?
No one in what International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach calls this “fragile” world owns moral superiority. No one.
We are all grievously imperfect. Each and all of us. People. Institutions. Nations.
Keep in mind that golf is now an Olympic sport. The Saudi influence signals the emergence of the new power bloc in international sport – the Global South and East, ready this century to challenge the West for supremacy. Saudi Arabia will stage the Winter Asian Games in 2029. How? Money talks. It almost surely will be looking to stage the Summer Olympic Games in the next 20 to 30 years. Prediction: it will do so. How? You know how.
In April, I wrote this exact same affirmation – money talks – when the women’s tennis tour, the WTA, announced it was heading back to China, ending the boycott linked to concerns over former player Peng Shuai.
What about the moral high ground? The WTA acknowledged: money talks. What about all the Western, particularly American, journalists who made such noise before and during the Beijing Olympics? What’s that? Money talks.
Same deal here.
That a bunch of professional golfers who need ice in their veins when it comes to making a seven-foot putt on the 72nd hole couldn’t see that, or didn’t want to see that – that’s not just incredible. It’s incredulous.
Same goes when it comes to reporting, writing and broadcasting about golf instead of tennis. Journalism is not about rooting. A lot of money talks very loudly. This, in our world, is the cold, hard truth.