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Just when you thought the standoff between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf couldn’t get any crazier, the PGA Tour said “hold my beer.”
The well-established golf league reportedly filed a motion in federal court to keep three suspended players — Talor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford — from competing in the upcoming FedEx Cup playoffs. All three golfers are part of a large group of pros who are suspended for joining the Saudi Arabia-funded breakaway league but are still trying to compete in the world-ranked playoff series.
“Despite knowing full well that they would breach tour regulations and be suspended for doing so, Plaintiffs have joined competing golf league LIV Golf, which has paid them tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed money supplied by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to procure their breaches,” the PGA Tour’s motion said, via ESPN.
Eleven LIV Golf participants, including Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, filed a lawsuit against the PGA Tour last week in an effort to still participate in the FedEx Cup playoffs, which kicks off this week with the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, Tennessee. Since LIV Golf does not qualify for world ranking, those 11 golfers no longer qualify to compete in the playoffs.
“LIV is not a rational economic actor, competing fairly to start a golf tour. It is prepared to lose billions of dollars to leverage Plaintiffs and the sport of golf to ‘sportswash’ the Saudi government’s deplorable reputation for human rights abuses,” the motion continued.
Perhaps it’s no big surprise that the war between the tour and LIV Golf has come down to the two sides duking it out in court.
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