The Riverside Press-Enterprise
LIV'S al-rumayyan, PGA'S Monahan make strange bedfellows
After more than a year of high-stakes jockeying and long-distance accusations, Jay Monahan and Yasir alrumayyan finally met in May, an arranged blind date in some Venice cafe or hotel.
Now the oddest of bedfellows will attempt to remake the future of professional golf and repair the damage done by a yearlong civil war they had once waged against each other.
The 53-year-olds in charge could not be more different: Monahan, the American commissioner of the PGA Tour since 2017, and al-rumayyan, the trusted confidant of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and overseer of his country’s massive Public Investment Fund.
It is that fund, claiming to be worth somewhere close to $700 billion, that bought its way into golf on June 6. It ended a sniping, court-complicated fight between the PGA’S American and European tours and the Saudibacked LIV Golf tour. It instantly solved the PGA Tour’s financial struggles.
Now al-rumayyan will be chair of this entity. Monahan will be his CEO. And among the many complex questions this raises is one of internal logistics. How will this unlikely duo manage — manage the game of golf, both on the course and off it, and manage to get along?
“Money can change everything,” legendary golfer Gary Player said in an email exchange. “And all we can do now is hope the outcome moving forward is positive for all.”
Monahan has deep New England roots and a background in sports marketing. His leadership style is as hushed as a golf crowd awaiting a winning putt.
“I enjoy all forms of human interaction,” he told Golf Digest in 2017. “Talking with people, listening to them, often just observing them. Even unpleasant people, I enjoy discovering what makes them tick. It’s sort of a requirement of the job I’m in now because the range of people is so broad, their situations so dynamic. Their needs and goals can be material, but it’s the human interaction
that gets us there.”
Al-rumayyan, the cashcarrying disrupter with a deep passion for golf, is a stern test for Monahan’s people skills. Certainly his “needs and goals” are material.
While al-rumayyan will hold just one of the (now) 11 seats on the PGA Tour board of directors, he and the wealth fund have the exclusive right to invest in the new entity. That means they control the finances, and they plan to pump in billions of dollars.
In his only public appearance since the merger was announced last week, a televised consummation on CNBC where the two sat chummily side by side, alrumayyan
said he would let Monahan lead the operation.
The “voting system” and the majority of the board, he noted, “is not going to be with us.”
But al-rumayyan’s very presence — and the deal itself, for now only a framework that could take months to formalize — is a heavy reminder that money can trump it all.
“The Saudis will want to dominate this,” said James M. Dorsey, adjunct senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School for International Studies in Singapore. “They don’t like to play second fiddle. And they believe, not without reason, that money talks.”
What kind of takeover leader al-rumayyan will become is unclear. His PIF portfolio is massive, and he chairs dozens of state-owned firms, including the oil giant Saudi Aramco and the mining firm Ma’aden. He largely lets executive teams run them as they see fit.
But the relationship with Newcastle United, the English soccer team, might provide the best clues for golf.
The PIF bought an 80% share of Newcastle United in 2021. Fans of the English club immediately welcomed the ownership change, as the prospect of on-field success overrode hard questions. Infused with PIF money, doled out by al-rumayyan, Newcastle has surged toward the top of the English Premier League.
At Newcastle, he has left day-to-day decisions to others, though he has quickly approved expenditures for talent upgrades and has not been invisible.
Most do not expect al-rumayyan to be an overtly public presence in golf or a familiar figure around the trophy ceremonies. Part of it is his portfolio; he has plenty of other business responsibilities. “How much time does he have to allocate?” Dorsey said. “This is a man at the top of an empire. He oversees a vast array of things. I think you’ll see a lot of his lieutenants and not a lot of him, at least once this settles down.”
Part of it is Saudi culture; he has to “walk a fine line,” according to Kristian Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, given the autocratic leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed.
“If you seem to be too big, and you seem to be Mr. Saudi Arabia, bin Salman doesn’t take well to people stepping on his toes,” Ulrichsen said. “But we’ve also seen that alrumayyan is probably the most trusted and most competent member of his inner circle.”
Continued human rights violations and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, on orders, the CIA has said, from Crown Prince Mohammed, have made the Saudis global pariahs.
But under al-rumayyan’s direction, the investment fund grew exponentially.