The PGA Tour responded Monday to an antitrust lawsuit filed final week by a bunch of 11 LIV Golf professionals, accusing the hoary previous group of partaking in anticompetitive conduct when it acted to exclude members of the Saudi-financed breakaway league from future Tour occasions. The grievance, filed August 3 within the U.S District Courtroom of Northern California, says that the PGA Tour is threatening each the livelihoods of LIV professionals and the success of “LIV Golf’s otherwise-promising launch,” and asks for an emergency injunction stopping the PGA Tour from excluding LIV professionals from the Tour’s annual season-capping playoff, scheduled this 12 months to start on August 11, in Memphis.
The PGA Tour’s response hypes its personal function in “driving media and sponsorship cash” into the game by permitting golf professionals “to pool their media rights,” and argues that it couldn’t perform on this approach with out a dedication from its members, who immediately profit from this association, “to not play in, and thereby contribute their media rights to, non-TOUR golf occasions held in North America that battle with PGA TOUR occasions.” As a famend knowledgeable on antitrust issues—thus far on this weblog I’ve spelled the phrase “antitrust” a number of occasions with none typos in any way—I’m tempted to bang the gavel and say the PGA Tour is being super-duper non-competitive right here, on the grounds that you simply can’t idiot me just by utilizing the phrase “battle” as a substitute of the phrase “compete” in your worker handbook. Nonetheless, as I’m not technically the assigned choose on this matter, I’ll defer to the Honorable Beth Labson Freeman, whose gavel-wielding abilities I’m sure by requirements {of professional} decorum to respect on the subject of parsing the antitrust what-have-yous of this lawsuit.
Authorized intricacies which I perceive tremendous properly however is not going to get into proper now however, the lawsuit does appear to have triggered a foolish and pleasant role-reversal among the many events. The 11 LIV gamers, who usually left the PGA Tour as a result of they had been lured by huge, unprecedented upfront funds and monetary ensures, now should argue that their livelihoods are being significantly threatened by actions that exclude them from a handful of occasions with complete purses price a fraction of what a few of them have already made in LIV Golf earnings. The implications, they are saying, could be “substantial and irreparable, and a short lived restraining order is required to forestall the irreparable hurt that might ensue had been they not to have the ability to take part.” Their argument requires that they place the basically bottomless assets of the Saudi Public Funding Fund as inadequate to mount a reputable golf tour, and to maintain their gamers fed and sheltered, in a world dominated by the PGA Tour. This may seemingly contradict the express pitch of LIV Golf, which is that the basically bottomless assets of the Saudi Public Funding Fund will permit the group to right away mount a reputable golf tour, worthy of the world’s high professionals, who shall be fed and sheltered past their wildest goals.
The case that these 11 LIV professionals, together with Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, are making—that LIV Golf and its professionals are ravenous, and with out entry to PGA Tour occasions the LIV Golf gamers will wither and die—is a case that you simply would possibly count on the PGA Tour itself to make, implicitly and explicitly, at each flip, because it fights off this new menace. However for now, whereas there may be an antitrust lawsuit the place they’re accused of utilizing their dominant place in North American skilled golf to strangle a competitor and its staff, it abruptly behooves the PGA Tour to make the case that LIV Golf is definitely kicking main butt and has nothing to fret about. “With entry to just about limitless funding by the PIF, LIV has been capable of compete for elite gamers rapidly and efficiently and function with out consideration of profitability,” boasts the PGA Tour, on behalf of their direct competitor. “Throughout its brief existence, LIV has established itself as a competing golf tour, having already efficiently recruited greater than twenty PGA TOUR members,” together with the 11 plaintiffs within the lawsuit. At occasions the PGA Tour’s response to the go well with reads prefer it was swiped immediately from a LIV Golf recruiting pitch:
Removed from struggling to recruit golfers, LIV’s CEO acknowledged in a televised interview with Tucker Carlson simply two days earlier than Plaintiffs filed this lawsuit that LIV is oversubscribed for golfers and that “the record will get longer, longer, longer for the gamers that need to” be part of LIV. It has additionally been reported that gamers becoming a member of LIV have acquired tens-of-millions of {dollars}, and in some instances hundreds-of-millions of {dollars}, in assured funds to play for LIV. Plaintiff Phil Mickelson reportedly acquired $200 million to hitch LIV, and different outstanding TOUR members comparable to Plaintiff Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson have reportedly acquired greater than $100 million every.
The response goes on to notice that LIV Golf eschews what the PGA Tour describes as skilled golf’s “long-earned fame as a meritocracy” in favor of a system during which gamers are assured what the Tour considers “exorbitant prize cash,” by purse shares and enormous crew bonuses. LIV Golf, the response notes, plans to develop to 14 occasions in 2023, and to supply up almost half-a-billion {dollars} in complete prize cash. I want to notice right here that this isn’t an commercial for LIV Golf!
It’s enjoyable for me to think about an undecided mid-tier golf professional, studying the antitrust grievance and deciding that LIV Golf have to be in horrible form, if high-profile and outrageously overcompensated professionals like Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau really feel that being excluded from the playoffs of a tour they willingly and publicly dumped would trigger “substantial and irreparable” hurt to their very livelihoods. After which to think about that very same professional studying the PGA Tour’s response and being advised by the very group with whom he hopes to ascertain a profitable profession that its breakaway competitor is firmly established, endlessly resourced, wholesome, rising, and throwing round fistfuls of money to any participant who can safe a spot on one in every of its dipshit groups. Who to imagine? The LIV Golf professionals who say they can not survive with out the PGA Tour? Or the PGA Tour, which insists that LIV Golf is like heaven for golf professionals?
This a lot is definite: The battle between these two organizations goes to get extraordinarily silly earlier than the mud lastly settles, if it ever does. The PGA Tour’s full response to the grievance is embedded beneath, on your perusal.
