How a Deal to Shape Golf’s Future Went Cold-OxBig News Network

Just months ago, professional golf seemed to be on the brink of resolving a bitter conflict that had torn the sport apart. The PGA Tour and Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, rival leagues that had been feuding over stars and audience share for several years, finally submitted a proposal for a deal to the Justice Department.

Golf executives hoped President Trump would help move things along — and the president was confident he could.

“I could probably get it done,” Trump said on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Bill Belichick and Jim Gray in November. “I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done.”

But it is taking a lot longer.

As the Masters Tournament teed off this week at Augusta National, the negotiation has essentially come to a standstill, three people familiar with the talks said.

Despite Trump’s personal interventions — in February, for example, he hosted Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the chairman of LIV and the governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, at the White House — the two sides appear at their greatest extremes since June 2023, when they stunned the sports world by announcing a thinly sketched deal that would bring an end to acrimonious litigation.

“I don’t think it’s ever felt that close,” Rory McIlroy, the golfer from Northern Ireland, told reporters last week of those February meetings. “But it doesn’t feel like it’s any closer.”

In the months before those Oval Office meetings, the two sides had hammered out a tentative agreement for the Saudis to pool $1.5 billion in a new commercial arm, alongside a band of new U.S. investors. That deal answered some competitive concerns, but left several business questions unresolved.

Namely, that the agreement would have left LIV intact as a stand-alone circuit, even as golf executives and fans alike remain unconvinced the market for the sport is large enough to support two competing tours. For those on the PGA Tour, there was the nagging issue that LIV’s approach has been burning cash.

Trump’s victory in the presidential election changed the calculus. The two sides expected his Justice Department would be more lenient toward a consolidation, and during the February meeting at the White House, the PGA Tour proposed a new deal to absorb its rival golf league, while integrating aspects of LIV Golf. The PGA Tour would give the Saudis a $500 million credit on their $1.5 billion investment, effectively the value it pegged to LIV.

The hope was that Trump might give the final nudge to make that all happen. Like many golf fans, Trump may be less interested in the dollars and cents of any deal than he is having the world’s top players competing against each other more regularly. (The Masters is one of the few tournaments that includes both PGA Tour and LIV players.)

And he likely wouldn’t mind being known as the deal maker who brought it all together.

“The president, he can do a lot of things,” McIlroy said shortly after that meeting. “He has direct access to Yasir’s boss.”

But the Saudis balked. They preferred instead to stick with the deal to invest in the commercial arm and keep LIV alive — no matter how much money it was losing. And in recent weeks, the PGA Tour formally rejected that offer, two people familiar with the deal said. The Tour told the Saudis it wanted to focus on a true merger, now that the regulatory backdrop might allow it. The Guardian first reported the Tour’s rebuff.

In wake of the seeming collapse of the talks, Greg Norman, LIV’s recently departed former chief executive, riffed about how the word “merger” had been tossed around. “I don’t even know what the right word is,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. But, he added, “As far as I know from my boss at the time, it was never going to be a merger. LIV was always going to be a stand-alone.”

Preserving the future of LIV is personal for al-Rumayyan, a golf fanatic who has steeped himself in the small details of the circuit.

“I can only go on what he says in our meetings,” Norman said, “that LIV is a stand-alone, and LIV will be around long after he’s dead, and he’s not planning on dying soon.”

The two sides maintain that a deal is not officially off the table. And naturally, each contends they have the upper hands in negotiations.

LIV, with its seemingly unlimited budget, may once again go after PGA Tour players.

And Tour executives have crowed about how ratings for a recent quotidian PGA Tour tournament in Texas — which many stars had skipped in order to prepare for the Masters — blew away those for a LIV tournament at Trump’s property in Doral, Fla.

They also do not feel as if they particularly need the cash. The Tour has yet to spend much of the $1.5 billion from a band of big-name American investors last year, as it looked to strengthen its hand in negotiations with the Saudis.

Trump, for his part, remains confident that a deal will close — and that someone will surrender.

“Ultimately, hopefully the two tours are going to merge,” Trump said earlier this month. “That’ll be good. I’m involved in that, too.”

But unless he, the PGA Tour and the Saudis can find their way to a deal, this weekend will be one of the only times this year that players from both circuits will be on the fairways together.

Alan Blinder contributed reporting.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

A key business trade group considers suing to block Trump tariffs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, is weighing whether to take the Trump administration to court to forestall the levies, Fortune reported. It’s the latest effort to use the judiciary to fight the tariffs. The Trump administration has already been sued by a nonprofit over how it imposed new duties on Chinese imports, and Republican members of Congress have called on fellow lawmakers to reassert their authority over tariffs.

