Tour officials will appear before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for a first hearing on the agreement between the Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund—a pact between bitter enemies that shocked the golf world and quickly drew the ire of Capitol Hill.
The hearing arrives at another moment of internal tumult for the Tour because of rancor over that stunning deal. They’ll be testifying little more than 36 hours after Tour policy board member Randall Stephenson said he was resigning over the deal, while specifically citing the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.
Stephenson, the former chief executive of AT&T, also complained that the deal had been reached without input from the board. His departure was first reported by the Washington Post.
Lawmakers are set to grill the PGA Tour’s chief operating officer Ron Price, after PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan took a leave of absence to address an unspecified “medical situation” shortly after he announced the deal. Monahan said Friday that he would be returning to work July 17—six days after the hearing.
Jimmy Dunne, a PGA Tour board member who was one of the deal-brokers, will also testify.
The committee’s chairman, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, indicated, in an interview ahead of the hearing, that it’s likely to be a rough outing. “They betrayed the people and institutions that supported them,” he said of the Tour, pointing to players who rejected LIV Golf’s overtures, families of Sept. 11 victims that rallied against the upstart circuit—and public officials.
“The American people want us to uncover the facts about this foreign government taking charge of a cherished American sports institution,” Blumenthal added. The Saudi government, he said, is “taking over not a team, but the entire sport, so the stakes are real.”
If the concerns flagged by senators sound familiar, that’s because they are: The same rhetoric the PGA Tour used to bash LIV and its Saudi money has already echoed around the halls of Congress to assail the Tour’s decision to partner with the Saudis—just as LIV’s antitrust rhetoric against the PGA Tour left a trail of land mines for the deal.
A person familiar with the Tour’s thinking said Price and Dunne are likely to say that the rollout of the deal lacked transparency and clarity, but that explaining it before Congress is part of an effort to assuage concerns about the Saudi involvement and show that the Tour’s leaders remain in control of the game of golf.
The Senate probe is one of the numerous political hurdles the agreement will have to clear as the parties look to move beyond their broad initial pact to something firmer. A final deal between the two sides will also be investigated by the Justice Department, which was already investigating the PGA Tour and other powerful golf bodies for potential anticompetitive behavior, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. Lawmakers also have the ability to make life difficult for the Tour, going after its tax-exempt status, just as they had raised unpleasant questions for LIV about whether its work constituted that of a foreign agent.
LIV and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund won’t be at Tuesday’s hearing. The committee had invited LIV’s chief executive Greg Norman, and the fund’s governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, but neither will be in attendance due to what the subcommittee called scheduling conflicts.
LIV offered to send another executive but it wasn’t keen on sending Norman, who was scheduled to be out of the country, knowing that Monahan wouldn’t be attending, a person familiar with LIV’s position said.
The subcommittee has subpoena power and Blumenthal and the top Republican on the panel, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, have said they plan “to find a mutually agreeable date for them to appear in the very near future.”
The Tour’s Price and Dunne, meanwhile, will likely have to answer for Monahan on an array of areas.
Shortly before his departure, Monahan responded to antitrust concerns by saying that the deal would benefit everyone in the industry—but then, hours later, told reporters that it would be good for the Tour “to take the competitor off of the board, to have them exist as a partner, not an owner.” It was a remark that quickly set off alarm bells for antitrust lawyers.
More broadly, the Tour’s anti-LIV talking points are already being used to question the body’s about face. The victims of 9/11 families, who staunchly backed the Tour’s fight against LIV, have been vocal in their criticisms of the pact. Monahan, a year ago, called LIV a “foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in an attempt to buy the game of golf.”
“I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite,” he said after the new deal was announced. “I accept those criticisms.”
Monahan had told employees before his departure that the Tour had agreed to the Saudi partnership because it couldn’t afford to continue battling them—in the courts or in the game—over the long run. “I understand all the human rights concerns. I’ve had them myself,” he said.
But in the deal’s aftermath, Monahan didn’t exactly make new friends on the Hill. Shortly before his leave of absence, Monahan wrote a letter to lawmakers in which he indicated Congress shared some blame for the deal. The Tour, he wrote, had been left largely on its own to fend off the Saudis.
When Congress gets involved in professional sports, it can have a flair of theatrics. But all it takes is recent history to understand how these types of inquiries can land damaging punches.
The recent investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform of the workplace culture of the Washington Commanders football team—and the NFL’s response—resulted in additional allegations of sexual misconduct and financial improprieties.
The team and its owner Dan Snyder broadly denied wrongdoing, and have settled the financial allegations in the District of Columbia, though other areas are still being fought in the courts. Snyder is now on the brink of a deal to sell the team—while avoiding even giving public testimony to the committee.
League commissioner Roger Goodell, meanwhile, did testify—and was pummeled over several hours.
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