Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out It's the End of LIV Golf as We Knew It (and Trump Feels Fine) About this episode The president may have ended his favorite sport's civil war — by waging a war of his own. But what did we really learn from Saudi Arabia's multibillion-dollar golf experiment? Journalist Alan Shipnuck explains what insiders are texting about but won't say out loud: that golfers are the most overpaid athletes on Earth, that peacetime is suddenly more complicated for the PGA Tour... and that sportswashing is insidious because it works.
• Read "LIV and Let Die" https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/LIV-and-Let-Die/Alan-Shipnuck/9781668020012 by Alan Shipnuck
• Previously on PTFO: Phil Mickelson, the Pipeline and Trump's (Alleged) 14-Inch Pipe https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjkwZDJlYjhjNzJiNzg2OWUyNTc5Zjhj
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 It's interesting to think that Trump helped save live golf and then him waging war in Iran may end live golf.
0:15 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
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2:30 Speaker 01 I have a small problem here.
2:31 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say, a bleeding Alan Shipnuck, given the topic we're here to discuss, is something that raises questions immediately as your neck, your neck is-
2:41 Speaker 01 Can you see this?
2:42 Pablo Torre? I can. We can all see. Who did this to you, Alan? Let's start there.
2:48 Speaker 01 Are we recording?
2:48 Pablo Torre? We are recording. Who did this to you? I demand answers. I demand accountability.
2:54 Speaker 01 It's not Greg Norman, although he probably would have loved to have taken a knife to my throat at some point.
2:59 Pablo Torre? I don't know how many more convenient segues you can give me as you clutch a piece of toilet paper to a wound right at your Adam's apple. This is ridiculous.
3:11 Speaker 01 This is a public service announcement. Do not shave in a hurry before, you know, the most important podcast appearance of your entire career.
3:18 Pablo Torre? That's right.
3:19 Speaker 01 Huge mistake.
3:23 Speaker 01 I'm gonna, should I put a turtleneck on? Like, I'll legit put a turtleneck on.
3:26 Pablo Torre? I had no idea [bleep] Alan was gonna be bleeding from his neck.
3:28 Speaker 01 Hold on. I'm gonna turtleneck.
3:48 Pablo Torre? So now that you have your turtleneck on, you no longer have to staunch the bleeding. I do wanna get to the bleeding in the world of golf. I just regard you as one of the most plugged-in people that I know, certainly into this sport, certainly into the world of live. So just give me a sense, just behind the scenes, as the collapse, as the bleeding has been happening steadily into public view now, how would you explain this to someone who's not getting the texts and calls and the messages that you have been navigating over the last month now?
4:23 Speaker 01 I mean, Liv has been chaotic from day one. I remember one of their executives telling me back in 2022, "We're building the plane as we fly it." And now, the plane is crashing all around them. The wings just fell off. There's one engine left, it's smoking. Some of the windows have popped out and people are getting sucked out of the plane. Like, any number of metaphors we could come up with, but Liv has been chaos merchants this whole way through, and it could only end this way. Just total messiness, uncertainty, the information war between the tours, the players, the agents, everyone trying to carve out the future while they're trying to figure out what that's going to be in real time.
5:05 Speaker 01 It's just a perfect ending to this era of disruption and bullshery.
5:10 Speaker 04 Liv Golf's CEO has been trying to quell the speculation that the league is in deep financial trouble. Scott O'Neill sent a memo to his staff yesterday in which he insists the 2026 season of the controversial tour will continue as planned and uninterrupted. The Financial Times, among others, has reported that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund is on the verge of cutting its financial backing.
5:32 Speaker 05 Is there a warning to the world from golf? All that Saudi cash that's been lavished on sport, are we seeing the end of vanity investments?
5:41 Speaker 06 We'll start with huge breaking news that Liv Golf as we know it is over. As expected, the tour has just confirmed that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund will no longer provide financial backing, with chairman Yasser Al-Rumayyan also set to leave.
5:56 Speaker 04 Well, it looks like it's the end of the road, but as far as Liv are concerned, the show must go on.
