A PGA Tour delegation of Tiger Woods, Australia’s Adam Scott and commissioner Jay Monahan are meeting US President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday afternoon (Friday morning, AEDT), according to sources.
Golf Digest has confirmed what was first reported by Bunkered.co.uk, that Monahan, along with a few other PGA Tour “team members”, has been in attendance at the Future Investment Initiative (FII), an annual conference run by the PIF in Riyadh.
At the moment, it seems negotiations between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are enmeshed in anti-trust regulation hell, forcing a harrowing holding pattern in which all of golf’s lawyers and all the kingdom’s men can’t seem to put what’s left of the tour back together again.
Exactly what was being said between the two main protagonists in their many private moments will remain something of a mystery. Neither man had anything to say publicly at the conclusion of their rounds.
[PHOTO: Ross Parker – SNS Group] Rory McIlroy wanted nothing to do with speaking to the written press on the eve of the DP World Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. But the Belfast lad did give a two-and-a-half-minute interview to BBC Northern Ireland on the subject of, you guessed it, the symbolism of the men Read more…
The two men who were the architects of the now infamous June 6 framework agreement from last year will be playing golf in the same grouping, in public, on television, on one of the most recognisable golf courses in the world.
Though the incontrovertible takeaway from the past two years in professional golf is that no one knows anything, at least for certain, we’ve spent much of this week at TPC Sawgrass gathering intel on the status of the deal.
In a performance that was alternately confident and cautious, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan spoke in front of the gathered media for the first time since last August at the Tour Championship.
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the de facto head of LIV Golf, has been accused of “having carried out the instructions” of Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman with “malicious intent” according to a lawsuit filed in Canada.
Monahan spoke at the New York Times DealBook Summit, covering a number of topics from the tumultuous past year that included the continued threat of losing players to LIV Golf, the tour’s surprise framework agreement with PIF in negotiations unknown to the players, and the subsequent leave of absence Monahan took to address his own mental health issues.
Australian Golf Digest
