2 years later, TOUR-LIV marriage remains maddeningly stuck at altar

Slow play has long been a scourge of professional golf, but who knew that it would extend to business deals?

The proposed alliance between the PGA TOUR and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, benefactors of LIV Golf, was first announced with a framework deal in June 2023.

Since then, it has been like a 6-foot putt in which the player reads the green, addresses the ball, backs off, reads it again from the other side, steps up again, and then backs off and asks his caddie to take a look.

Hit the ball, man.

The 2025 seasons are well underway, with this week's The Players Championship marking the unofficial start of the PGA TOUR's high-profile stretch, and there are few signs that a deal to bring "reunification," to use TOUR commissioner Jay Monahan's word, is close.

Rory McIlroy is something of a bellwether on the schism because he used to staunchly oppose the Saudi league. "I still hate LIV," he famously said when the framework deal was announced, before more recently talking up the need to rejoin forces. Last week, he sounded like he was leaning the other way again.

"It takes two to tango," he said before the Arnold Palmer Invitational, implying that the Saudi-LIV side was responsible for the stalled progress. McIlroy also said that while he knows the golf world would like "all the best players together again," he doesn't think the PGA TOUR needs a deal. "I think the momentum is pretty strong."

That much is up for debate. The early part of the TOUR season has again had some unfamiliar names at the top of leaderboards, and a number of stars have played sparingly due to injury.

But it is also striking how much the TOUR's business has changed in the months since it and the PIF announced what has amounted to a ceasing of hostilities. The TOUR brought in outside investors, sharply increased prize money, and designed a tier of big-money signature events intended to create star-laden Sunday leaderboards. There was also the launch of the TGL, the made-for-TV spectacle in which TOUR stars play on a simulator in a Florida arena, which has delivered decent-to-good television audiences in the United States.

Many of the changes were a direct response to LIV: the injection of money, the no-cut big events, the noisy spectacle of TGL with its contrived team format.

LIV itself, meanwhile, debuted its new season last month to disastrously low TV ratings despite moving to Fox Sports from The CW. After poaching Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton from the TOUR last year, this was the first of its four seasons to not begin with any new high-profile recruits. There have also been rumors that some of the initial defectors, like Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau, are interested in moving back once their contracts run out this season. (Those stories have been denied.)

But even if LIV has never come close to being the rival to the PGA TOUR once envisioned by its founder, PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, its mere existence could keep a real reunification from taking place. LIV players would struggle to manage a full schedule, which includes global travel, while playing enough TOUR events to maintain status.

And while guys like McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler will make plenty of cash in the newly flush TOUR events regardless of what happens with LIV, the players lower down on the money list who are fighting to make cuts (and earnings) every week would be severely impacted by a sudden influx of players from the Saudi league.

All of this makes a deal, at the least, uncertain. The one obvious solution would be for the PIF to fold LIV, invest in the TOUR, and become a visible presence in some way, while its players are given conditional TOUR status and allowed to play their way back into its good graces. But that probably would have happened at some point over the past two years if it was ever a realistic possibility.

And so the schism drags on. While guys like McIlroy and Scheffler will be at The Players Championship in Florida, LIV players like Koepka and Rahm will be at an event in Singapore that takes place in the evening hours in North America. Regardless of what anyone thinks of the Saudi-backed startup, there's no disputing that the TOUR has been harmed by the departure of talented and well-known stars.

The guys who stuck around can correctly feel like their situation is solid now. They play for much bigger purses, they're backed by new investors, and there's even TGL to bolster their profiles and bring in new sponsorships. But their TOUR, and the theater of the actual tournaments, would be better off with the LIV guys' return. Everyone knows this. Getting there is another question entirely. How do you unring that bell?

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.