6:04 Pablo Torre? I want to remind people of the decadence of the sales pitch, right? Because so much of what's happening, the schadenfreude, that everyone is hearing around sports around the collapse and the wounds. Liv, when it was born in 2022, for those who don't remember, what did it look and sound like?
6:25 Speaker 01 It was like if Louis XIV got into golf and sponsored a tournament. When you think of a golf tournament, you likely think of silence when the players are hitting their shots, but that is not how it works on the Liv Golf Tour.
6:37 Speaker 07 Golf, but louder. That's how Liv Golf wants to be known. Our approach is to treat it like an NBA game, or an NHL game, or an NFL
6:46 Speaker 01 Where the entire course is integrated like an arena. You know, they were chartering the 747s to fly players from A to B. They had their own personal drivers and they had their own chefs and they just took it to the illogical extreme and you know, shopping trips for the wives and you name it. Because they were trying to create a culture, they were trying to give players on the PGA Tour a reason to jump. And of course, when Liv arrived, there were only four tournaments on the PGA Tour that had a purse of more than $9 million. That doesn't count the majors, those are not conducted by the PGA Tour. And all of a sudden Liv showed up with $25 million purses. The scale of the money was unheard of.
7:30 Speaker 01 And then, those were for the weekly tournaments. Then they were signing these guaranteed deals and you know, Brooks Koepka's wing coach had a quote, you know, that Brooks deserves to be paid like an NFL quarterback. And he was, he got that contract.
7:44 Pablo Torre? Right, I mean, so Jon Rahm gets $300 million. Phil Mickelson, your boy, gets $200 million. Brooks Koepka, $130 million, as you just referenced. Dustin Johnson, $125 million.
7:55 Speaker 01 The flaw in that thinking was, and actually it was Rory McIlroy who pointed this out, and he's one of the guys who said no to Liv money. There was a tour event that was on the same day as like the AFC Championship game. And the ratings for the AFC Championship were 50 times what the PGA Tour event pulled. So you can't pay guys on the scale of Patrick Mahomes if they only deliver, you know, 2% of the eyeballs. Right now, professional golfers are the most overpaid athletes in any sport on a per eyeball basis. And that's because Liv just pumped the numbers up to a completely unsustainable level.
8:27 Pablo Torre? But the estimations of how much the PIF has lost on Liv, is there a back of the envelope math that you feel like makes sense?
8:38 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, I mean, $5 billion is a very solid number of what they've lost in less than five years.
8:49 Pablo Torre? So the reason I wanted to bring Alan Shipnuck, our journalist friend, back on the show is not to just throw dirt on the apparent grave of Live Golf, the subject Alan literally wrote the book about and has covered as closely as anybody. I wanted to have Alan back on because by understanding how boring old golf became this geopolitical soap opera, I suspect that we might find something out about the future of sports in general. Because when Live first launched, the premise of spending $5 billion in less than five years was not an indictment. It was an advertisement. "This is what Saudi Arabia can do." That was what was so eye-opening as much as anything. The Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund,
9:33 Pablo Torre? the PIF, the Public Investment Fund, at the discretion of Yassir Al-Rumayyan, who was the head of it. But above him, of course, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, deploying their sum total of about $900 billion that they had to distribute. And they chose the PGA Tour, the most country-club, traditionalist sports organization in America, arguably, as their first big project.
9:59 Speaker 01 You know, Live was never really about golf. It was about soft power. And it was a chance for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to buy access to the Western world, to its thought leaders, its political leaders, who all love golf. In Washington, DC, all the politicians hang out at Burning Tree Golf Club.
10:19 Pablo Torre? But at some point late last year, it began to look like Saudi Arabia's unlimited budget, which had reportedly also guaranteed $125 million to Bryson DeChambeau, for instance, might actually have limits, after all.
10:36 Speaker 01 And it really goes back to December, when Brooks Koepka announced he was returning to the PGA Tour. That was a Christmas surprise. And that was the first crack in the wall, that things were happening behind the scenes that not everybody was privy to. And then Patrick Reed followed. So at that point, you know, things are happening. From a business standpoint, things are not going well at Live.
