Report: NBA Commissioner Adam Silver ‘not interested’ in running PGA Tour-Saudi PIF’s new commercial entity

Looks like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver won’t be trading basketballs for golf balls.

Looks like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver won’t be trading basketballs for golf balls.

According to a report in the New York Times’s Deal Book, a prospective investor considering investing in the new commercial entity reached out to the longtime hoops executive about heading up the business venture from the PGA Tour-Saudi PIF framework agreement.

According to Deal Book reporter Lauren Hirsch, he “isn’t interested,” but wrote the move to explore his interest in the deal “reflects the size of the ambitions for the sports endeavor.”

“Media is a big part of these plans, as investors bet on the fervor of big broadcasters and tech companies for live programming to lift sports league valuations. The PGA Tour signed a nine-year TV agreement with CBS Sports, NBC Sports and ESPN in 2020, and industry executives expect the likes of Amazon, Apple and YouTube to compete for the next deal,” Hirsch wrote. “This was the context for the effort to recruit Silver, who has been praised for his handling of NBA streaming rights.”

Golfweek previously reported that the Tour has narrowed the potential list of investors being considered as private equity partners in its new for-profit entity to five.

The Tour held its final board meeting of the year on Monday. In a memo to players obtained by Golfweek, Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan addressed the bidding to be the Tour’s main private equity partner. “Additionally, as you know, the Framework Agreement with PIF and the DP World Tour generated unsolicited – although not surprising – interest from numerous outside potential investors. The opportunity to potentially participate in the transformative growth of the PGA Tour for the first time brought forth dozens of inbound prospects, which were all initially vetted by the Tour’s investment bank, Allen & Company,” he wrote. “In the Policy Board meeting, we reviewed these remaining bids with the Independent Directors and Player Directors – with input from Allen & Co. and The Raine Group – and agreed to continue the negotiation process in order to select the final minority investor(s) in a timely manner.”

The Framework Agreement has a Dec. 31 deadline to reach a definitive deal between the Tour and the PIF, but that date is widely expected to be pushed deep into 2024.

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LIV Golf signs on high-powered D.C. lobbying firm amid congressional probe

A representative of Akin Gump said Al-Rumayyan should not be forced to take part in any future hearings.

As a congressional probe into LIV Golf and the Saudi Arabia-backed Public Investment Fund (PIF) continues to press for testimony from the fund’s governor, a high-powered Washington D.C. lobbying firm has been retained to help shield Yasir Al-Rumayyan from having to speak publicly.

According to Politico, Akin Gump Strauss & Feld has been retained by PIF as the sovereign fund pushes back against the probe, insisting that some of the inquiry is subject to immunity.

In June, PGA Tour Chief Operating Officer Ron Price and board member Jimmy Dunne were sworn in at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Washington D.C. to discuss the proposed deal between the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and PIF.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is the chairman of the committee and has been publicly critical of the deal, which is expected to unite the two once-warring factions in golf under the same commercial umbrella.

According to Politico, a representative of Akin Gump said Al-Rumayyan should not be forced to take part in any future hearings.

Raphael Prober, a lawyer at the firm, wrote to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) on behalf of the Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), arguing that the governor of the fund “cannot participate in any public hearing that is part of an unbounded inquiry into the PIF’s past, present, and future interests and investments.”

Blumenthal, who chairs the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has requested testimony from PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan since June.

“An unprecedented effort by the Subcommittee to compel [Al-Rumayyan’s] appearance and testimony would not only disrupt the delicate balance of foreign relations and international diplomacy, but would also compromise the prerogatives of the Executive Branch,” Prober wrote in the letter.

Prober, a partner at Akin Gump, co-heads the firm’s congressional investigations division.

His letter, dated Aug. 23 but filed with the Justice Department on Aug. 30, is the latest volley in PIF’s back-and-forth with Blumenthal’s subcommittee over Al-Rumayyan’s potential testimony, as part of an inquiry into the wealth fund’s U.S. investments. The subcommittee launched a probe after the announcement in June that the PIF-financed LIV Golf league and PGA Tour planned to join forces after months of bitter infighting between the two ventures.

