Phil Michaelson and 10 other professional golfers sued the PGA Tours claiming it is an “entrenched monopoly in professional golf” that is harming their careers by suspending them for joining the L.I.V Tour financed by Saudi Arabia.
LIV golfers are seeking an injunction to lift the PGA’s “anti-competitive” suspensions in an antitrust lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.
Separately, the US Department of Justice is investigating the PGA Tour for possible antitrust violations related to its ongoing dispute with rival circuit.
The PGA Tour threatened lifetime bans before imposing “unprecedented suspensions” on players and also pressured sponsors, suppliers and agents to force golfers to withdraw from LIV golf events, “as part of a carefully orchestrated plan to beat the competition,” LIV golfers said.
Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford and Matt Jones are among the golfers suing the PGA Tour. All three players qualified for the lucrative FedEx Cup Playoffs with a top prize of $18 million at the end of the tour’s 2022 season, but were barred from participating, according to the lawsuit.
“The Tour’s conduct serves no purpose other than to cause harm to players and to shut out the first significant competitive threat the Tour has faced in decades,” the players said in their complaint.
The PGA Tour’s reaction to the lawsuit
PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan told the members in a letter that the group plans to present its case “clearly and vigorously” in court. The lawsuit is an offer by golfers to promote themselves and “ride for free” on the tour platform, he wrote.
“These suspended players, who are now employees of the Saudi Golf League, have left the Tour and now they want to come back,” Monahan said. “With the Saudi golf league on hiatus, they are trying to use lawyers to fight their way through the competition alongside our members in good standing,” he said.
LIV Golf has been struggling with mixed publicity ever since two-time Grand Slam champion, Greg Norman, announced in March the big-budget project that seeks to change some of professional golf’s longstanding traditions.
The series marked its Eastern US debut last week with a much-hyped launch at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The next LIV tournament is scheduled for September, in Boston.
Saudi Arabia is accused of trying to improve its image through so-called sports laundering. “They want the country to be associated with elite sporting events to change the global perception of a brutal and murderous regime,” the London-based human rights group Grant Liberty said in a report, citing the conflict in Yemen, the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the treatment of prisoners of conscience in Saudi prisons are examples.
Nearly 23 PGA Tour sponsors do business with Saudi Arabia each year for an estimated $40 billion, the players said in the lawsuit.
“For the PGA Tour to enthusiastically do business with these companies while criticizing golfers for playing on a tour primarily sponsored by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund is the height of hypocrisy,” they said.
The background of a lawsuit against the PGA Tour in 1990
The PGA Tour was previously embroiled in an antitrust dispute with the Federal Trade Commission in the 1990s. It ended the agency’s investigation into its rules, including one that prohibited golfers from playing on rival tours without its permission.
At the time, Norman planned to launch a rival circuit called the “World Tour” and Fox planned to acquire the broadcast rights.
The PGA Tour warned players that they would be suspended for joining the World Tour and argued that its rules were necessary to ensure television networks and advertisers had enough good players. The commission ended its investigation in 1995 without taking any action.
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