11:00 Pablo Torre? And by the end of February, President Donald Trump, the golfer-in-chief himself, who was scheduled to host two Live events at his courses this year, also decided to do this.
11:17 Speaker 04 A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
11:25 Pablo Torre? Liv's executives tried to dismiss Saudi Arabia's collateral financial damage from the war as just a flesh wound. But in April, the Saudi Public Investment Fund finally presented its new five-year plan. A plan which focused on, quote, "maximizing financial returns" and "strengthening investment efficiency." Sounding more like McKinsey than the money waterfall that would eternally keep sports properties in America going up and to the right. In fact, this plan ultimately reduced Saudi Arabia's international investments by 10%.
12:05 Pablo Torre? At which point, I started monitoring what the sports industry was thinking about the war in Iran.
12:13 Speaker 01 People made the parallel very quickly. In fact, I tweeted, you know, now that oil prices are going to skyrocket, maybe Liv can re-sign Bryson because the Saudi economy is tied very closely to the price of oil. But then the refineries were starting, you know, getting set on fire by drone attacks and the straits were closed and you couldn't export the oil. So the whole situation is so volatile. But if you're paying attention, this was always going to be a thing. And then, of course, in April, when the PIF dropped this five-year strategic plan, they made it very clear they were reducing their discretionary spending. And it wasn't just Liv Golf, right? PIF was going to underwrite Tom Brady's flag football league. That went away.
12:54 Speaker 01 Snooker is a huge sport in Europe and parts of the Middle East. And Saudi Arabia has sponsored the Snooker Masters. And they had a 10-year deal and they canceled that after two years. They're selling one of their soccer teams in the Saudi League the PIF owns. So sports is consolidating, I think, around F1, around, you know, English Premier, like some of these mega franchises. But sort of the vanity projects, the gambles, the like, let's take a flyer on this, like, those are going away.
13:24 Pablo Torre? The theory was, we're going to diversify our portfolio as a country, as a sovereign wealth fund, from just oil into all of these things. And sports was seemingly going to be their main artery towards that. And yet... As all of this was happening, it turns out, oh, right. But the way to buy up all of those things, to fund all of those things, was with oil.
13:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, and for decades, there were no professional sports activities in Saudi Arabia. It was only when MBS seized power and there was a young restless population. He's like, we gotta distract these people. And so then it was like, let's bring on the sports. And so they, they just said yes to everything. And now as time has gone by, they've seen what works, what doesn't, what people care about, what's losing billions of dollars every year. And so there was, there was a gold rush sort of fever around 2015, 16, 17, when MBS assumed power and they just launched all these initiatives. This league was a monument to decadence and that, that's gonna end. On golf Twitter, we call it Zombie Live.
14:32 Speaker 01 You know, it may, it may keep going for a year or two because they have to fulfill contracts, which they've signed with venues and boards of tourism and corporations and players. But Live, as we know it, looks like it's dead.
14:45 Pablo Torre? But I wonder if this has said to you anything about what the ceiling was for this project to begin with?
14:55 Speaker 01 Live Golf began as the premier golf league and it was dreamed up by these Brits who were just disgruntled golf fans. And the reason the PGA Tour was vulnerable to a challenge is because it never really had had a competitor. And any business without a competitor is gonna get stale and bloated and inefficient and maybe a little boring. And that was the PGA Tour. And so the premier golf league sought to reimagine what professional golf could be. They brought on the Saudis as investors. The Saudis, specifically Al Rumaian, pledged $500 million to try and launch this premier golf league. They could never sign the players. They just, they weren't closers. And ultimately, the Saudis were like, okay, we can do this without them. And they more or less cut and pasted the entire Premier Golf League format.
