The PGA Tour made a significant legal move this week and on Tuesday, turned the focus of its countersuit against LIV Golf and is now going after the Saudi Public Investment Fund and its governor — Yasir Al-Rumayyan.
The Tour’s move basically brings to light that Greg Norman (aka The Lamest Commissioner In All The Land) is not actually the guy calling the shots, even though he carries that CEO title.
The motion filed on Tuesday argues that instead of LIV Golf and Norman having control, it’s Al-Rumayyan and the PIF that have ultimate power over LIV’s business, including recruiting players, approving contracts, determining payout structures and even promising to indemnify them from financial responsibility in lawsuits. (LIV Golf is a subsidiary of LIV Golf Investments, which is funded entirely by the PIF, which owns 93% of LIV.)
The motion argues that all of those alleged actions, are tortuous interference of the contracts the defecting players signed with the PGA Tour, as well as the contracts between the Tour and players who stayed (but LIV actively recruited).
Truth of the matter is that all sorts of individual names are being pulled into the action. LIV wants access to communications between PGA Tour policy board directors and dozens of Augusta National members.
The Tour believes that Norman is simply a figurehead and has to get approvals for virtually everything from Al-Rumayyan and the PIF. “It is Al-Rumayyan who functions as LIV’s chief executive,” the Tour alleges, adding that LIV’s leadership understands Al-Rumayyan to be “de facto CEO,” and that Al-Rumayyan micromanages “LIV’s day-to-day operations both while in the United State and abroad.
“And even once contracts are signed and debts accrued,” the Tour alleges, “PIF holds the purse strings: none of LIV’s partners or golfers gets paid until PIF and Mr. Al-Rumayyan agree to distribute the money.”
Attorneys for the Tour have worked hard to subpoena Al-Rumayyan and the PIF for various documents about its actions toward players and agents in its efforts to LIV off the ground. Al-Rumayyan’s text messages and emails — with the likes of Bryson DeChambeau and sports agent Casey Wasserman, among others — were included in the Tour’s presentation during a discovery hearing on Jan. 13. Presumably, those documents were acquired via discovery with players and agents, not Al-Rumayyan himself, who has done everything possible to avoid the discovery process thus far. Also presented during the three-hour hearing was a key document referred to as the Shareholders’ Agreement.
The agreement, as it has been shared with the Tour, was signed by Al-Rumayyan. In it, the Tour states, the PIF is “required to approve” the reported nine-figure contracts signed by the likes of DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson. During the Jan. 13 hearing LIV argued that the Tour was misinterpreting the agreement, but what’s clear is the Tour has quickly doubled down on what it believes to be the truth.
Jodi Balsam, a sports law professor at the Brooklyn Law School, has been an interested outside observer of this legal battle and gave her opinion on Twitter:
“About time. By adding Saudi PIF and Al-Rumayyan as defendants in tortious interference counterclaim, PGA Tour strengthens argument for discovery against those parties, something they and LIV Golf are so anxious to avoid, it may change (end?) the course of the lawsuit.”
This is only bound to get messier.
Stay tuned!!
