SUGAR GROVE, Sick. — As LIV Golf prepares to stage its fifth event, which is exterior of Chicago this week, CEO and commissioner Greg Norman stated the upstart circuit has no want to speak with the rival PGA Tour a few truce.
LIV Golf, financed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund, has been in a fierce battle with the PGA Tour for one of the best golfers on the planet for a lot of this yr. Norman stated he tried to speak to PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan up to now about making an attempt to determine how the leagues can coexist, however Norman says he is not all for doing so.
“We’ve little interest in sitting down with them, to be trustworthy with you, as a result of our product is working,” Norman informed The Australian in an interview this week.
Monahan has been unwilling to sit down down with LIV Golf even after a number of previous main championship winners, together with Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Brooks Koepka and Bubba Watson, had been lured to the brand new circuit with signing bonuses reportedly price as a lot as $100 million to $200 million.
“That is why we’re the place we’re as we speak,” Norman stated. “We tried awfully exhausting — I do know I did personally for the previous yr. … After we knew we had been by no means going to listen to from them, we simply determined to go.”
Greater than two dozen PGA Tour members have defected to LIV Golf, together with a handful who’ve resigned their memberships. Monahan has suspended gamers who competed in LIV Golf tournaments with out conflicting-event releases. Smith, the third-ranked golfer on the planet and reigning Open Championship winner, was among the many newest wave of gamers to depart.
A supply informed ESPN on Thursday that Norman’s makes an attempt to speak with Monahan included a Feb. 24 letter and a voicemail left by Norman for Monahan shortly earlier than LIV Golf introduced its 2022 schedule.
Within the letter, Norman accused Monahan of “going too far, being unfair” and certain breaking labor legal guidelines by threatening gamers with lifetime bans and/or suspensions.
“Merely put, you may’t ban gamers from enjoying golf,” Norman wrote. “Gamers have the proper and the liberty to play the place we like. I do know for a incontrovertible fact that many PGA gamers had been and nonetheless are all for enjoying for a brand new league, along with enjoying for the Tour. What’s incorrect with that?
“What’s incorrect with permitting gamers to make their very own selections about the place to play and the way usually to play? What’s so incorrect with participant alternative? Why do you are feeling so threatened that you’d resort to such a determined, unwise, and unenforceable menace?”
On Aug. 27, LIV Golf joined a handful of its gamers of their federal antitrust lawsuit towards the PGA Tour, by which they declare the PGA Tour has used its monopoly energy to quash competitors and unfairly droop gamers for competing in LIV Golf occasions.
Norman insisted to The Australian that LIV Golf’s plans from the start was to be an “additive” to the prevailing golf ecosystem.
“It was all the time an additive to all excursions,” Norman stated. “This notion [that] we’re making an attempt to destroy excursions is just not true. The PGA Tour is making an attempt to destroy us, it is so simple as that.”
