PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — For the last three years that Justin Thomas has stepped onto the interview podium at the Players Championship there has been one constant: the topic of LIV, the PGA Tour and their ongoing battle.
“I think we’re kind of past the level of exhaustion,” said Thomas, who won the Players in 2021. “There’s just so many of us, really on both sides, both us on tour and I think the LIV players, that we don’t really know what’s going on and we’re just playing golf and hoping for the best and because there’s a lot that we don’t know and that we can’t control.”
Even though the two parties jointly announced a framework agreement between the tour and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia on June 6, 2023 (and that the agreement expired on Dec. 31 that year), no deal between the two parties has been formally signed and negotiations remain ongoing.
Most recently, player directors Tiger Woods, Adam Scott and commissioner Jay Monahan met with White House officials Feb. 20 in order to try to speed up what they have staunchly described as the reunification of professional golf. Monahan and Scott had previously met with President Donald Trump on Feb. 4 at the White House attempting to fast track the federal government’s approval of the tour’s proposed deal with the PIF, which plans to inject $1.5 billion into the tour’s for-profit entity, PGA Tour Enterprises.
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“The talks are real,” Monahan said Tuesday. “They’re substantial.”
“We believe there’s room to integrate aspects of LIV golf into the PGA Tour platform,” Monahan added. “We will not do so in a way that diminishes the strength of our platform.”
Thomas acknowledged that though players are fatigued and want to move past it, he knows it’s not that simple.
“It’s not like you or anybody can say, ‘All right, this is what we’re going to do,'” Thomas said. “I think obviously everybody needs to be on the same page, and I think when it gets to that level, I don’t know if the government’s getting involved. There’s just so many things above my pay grade that are involved that I don’t know about, that I probably shouldn’t or can’t speak to.”
Last week, at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, world No. 3 Rory McIlroy, who has been outspoken on the topic of reunification, balked at the notion of it happening soon. At the Genesis Invitational in early February, McIlroy had stated that he felt reunification could happen by the 2026 season.
“I don’t think it’s ever felt that close, but I don’t, it doesn’t feel like it’s any closer,” McIlroy said in Orlando.
When asked if LIV, which is backed by the PIF, has been good for the game of golf, Thomas acknowledged that a lot of what has happened on tour, including higher purses for tournaments, has been connected to the fact that LIV disrupted the sport. Thomas, however, is still adamant that the way this fracturing transpired is what has made it difficult to accept.
“There’s a couple guys like a Phil [Mickelson] or a Bryson [DeChambeau] that how they went about it maybe isn’t exactly how I would have, but they did say some things that had some value to them or had some truth,” Thomas said. “It’s hard to say, has it made the game of golf better? Yeah, maybe done some things on tour that have improved the tour, but the game of golf as a whole, if it’s separated in different [tours] and creating some animosity, then that’s not necessarily better.”