15:38 Speaker 01 The fifty-four hole shotguns, the purses, the fourteen tournament schedules, that was all from the Premier Golf League. The Saudis shamelessly ripped it off, and in fact, now they're getting sued finally by the founders of the Premier Golf League, which is a whole other story. But the key thing that the Premier Golf League was selling was a ten-year plan. They said, is it going to take us ten years to make this sustainable? There's massive costs upfront to sign players, to build infrastructure, like it's going to take ten years. And Liv hired some of the consultants who helped the Premier Golf League. The same humans went from one side to the next, and they were always preaching it's a ten-year plan because they knew how long it was going to take. And ultimately, Yassir didn't have the stomach for it, or more specifically, his boss did not.
16:20 Speaker 01 We're only in year five, and so Liv Golf has made, ironically, has made some progress. Their revenue is going to be up this year. They brought on some blue chip sponsors in HSBC and Rolex and Workday. The individual teams have had some success in attracting more endemic sponsorship from golf club manufacturers and apparel. When they went to South Africa and Australia this year, they had over a hundred thousand fans on site. They sold out the premium hospitality in Korea. They signed this TV deal all throughout Asia. So things that were starting to turn, obviously, they got world ranking points, which was a huge deal to try and attract some young players. Like, the depth of the field has gotten much stronger by bringing in some good young players.
17:05 Speaker 01 So Liv was making progress. It was halting and it was slow, but signs were there. But ultimately, we're never going to know what they could have done in five more years because that's asking for a tremendous amount of patience and tremendous amount of capital, and that's just not how the world works. You can't game plan a war in your backyard like it's happened to the Saudis. You don't know what's going to happen in the next presidential election, and no one in today's world has ten years.
17:31 Pablo Torre? I want to get to the sort of timeline here in a second, but yeah, look, one of the most famous quotes was the one that you got from Phil Mickelson that he resented and continues to resent, I can only imagine, because he said to you as you're writing your book on him, quote, "We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates." And so, again, in that infamous quote about the scary motherfuckers, as he calls them, that are the Saudi authorities, there was already this notion of, yes, but there is
18:12 Pablo Torre? a transaction that is worth it. What's interesting to me is the plan and the strategy and who are the parties who most could use a partner like Saudi Arabia. And so, I bring it back to Vision 2030. And that was Saudi Arabia's grand plan, and it was launched in 2016. You may recall something else that happened that was quite pivotal later in 2016.
18:38 Speaker 01 The Fox News Decision Desk has called Pennsylvania for Donald Trump. This means that Donald Trump will be the 45th President of the United States. One of the few times golf as an institution ever showed any backbone was when the PGA of America pulled the PGA Championship from Trump Bedminster, is in reaction to some of the inflammatory rhetoric of the presidential campaign. And the PGA Tour repudiated Trump. They took away his event at Doral, sent it across the wall to Mexico City. The LPGA and Trump had been longtime partners. That ended. The British Open has famously repudiated
19:21 Speaker 01 Trump and refused to bring the Open Championship to Trump Turnberry. Golf means more to Trump than any of us can ever imagine, because he's always found a way to buy himself into the highest echelons of society. The one thing you cannot do is buy your way into the great old clubs of America. So he was never allowed to become a member at Augusta National or Pine Valley. And you can, you can buy the biggest, ugliest house in Florida in Mar-a-Lago, but you can't buy your way into Seminole Golf Club. And this burned Trump to the core that golf had always turned its back on him. And so he had to create this, this whole empire of his own clubs in his image with the tacky waterfalls and the Roman columns and all that stuff.
20:05 Speaker 01 And so hosting these tournaments was, was this, was the pat on the head from the establishment he'd always needed. Like, we still don't want you as a member, but we will bring our, our tournament to your venue and, and we'll, we'll accept you in that manner. But then he lost all the tournaments and that wounded him so deeply. And the only organization that would, that would take on Trump, who was so radioactive in the golf world, was Live Golf. Well, I've known these people for a long time in Saudi Arabia and they've been friends of mine for a long time. They've invested in many American companies. They own big percentages of many, many American companies.
