PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and participant administrators Tiger Woods and Adam Scott are assembly with officers on the White Home on Thursday, in what the tour hopes is one other step in reunifying males’s skilled golf.
Monahan and Scott met with U.S. President Donald Trump on Feb. 4 in an effort to hurry up the federal authorities’s approval of the tour’s proposed take care of Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund, which plans to inject $1.5 billion into the tour’s for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises.
PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan attended Thursday’s assembly in Washington. President Trump was additionally on the White Home.
“We had some attention-grabbing discussions,” Trump mentioned at a Black Historical past Month reception, which Woods, Scott and Monahan attended. Woods went on stage with Trump carrying the Presidential Medal of Freedom he acquired from Trump in 2019.
The PGA Tour, DP World Tour and the PIF introduced they’d reached a framework settlement to type an alliance on June 6, 2023. That deal expired on the finish of 2023, however the sides continued to barter a possible deal over the previous two years.
The PIF, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, is financing the rival LIV Golf League.
The U.S. Division of Justice’s antitrust division has been reviewing the PIF’s proposed funding into PGA Tour Enterprises for the previous a number of months to find out whether or not it violated federal antitrust legal guidelines.
U.S. lawmakers, together with Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), have raised nationwide safety considerations, saying the deal would permit Saudi Arabia to sportswash its controversial human rights document.
Eventually week’s Genesis Invitational at Torrey Pines outdoors San Diego, Monahan advised reporters that the assembly with Trump earlier this month was productive and was about “the reunification of the skilled sport on one tour, with all the most effective gamers on it.”
“All the things is transferring ahead with tempo, and I feel there is a common — whenever you take a look at all of the events concerned — there is a common enthusiasm for getting this carried out,” Monahan mentioned. “I feel the assembly [with Trump] in the end will get us one step nearer to a deal being carried out, however there’s much more work to do.”
Throughout Sunday’s closing spherical protection of the Genesis, Woods advised CBS that negotiations with the PIF are in a “very optimistic place proper now.”
“I feel issues are going to heal rapidly,” Woods mentioned. “We will get this sport getting into the correct path. It has been heading within the unsuitable path for a lot of years, and the followers need all of us to play collectively — all the highest gamers enjoying collectively — and we will make that occur.”
Data from the Related Press was used on this report.
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