Law firms continued to be divided over whether to settle with or fight President Trump. Four prominent firms — Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett — each agreed to contribute $125 million worth of pro bono work to causes Trump backs. A fifth firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, agreed to provide at least $100 million in pro bono work. Other firms, such as Jenner & Block and WilmerHale, asked federal judges to permanently reject Trump’s executive orders seeking to impose steep restrictions on their business.

Elizabeth Warren called for a probe into whether President Trump violated securities laws. The Massachusetts Democrat sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday, asking the agency to investigate if Trump broke the law by giving certain officials or friends advance notice of his policy reversal on global tariffs. Trump’s erratic moves led to “significant market turmoil,” she wrote. It’s far from certain the agency will trigger an investigation but other Democrats have called for greater scrutiny. Senator Chuck Schumer signed Warren’s letter and Representative Maxine Waters sent a letter to the S.E.C. and the Government Accountability Office also requesting an investigation.

The great decoupling gains speed

Trump reversed course on his broad slate of reciprocal tariffs, but left in place a quickly escalating trade war with China that could be even more disruptive to the global economy.

Tariffs on Beijing stand at a minimum of 145 percent, while China has raised levies on U.S. exports to 125 percent. The escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies threatens to put nearly $600 billion of commerce at a standstill.

To better understand the consequences of the standoff between Trump and Xi Jinping of China, DealBook talked with Teddy Bunzel, the head of Lazard Geopolitical Advisory. The interview has been edited and condensed.

U.S. businesses already knew being in China was a risk. How have the last two weeks changed what they’re actually doing?

Even clients that have been preparing for a long run de-risking from China were caught off guard.

The tariffs have moved so quickly back and forth. Both sides, Washington and Beijing, are indicating in their own ways that they’re open to having a deal. So in the long-term, no one is going to completely reorient their operations based on what’s happening over the last week.

In the short term, a lot of companies have already stockpiled goods in anticipation of trade tensions. They’re probably burning through their stockpiles right now. Some companies that have been taking this risk seriously have diversified manufacturing operations and suppliers away from China, so that they’re not as single-sourced. And so now we’re putting that whole system to the test.

Where do you think there is room between Trump and Xi for negotiation?

One of the areas that Xi may be focused on, and Trump less so, is around technology competition and a lot of the export controls and other restrictions that the United States has steadily put in over the last four or five years. Part of what I would assume Beijing wants is for a loosening of some of those restrictions.

For Trump, it seems to really be about reducing the bilateral trade deficit, bringing more production back to the United States and also having China buy more U.S. goods. He has also talked about Chinese investment into the United States, which puts him at odds with probably a lot of folks in his administration and also on Capitol Hill. But that does seem to be something that Trump is interested in as well, and Xi might be interested in, too.

Does it complicate things that Trump has also attacked potential allies against China? Could he have built a coalition first?

It certainly complicated the strategy of trying to align with allies and partners in a united front. I think Scott Bessent has said that part of the goal is to work with allies now to focus on trade dynamics with China. And that would be the optimal strategy. In fact, there was probably a moment at the beginning of the Trump administration when Europe was hoping to head off any sort of trade frictions and duties and was trying to strike a preliminary understanding and agreement with the U.S. where some of those issues may have been on the table, right? Thinking about coordinating export controls and other trade measures vis-à-vis China. But now it’s more complicated because of the way that Trump and his team have gone about the sequencing here: first raising duties on Canada and Mexico, and then raising duties on the rest of the world.

What are the worst and best case scenarios for U.S. business interests?

The bear case would be that no deals are struck over the coming 90 days, and 90 days from now we revert to the reciprocal tariff regime on a country-by-country basis, and these elevated rates on China remain in place. It’s also important to remember U.S. multinational sales in China are three times the size of total U.S. exports to China. So that is a significant amount of economic leverage that China has. It has not yet been deployed, at least in this spat.

The best case scenario would probably be if Congress reasserts its authority over trade through some of the bills that are kicking around on Capitol Hill. I think that’s a very unlikely outcome, except in an extreme scenario.

Are there second order impacts that aren’t getting enough attention?

Given that China is so dependent upon exports for its growth, those goods are going to have to go somewhere. And you couple that with the potential for a devaluation of the RMB in response to these trade tensions. And that means you have more Chinese goods flooding other countries. The currency is cheaper, so those goods are cheaper, and that’s going to fuel incremental trade tensions with other partners. Europe’s already mentioned that it’s on guard for trade diversion and challenges around overcapacity from China as a result of the U.S. trade war with China, but the emerging world will also be hit with a wave of Chinese exports.

And actually, if you look over the past few years, the majority of trade defense actions against China have actually been instituted by emerging markets rather than developed markets. Places like Brazil, India, Mexico.

DEALBOOK WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

Have the tariffs affected your business? We’d like to know how you’re managing the new levies. Have you changed suppliers? Negotiated lower prices? Paused investments or hiring? Made plans to move manufacturing to the U. S.? Please let us know what you’re doing.

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