20:46 Speaker 01 And frankly, what they're doing for golf is so great. What they're doing for the players is so great. The salaries are going to go way up. The PGA was not loved by a lot of the players, as you know, for a long time. They were desperate for somewhere to play. He had some pretty good golf courses. He raised his hand. And so, you know, the first season, two of the first eight events on Live were at Trump venues. And so they became allies. And he played in the Pro-Am with His Excellency Yassir Al-Rumayyan. And this was just another way that the Saudi money could flow to the Trump family. Just like MBS gave a billion dollars to his son-in-law Jared Kushner for his investment portfolio. They were always allies when, during the first Trump presidency.
21:28 Speaker 01 And so that was Trump's way back into the golf world. It's interesting to think that Trump helped save Live Golf. And then him waging war in Iran may end Live Golf. He's going to lose the tournaments that he was being paid to host. Like this all comes full circle.
21:46 Pablo Torre? It's remarkable, man, how symmetrical some of this is.
21:49 Speaker 01 I mean. The PGA Tour had, it was a proud institution. It did not have the money that the Saudis did. It still doesn't, but they've won this war. You couldn't buy Rory or Scottie. You couldn't buy a membership at Augusta National, which you see or crave. The legacy of professional golf turns out not to be for sale. People still care about the old tournaments and the old venues. And you can't just crash the party with a lot of money. And of course, Trump's in the middle of all of it. Because after he was reelected, you know, one of the first things he did was try and call together the leaders in golf on both sides.
22:25 Pablo Torre? Yes.
22:26 Speaker 01 I feel like he cared more about finding peace in professional golf than he did finding peace in Gaza. He was way more emotionally invested in trying to, in trying to solve this, this war in golf. And in a roundabout way, he has. It's not how he envisioned in some grand handshake on the South Lawn, but he's played a role.
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24:19 Pablo Torre? One of the first thoughts I had while thinking about this unfolding story was that Liv's whole war against the PGA Tour was not the most cost-effective way to sportswash Saudi Arabia's human rights record in retrospect. You know, the whole bone sawing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the whole thing, for instance, about how President Donald Trump was hosting a tournament at his course in New Jersey over the protests of the families of 9/11 victims who physically showed up. My sense was, if you're gonna spend $5 billion to normalize the kingdom, you probably could have just spent your money backing an incumbent American sports organization
25:04 Pablo Torre? instead of trying to build an unsustainable rebel league in order to antagonize one. But while talking to Alan Shipnuck, something jarring did occur to me as we continued the postmortem of this mission. Because what if you consider the fact that the PGA Tour already surrendered its supposed moral high ground in this battle? And what if Saudi Arabia also already got almost everything that it wanted?
25:39 Speaker 01 You look at the alliances that the PIF and the Saudis have forged with Trump through Liv Golf. Liv has been successful at going to these world capitals and conducting tournaments, whether it's been in Seoul, Korea, or it's been in Tokyo. It's been Mexico City. And for one week, they take over the town and they entertain the political and the business elite. And who knows how many deals have been cut for the PIF out of those weeks? And maybe that justifies the outlay of $5 to $6 billion they spent on Liv Golf. When Liv went to Adelaide a few years ago, the premier of Southern Australia, you know, reaffirmed this long-term commitment that Australia has to...
26:17 Speaker 01 You know, supply Saudi Arabia with billions of dollars every year of beef and wheat and barley and all these, all these things. So on one level, if you can feed your population, if you can distract them and you can, you can prevent political unrest and regime change, it's definitely worth Jon Rahm's contract. And so you can't judge Liv as a traditional business or traditional sports league because the goals were very different. It wasn't necessarily to make money. It wasn't necessarily to export the values of golf. It was to win hearts and minds around the world. It was to sports watch the Saudi atrocities. And there's a really interesting piece of history here where the first ever professional golf tournament in Saudi Arabia was scheduled
27:00 Speaker 01 for January of 2019. It was the Saudi International that was dreamed up by Yassir Al-Rumayyan. It's going to be part of the European tour schedule. And a couple of months earlier, Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated and the entire Western world was pulling back from the Saudis. You know, Jeff Bezos canceled an appearance over there and Ari Emanuel, he canceled the $400 million deal he'd been chasing for years. Richard Branson pulled out of a big deal with the PIF. And at a moment where the Saudi elite were desperate for allies, the European tour still conducted its tournament. And that was a monumental moment when, when the entire regime was vulnerable. And I think that was a fundamental
27:45 Speaker 01 affirmation that golf is our friend and we can count on these guys and they can help us achieve what we want politically.
