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Eleven golfers in the fledgling LIV Golf Invitational Series filed a nationwide antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour, arguing that their careers were hurt when the tour suspended them after they joined the Saudi-funded organization. The move has been expected since LIV emerged this year to challenge the PGA Tour’s professional golf supremacy.
Unlike some of the other players who joined LIV Golf, the 11 players who filed the lawsuit – Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford, Matt Jones, Ian Poulter, Abraham Ancer, Carlos Ortiz, Pat Perez, Jason Kokrak and Peter Uihlein — haven’t relinquished their PGA Tour membership, meaning they still hoped to play on both tours. However, the PGA Tour would not grant them permission to compete in LIV tournaments and imposed multi-year suspensions thereafter.
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The lawsuit alleges that the PGA Tour not only threatened golfers who wanted to play LIV tournaments, but also “threatened sponsors, vendors and agents to force players to forego opportunities to play LIV golf events.” ; “enacted a per se illegal group boycott with the European Tour to deny its members access to LIV Golf”; and “leaning” groups that hosted golf’s four major championships and pressured them to ban LIV golfers from playing the sport’s top-flight events.
“The Tour’s conduct serves no purpose other than to harm players and preclude the occurrence of the first significant competitive threat the Tour has faced in decades,” reads the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District was from California to Oakland.
Mickelson, one of the world’s most popular golfers and a six-time major winner, has long been a proponent of creating a breakaway organization and admitted to a biographer that he helped pay attorneys to create its operating rules. The lawsuit alleges that the PGA Tour suspended Mickelson for at least two months on March 22, including for “attempting to recruit players” to join LIV Golf. (Mickelson’s last PGA Tour event was in late January before news broke of his involvement with LIV.) It then denied his request for reinstatement on June 20, saying he broke PGA Tour rules by he competed in LIV Golf’s first tournament in London, and suspended him until March 31, 2023. That suspension was extended to March 31, 2024 after Mickelson played at LIV’s second tournament in Oregon, according to the lawsuit.
“Mr. Mickelson’s unlawful two-year suspension from the PGA Tour caused him irreparable professional, financial and commercial harm,” the lawsuit states. Although Mickelson lost a number of sponsors after exposing human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia prior to the start of LIV downplayed he has also reportedly been paid more than $100m just for joining the series which has seen the 52-year-old play poorly in three events He and the rest of the LIV golfers will be paid, no matter how bad they play because LIV tournaments don’t have cuts.
For the LIV players’ lawsuit to succeed, they would need to prove that they suffered actual harm and that the PGA Tour’s actions reduced competition in violation of federal law. Jacob S. Frenkel, the chair of government investigations and security enforcement at the Washington law firm Dickinson Wright, told the Washington Post last week that proving damage “would not be particularly easy if they were being compensated in a way that might be greater.” is as the ultimate compensation from the PGA Tour.”
“You made a personal decision to distance yourself from the PGA and join a competing tour. They weren’t forced to do that,” said Frenkel. “As a PGA Tour participant, you’ve also agreed to certain standards, not just standards of the organization, but standards of personal conduct as well.”
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PGA Tour golfers must be permitted to play in unsanctioned tournaments and have traditionally been allowed to play three such cases per season (usually to play events on the European Tour, which has an operating agreement with the PGA Tour). The lawsuit alleges that the tour “weaponized” this Conflicting Events Regulation to prevent its golfers from participating in unsanctioned tournaments and that this system “does not allow for meaningful competition from other tours.”
The U.S. Department of Justice is also investigating the PGA Tour for possible antitrust violations, according to The Wall Street Journal, in at least the second time federal officials have been investigating the tour deals. In 1994, antitrust attorneys for the Federal Trade Commission tried to get the US government to repeal the rule requiring golfers to be permitted to play at conflicting events – and another that said players must be permitted to appear on television programs not sanctioned by the Federal Trade Commission PGA Tour — because they created possible “unfair methods of competition.”
But after extensive lobbying by then-Commissioner Tim Finchem – a former official in President Jimmy Carter’s administration – the four commissioners of the FTC voted unanimously to reject the recommendation of the staff’s antitrust attorneys to take legal action against the PGA Tour.
In the players’ lawsuit, three LIV golfers are also seeking an injunction that would allow them to play in the season-ending FedEx Cup playoffs, a three-tournament competition that begins next week with an event hosting the 125th best golfers participate in the season standings. Golfers accumulate points based on their performances throughout the season, and the three defectors — Gooch (No. 20 in FedEx Cup standings), Jones (No. 62) and Swafford (No. 63) — would qualify for next week had been the St. Jude Championship, they would not have been banned from the PGA Tour after playing at LIV golf events.
In a memo to players sent Wednesday after the lawsuit was filed, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan described the three players’ attempt to gain entry to the FedEx Cup Playoffs “as an attempt to use the TOUR platform, to promote yourself and take advantage of your benefits and efforts”.
“Basically, these suspended players – who are now employees of the Saudi Golf League – left the TOUR and now want to get back in. As the Saudi Golf League is on hiatus, they are trying to use lawyers to force their way into the competition alongside us, members in good standing,” read the memo, obtained by The Post.
There are two FedEx Cup leaderboard pages on the PGA Tour website, one with the LIV golfers that are still included and another with those golfers that have been taken out and the players below them have moved up. The latter will be used to determine the 125-golfer field for next week’s playoff opener, subject to a judge’s order.
After the first playoff tournament, the top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings advance to the BMW Championship, while the top 30 after that event compete in the season-ending Tour Championship. The winner of this tournament receives $18 million, and golfers who finish the season with a high rank in the FedEx Cup points standings are generally admitted to the following year’s major championships.