Twist in golf merger saga as reports suggest White House meeting ‘didn’t go as well as hoped’

Talk of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf coming to an agreement to soon end the feud that has split men’s professional golf may have been premature.

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Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch has reported that the recent meeting at the White House involving US President Donald Trump to try reach a merger deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund, who financially back LIV Golf, may not have gone according to plan.

The Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard reported that a “deal in principle” may have been made at the meeting, while Tiger Woods said that an agreement will be reached “very soon” during the Genesis Invitational.
But Lynch’s report states that the second White House meeting, which had Woods as well as Australian Adam Scott and PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan in attendance, left the US Tours head honchoes disappointed.

“Rumblings from informed sources suggest that Thursday’s meeting at the White House didn’t go as well as Tour executives had hoped, which suggests that PIF governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, remains determined to keep shoveling cash into the furnace of his own pridefulness,” Lynch said.

The PGA Tour side have regularly insisted that the world’s best male golfers will once again be competing against one another on a regular basis, outside of the majors, but that notion hints at LIV events falling by the wayside.

The announcement a week ago that LIV’s popular Adelaide tournament is here to stay until 2031 was a statement of intent that the three-round events with a shotgun start and music pumping are going nowhere.

Speculation remains abound about what a post-merger landscape would look like with player movement between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf.

Hoggard also reported that the PGA Tour was open to LIV players returning to their events this year.

Even suggested that next month’s The Players Championship could feature LIV golfers, but that seems unlikely as the prominent event at TPC Sawgrass clashes with LIV Singapore.