27:53 Pablo Torre? The other thing I'm looking at, this portfolio, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, they're looking elsewhere, right? And so soft power, I mean, this is the reminder. You know, golf was one avenue, but it seems like the other one that they decided to go in back was, oh, right, Paramount. They're spending $110 billion to go take over Warner Brothers. And I'll just quote this line from the Hollywood Reporter. "The filing by Paramount Skydance with the Securities and Exchange Commission did not outline how much the funds plan to contribute, but sources familiar with the investment said the total amount was around $24 billion, with Saudi Arabia's PIF contributing about $12 billion and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar putting up around $6 billion each. This is part of a broader push by the country to curry favor with Trump
28:35 Pablo Torre? by influencing Washington and also keep young Saudi eyes and minds on the screens, not on questions of human rights." And so, from the perspective inside of golf,
28:48 Pablo Torre? what is the attitude from the PGA side of things? How much of the sports washing stuff is part of the golf conversation? How much of it is actually, "You guys tried to kill us and look who's bleeding now"?
29:03 Speaker 01 A big talking point in the first year of LIV was the sports washing. And Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, famously said, "You know, no one's ever had to apologize..."
29:12 Speaker 04 ...for being a member of the PGA Tour.
29:15 Speaker 01 And they co-opted the 9/11 families and the tour leaned in heavily on that. And it made sense because the tour was a proud American institution and you had these scary motherfuckers coming in and trying to take it over. And so then it blew up on Monahan specifically, but the tour in general, when after a year of fighting, they tried to cut a deal with the Public Investment Fund. And then they looked like the ultimate hypocrites.
29:38 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
29:39 Speaker 04 And so, what's happened today, and to your earlier question, is we've recognized that together, we can have a far greater impact on this game than we can working apart. And I give Yasser great credit for coming to the table, coming to discussions with an open heart and an open mind. We did the same and the game of golf is better for what we've done here today.
30:03 Speaker 01 The moral argument is fine until you give it up to take the money. And in the beginning, the players were pounded with these questions about sports washing, about Kaschogi, about human rights, about MBS. And by year two, those had mostly gone away. And you know, Bryson DeChambeau famously said, "We're done with that. We talked about that last year." And it was kind of effective. And so, sports washing is insidious because it works. There's been very little conversation in the last three years about sports washing. It's just completely gone away and that's why you do it. The whole Paramount deal is interesting because CBS gets swept up in this and CBS is the home of the Masters and the home of the PGA Tour. And so, there's been some thinking like that played a role
30:46 Speaker 01 in the PIF shutting down LIV Golf because we can't own both sides of the competition. We're fighting amongst ourselves if we're funding LIV and we're televising the PGA Tour. So, you know, depending on your level of conspiracy theory, you know, that may have been a factor. So, we're just left to speculate in this vacuum.
31:06 Pablo Torre? Donald Trump doesn't seem to have any hesitation about playing both sides here. We are talking as he has just again hosted this tournament, a live tournament at Trump National in Washington DC. And the PGA was at Doral the week before for the 2026 Cadillac Championship. It was the first PGA Tour event to be held at one of Trump's properties since he became the president. And so even as all of the chaos is swirling and erupting, Trump is, as always, cashing in everywhere.
