Commentary: Shocked by PGA Tour’s merger with LIV Golf? You shouldn’t be

LOS ANGELES – How are you going to watch PGA Tour golf again? How can you stomach it now that it’s grouped itself with LIV Golf, the divisive league backed by an entity controlled by Saudi Arabia’s crown prince?

The same way you watch the World Cup (Qatar). Or the Olympics (China). Or the NBA (Hong Kong protests).

The same way you’re reading this now, if you’re reading on an electronic device. Probably the same way you slipped into your favorite sneakers this morning. Put gas in your car lately?

Kudos to anyone disciplined enough to avoid the permeating tendrils of the world’s bad actors. But unfortunately, realistically, it would be a novel feat to avoid unsavory aspects of global business in your diet, whether you’re consuming products or pastimes.

It was naive to expect the PGA Tour to continue to inconvenience itself or to operate in anything but its own best interests.

Still, you felt whiplash Tuesday hearing that the PGA Tour agreed to merge with Saudi-backed rival LIV Golf.

And you can call the PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan hypocritical for making the deal – which will quash pending litigation between the tours as they form a new, yet-to-be-named for-profit company – and for saying one thing one day and the exact opposite one year later.

But pause to consider why he said any of it, and it’s clear nothing has actually changed.

The rhetoric sounds different, but his motivation lines up like a putt: Monahan is operating in what he believes are the best interests of the PGA Tour – or, well, whatever the PGA Tour is going to be.

In one instance, last June, he disparaged LIV Golf in an effort to protect his turf from a rival siphoning off players and creating an existential threat unlike any the PGA Tour had before experienced: “We welcome good, healthy competition. The LIV Saudi Golf League is not that. It’s an irrational threat, one not concerned with the return on investment or true growth of the game.”

Then, on Tuesday, Monahan was complimenting that former rival in an effort, again, to protect his turf, having conceded to the threat, he’s hoping that unification will allow the PGA Tour to retain a meaningful foothold: “We are pleased to move forward, in step with LIV and (Public Investment Fund’s) world-class investing experience, and I applaud PIF Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan for his vision and collaborative and forward-thinking approach …”

Can’t beat ’em, join ’em – in a game of monopoly.

The golf bodies are coming together to try to fill their respective shortcomings, whether it is, in the PGA Tour’s case, compensating players better, or, in the year-old LIV league’s, in a quest for long-term sustainability.

But still, gross. Right?

LIV had so many people talking about sportswashing. How golf, under its umbrella, was a diversionary tactic that’s part of a broader political effort by Saudi Arabia to paper over the country’s egregious record of heinous human rights violations.

And what about the players who didn’t take the LIV money and run? Who, as PGA Tour mainstay Rory McIlroy described it, resisted the urge to take “the easy way out?” PGA Tour colleagues of Wesley Bryan, who tweeted Tuesday, “I feel betrayed, and will not be able to trust anyone within the corporate structure of the PGA Tour for a very long time.”

As principled as some might really be, those guys made careful calculations. Like, with calculators. And you have to figure that most of them decided to do what they figured would make the most sense – and the most dollars. They surely weighed their own performance prospects on this new PGA Tour, what they stood to lose in sponsorships, the tour’s new sponsorship matchmaking service …

Yes, LIV’s ratings apparently were so lousy they stopped reporting them publicly here, in Year 2. But that didn’t change the fact that LIV was still poaching players. Still offering substantial contracts – previously unthinkable in pro golf – to guys to get them to defect.

And so stars like Brooks Koepka, a five-time major champion, and Dustin Johnson, twice a major winner, weren’t bolstering PGA Tour fields. Nor were Phil Mickelson, Cameron Smith or Bryson DeChambeau. Or Californian’s Kevin Na and Brendan Steele, who said he wasn’t interested in that LIV life in December but then signed on with the fledgling league in February.

The reality: People in the business of golf know it’s better when the best players all are competing against each other.

Talking with amateur star Preston Summerhays shortly after the news broke Tuesday morning drove that home. He’s a clear-eyed 20-year-old with a long PGA Tour lineage (father Boyd, uncle Daniel and great uncle Bruce, who won three PGA Tour Champions events).

And he had just moved on to the U.S. Open in a one-hole playoff to conclude the qualifier at Hillcrest Country Club when he heard the merger mentioned. Once he picked up his jaw from the fairway – “What? What!” – his instant reaction was gleeful: “It’s a great thing.”

“I think it’s good to get all the best players on the –” he paused, unsure, like the rest of us, what to call the new thing. “You want to get all the best players together.”

The PGA Tour and LIV know that, and so they’re going into business together. Of course they are.