LIV players suing PGA Tour
“Despite the PGA Tour’s effort to stifle competition, we think golfers should be allowed to play golf.”
LIV Golf statement
Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and nine other players who defected to the Saudi-funded LIV Golf on Wednesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, the first step in a legal fight that could define the boundaries of where players can compete.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, claims the PGA Tour has used monopoly power to try to squash competition and has unfairly suspended players.
A separate motion was filed asking for a temporary restraining order to allow LIV Golf members Talor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford to play in the FedEx Cup playoffs — the PGA Tour’s postseason — when they begin next week.
The lawsuit also revealed that PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan suspended Mickelson for two months in March for his role in recruiting players to LIV Golf. It said Mickelson’s request in June to be reinstated was denied because he played in an LIV Golf event and that he was suspended until March 2024 for playing in another one.
Monahan responded to the lawsuit with a terse memo to his players in which he referred to “11 of your former colleagues” suing the tour and continued to refer to LIV Golf as the “Saudi Golf League.”
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is the primary source of the money paying exorbitant signing bonuses and providing $25 million purses for 48-man fields. Several players are in their 40s and no longer ranked among the top 50 in the world.
Monahan said players knew the consequences of signing with the rival league.
“We have been preparing to protect our membership and contest this latest attempt to disrupt our tour, and you should be confident in the legal merits of our position,” Monahan wrote. “Fundamentally, these suspended players — who are now Saudi Golf League employees — have walked away from the tour and now want back in. It’s an attempt to use the tour platform to promote themselves and to freeride on your benefits and efforts.”
LIV Golf said in a statement: “The players are right to have brought this action to challenge the PGA’s anti-competitive rules and to vindicate their rights as independent contractors to play where and when they choose. Despite the PGA Tour’s effort to stifle competition, we think golfers should be allowed to play golf.”
The PGA Tour denied releases for players to compete in LIV events and suspended them as soon as they put a ball in play. Some players, like Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed and Sergio Garcia, chose to resign their PGA Tour membership. LPGA Tour: The Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews, Scotland, announced that the purse for the Women’s British Open, which starts Thursday, will be $7.3 million — more than double what it was five years ago — with the winner getting $1,095,000.
That means four of the five majors on the LPGA Tour will award a seven-figure payoff to the champion. The exception was the Chevron Championship in Rancho Mirage (Riverside County), which already has plans to boost its prize money next year as part of its new sponsorship and relocation to Texas.
“I think 2016, it was an important time for this sport and for the R&A,” Martin Slumbers, the R&A’s chief executive, said. “We had been working very hard on a strategy for the R&A that had inclusivity very much as a part of it.
“I think that when you think back over that six-year period since then, women’s golf has really exploded, and it’s got a long way to go yet. But I do think that that time will be viewed as pivotal in that change.”