31:40 Speaker 01 Elections have consequences, and when he won again, the PGA Tour finally said, okay, what can we do? He's the President of the United States, he wants to have a tournament, let's give him a tournament. So they went back to Doral. I mean, as an artistic endeavor, it was a total failure. The stands were empty, the golf course was boring, there was no buzz at all to that tournament. You know, Rory McIlroy, the Masters champ, skipped it. The tournament was a complete dud in every way, but it still made Donald Trump whole. He got a tournament back from the PGA Tour. And so, yeah, you're right, he's always gonna find a way to maneuver into any situation. And he's done that quite effectively with the golf. However, the Royal Ancient still refuses to give him an open.
32:24 Speaker 01 Like, and I've talked to some of those old boys over there, these Tweety gents who run that thing. And they're basically, their stance is over our dead body. And even though the Scottish government's put a lot of pressure on them, they refuse to do it. Like, they just gave the open in 2028 to Royal Lythman St. Anne's, which is a course that nobody likes, totally artless. And Turnberry's beautiful and wonderful and has all this great history. They won't do it. Like, they're the last line of defense. And it's kind of delicious in its own way, but everyone else in golf has come back to Trump. He's the sitting president, and he knows where the pressure points are, and so he's getting his way.
33:01 Pablo Torre? But the idea that even as the PGA is capitulating to Donald Trump, that there are places in this world, there are places in the world of golf, that will not abide by him, because they do have some sense of a code that is not simply financial, it is, in the way that you put it, the thing that I do almost perversely love about sports. And this is the through line through this whole story, which is you could have $900 billion at your disposal. You could have all the money in the world. You could be the president of the [bleep] United States. But there are some things that money cannot buy you when
33:40 Pablo Torre? it comes to sports. And as much as I have never thought of a golf club as a place that could be a fortress against the power of money, it does remind me that some things can't be bought. And that might be the only thing left in terms of a moral high ground or anything resembling one that professional sports can offer us at this point.
34:06 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, Al Rubaiyan openly coveted a green jacket to become a member of Augusta National. That would have been the ultimate acceptance of the Western world. That would have given him access to the halls of power in a way that almost nothing else could. And when there was this short-lived sort of truce between the tour and Liv and these consultants put together this prospectus of what the deal would entail tucked into the small print was that Yousseir wanted to become a member of Augusta National. And of course, the best way to not become a member of Augusta National is to ask to become a member of Augusta National. Like, that's just not how it's done. And so there's always been this thinking, like,
34:48 Speaker 01 he was willing to light $5 billion on fire if he could have gotten a green jacket. When it became clear that wasn't gonna happen, he's like, I'm out. Fuck it. And there's this weird code in the golf world. And, you know, Trump's never gonna become a member of any of these great old clubs, even though he's been elected president twice and everything else. It's never gonna happen for him. And that burns him so deeply. And it drives a lot of his behavior. I truly believe that.
35:13 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I think much like Alan Shipnuck's neck, he has a lot of scar tissue at this point around this topic. Oh, look at that.
35:23 Pablo Torre? Heels, almost, almost.
35:25 Speaker 01 No, I think I just reopened it and then clawed it against my turtleneck.
35:29 Pablo Torre? I should say.
35:29 Speaker 01 It's probably dripping down my chest right now.
35:31 Pablo Torre? The flip side of this metaphor is that sometimes you can just pick at a scab and it starts bleeding all over again.
35:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, which in some ways that's, that's what this, this whole story's become, you know, that the scab picking is going to go on throughout 2026, the recriminations and the [BLEEP] is turned up to full volume right now as, as everyone's posturing for who needs whom more. Arban Lahiri, he's a very B-list golfer who plays on Live Golf and he, but he's made $35 million since Live launched and he said, I don't even want to go back to the PGA Tour. And I was like, we don't want you anyway. The tenor of the debate is so juvenile and and then it's not going to end in, in 26 because if Zombie Live goes on and if Jon Rahm is trapped there because of this ironclad contract and he's frittering away his prime years and he's miserable.
36:22 Speaker 01 It's a never-ending story and I mean, I remember when golf used to be boring.
36:27 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
36:28 Speaker 01 And now we've got the President of the United States, we have the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, we have war in Iran, we have, we have Bryson in the Oval Office, like it, it's, we've gone from the, the sports page, the business page, the front page. It's been an incredible ride.