LIV Golf Chicago
LIV Golf Series CEO Greg Norman stands with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, Governor of Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, at the LIV Golf Series Invitational event in Chicago on Sept. 18, 2022, Rich Harvest Farms in Illinois. (Photo: Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press)

According to previous reporting, the Tour sent a six-page document to the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, previous to the hearing that outlined the potential framework of the deal. here are some of the main points of the deal:

  • LIV Golf’s future will be decided by the new entity’s board that will be controlled by a Tour majority.
  • A “Communications Committee” will be created that will “help facilitate a smooth business transition” and “coordinate and manage communications” between PIF, LIV and the PGA Tour.
  • The PIF will be “a premier corporate sponsor” of the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and other international tours, and will be a title sponsor for at least one event.
  • More from the agreement to create a new global golf entity, which they reference as “NewCo:”

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World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler says a lack of clarity on PGA Tour-PIF deal is ‘worrisome’

“They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t really have the information that we need.”

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Even before the inevitable questions about the state of his putting, world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler was asked to address the latest developments in the PGA Tour-PIF deal following the Tour’s testimony at a Senate Subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

“It always surprises me,” Scheffler said on Wednesday in North Berwick, Scotland ahead of the Genesis Scottish Open of the line of questioning at his press conferences. “Sometimes I feel like we’re going to get asked a lot of LIV Golf questions and they never come, but this time these questions came a little earlier.”

Asked for his reaction to watching Tour executive Ron Price and Policy Board Director Jimmy Dunne answer questions in Washington, D.C., for three hours from several Senators led by Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, Scheffler said, “we didn’t really learn a whole lot, again. As a player on Tour, we still don’t really have a lot of clarity as to what’s going on and that’s a bit worrisome. They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t really have the information that we need. I watched part of yesterday and didn’t learn anything. So I really don’t know what to say.”

Scheffler reiterated the company line while also expressing his dismay at how the announcement of the deal was rolled out. “It’s just a framework agreement right now so I don’t know what that entails,” he said. “We are not involved in any of the discussions. None of the players were involved in the original framework agreement, and so we just don’t really.”

Scottie Scheffler hits out of a bunker on the 16th green during a practice round of the U.S. Open golf tournament. Mandatory Credit: Kiyoshi Mio-USA TODAY Sports

Asked if he should have been involved, Scheffler said, “Probably not. But I’m sure that a few of our players’ members should probably have been involved.”

“I just try to keep my head down and play golf,” he added. “I don’t get too involved in a lot of that stuff. I love playing golf on the PGA Tour and that’s the spot for me. I’m hoping that’s going to exist for a long time. I felt like we were doing a good job before and then the agreement happened and now we have to navigate the whole deal.

“I think the Tour is working hard to try to get us more information but like I said, it’s tough when you’re in negotiations to make everything public. It’s hard to negotiate the public side. I understand the privacy of it but I just wish that definitely our player reps need to be more involved in the process.”

Scheffler was one of the more than 20 top-ranked players that gathered in Delaware last August during the BMW Championship in a meeting organized by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy that led to the commitments to play in 18 designated events with purses ranging from $15 million to $25 million this season. (Only Joaquin Niemann, who attended the meeting, later defected to LIV.) Scheffler was asked if he felt the meeting turned out to be a waste of time.

“I think when the merger announcement, it may have felt like a waste of time but at the end of the day, I think it [was] good to get everybody together,” he said. “I think that we are banded together as players and I think you saw the [Golfweek] article that came out on Patrick [Cantlay] a few weeks ago, and a lot of guys were posting on their social media and stuff like that because it was a ridiculous article.

“That’s what I appreciate as a player is having my voice heard and being able to come to a consensus with all the players and kind of go from there and that’s what we are working towards right now is try to get a consensus. We are a player-run organization, so we are doing our best as players to make it feel that way.”

Scheffler argued that the Tour’s current system of a 16-player advisory council voted on by the membership who pass along the concerns of the players to the five-player directors still works — in theory.

“As long as the player directors’ voices are being heard, we are the ones that put them in that position to be there and we want their voices to be heard, and that was really the only frustration with the original announcement is that none of those four or five guys were involved at all,” Scheffler said. “But as far as how things are going now, there’s open lines of communication. We have had numerous discussions with the Tour officials and players as weeks have gone on with stuff, and I feel like we’re going in the right direction.”

Scheffler did concede that he found it a bit disconcerting that longtime Tour independent director Randall Stephenson, the former CEO and Chairman of AT&T, stepped down from the board last week, stating in a letter that the deal with Saudi Arabia’s PIF “is not one that I can objectively evaluate or in good conscience support.”

“It was a little bit concerning that someone like him wouldn’t be on board. We have players reps and we have other people that are on that advisory board, and any time we lose one of those members is definitely a bit concerning,” Scheffler said. “Those guys are put in position for a reason, and for anyone to leave is tough for us. We’ll see what happens.”

As for his recent putting woes, Scheffler said, “I believe that I’m a very good putter, and everything returns to the average.”

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