Senators Ready to Grill the PGA Tour About Its Saudi Deal
When the PGA Tour viewed the Saudi-backed LIV Golf league as an existential threat, it counted politicians among its most prominent allies. A Senate hearing on Tuesday will be a public gauge of how dramatically and quickly that support transformed into antagonism. Tour officials will appear before the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for a first hearing on the agreement between the Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund—a pact between bitter enemies that shocked the golf world and quickly drew the ire of Capitol Hill.
The hearing arrives at another moment of internal tumult for the Tour because of rancor over that stunning deal. They’ll be testifying little more than 36 hours after Tour policy board member Randall Stephenson said he was resigning over the deal, while specifically citing the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents. Stephenson, the former chief executive of AT&T, also complained that the deal had been reached without input from the board.
His departure was first reported by the Washington Post. Lawmakers are set to grill the PGA Tour’s chief operating officer Ron Price, after PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan took a leave of absence to address an unspecified “medical situation" shortly after he announced the deal. Monahan said Friday that he would be returning to work July 17—six days after the hearing.
Jimmy Dunne, a PGA Tour board member who was one of the deal-brokers, will also testify. The committee’s chairman, Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, indicated, in an interview ahead of the hearing, that it’s likely to be a rough outing.
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