36:42 Pablo Torre? The news that Yassir Al-Rumayyan had stepped down from Live's board of directors was April 29th. And who's running it now? Like, how does that work?
36:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, the PIF is going to continue funding it for the rest of this season, but Yassir pulling out, it was obviously very symbolic. It also was to me a total act of cowardice. Like, this was his project from the beginning. The captain should go down with this ship and like, for him not to try and stick around and solve this, I thought was weak sauce. That was a big deal for him to cut and run. And so, you know, they, they brought in this new CEO, Scott O'Neill, who's, who's very dynamic. He's about a year and a half into his tenure.
37:20 Pablo Torre? Formerly from Madison Square Garden and the 76ers.
37:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so this is now his problem to solve. Can you reimagine Live and can you get some investment to keep it going? The answer might be yes. I talked to a couple of Live executives after Al-Rumayyan, you know, pulled up stakes. And of course they only ever speak on background. You can't use their name, which is frustrating, but one of them said, Like just look at the money that's pouring into professional sports at every level, men's and women's, and you can now get in on live for pennies on the dollar. We have all these deals in place. There is a lot of infrastructure on the TV side. We have venues, we have big markets, world capitals. It's potentially a great value. And they also have the corporate support that's in place and they have boards of tourism
38:09 Speaker 01 who are on board. But what the, no one knows if they have players.
38:12 Pablo Torre? Right.
38:13 Speaker 01 That is in fact, the product. So, so the players are waiting to see how it's going to shake out. And how, if you're Scott O'Neil, how you sell the future when you don't know what the future is and neither do the players. That's the ultimate balancing act. But again, there is a path forward for live, but it's never going to be the noisy, splashy, disruptive force that it hoped to be.
38:36 Pablo Torre? I just want to reread one of the quotes from Scott O'Neil, who again, not an easy hand to play, given everything you've described, the war in Iran, perhaps the most unmanageable of all of the economic threats. But he was on the TNT broadcast. It was Liv's Tournament of Mexico City in mid-April and he, he says, quote, "Liv Golf is in the best shape it's ever been in, period, end of sentence." And I would play that video for you, except the video has been deleted.
39:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
39:07 Pablo Torre? Which feels also a bit perfect for this story.
39:12 Speaker 01 And one executive said to me, "How many people hated Liv Golf because of the Saudi influence?" Probably two thirds of all the haters was around the Saudis. And now you take that away. It should make us more attractive to golf fans, it should make us more attractive to corporations. You know, we're not radioactive. We're an independent sports league. So they're trying to turn into a positive. Yeah, we lost all their money, but we also lost their baggage too. But again, it, you can't, you can't have a professional sports league without the athletes. And that's what it's going to come down to. Bryson is of course, the biggest domino here. Jon Rahm's important symbolically, but he does not move the needle anywhere like, like Bryson does. And if Liv can re-sign Bryson and maybe they just give him a piece of the league, you
39:55 Speaker 01 know, here, you can have 25% equity of Liv Golf, like. It creates some weirdness, but it also might be what it takes to sign him. It would appeal to Bryson, like, you know, Tom Brady never owned a piece of the NFL. Tiger Woods never owned a piece of the PGA Tour. Like, that might be how they can get his deal done. If they can keep Bryson and his juice and his online presence. They have a lot of good young talent signed to deals that are really gonna have nowhere else to play. I mean, Liv could remain a somewhat intriguing proposition, but of course, there's many ifs built into that sentence.
40:29 Pablo Torre? I mean, like, the program that the PGA launched, right? The Returning Member Program, which is just funny. It's like a gun buyback program for people who went to live. We're like, we're repatriating all of these exiles. I know Brooks Koepka accepted it, and that was, yes, extremely notable in terms of like the weather vane pointing in one direction. But the PGA just has to be loving this, man.
40:51 Speaker 01 You mentioned the Returning Players Program, which was so delicious because the Tour just made it up willy-nilly. And one of the criteria was if you'd won a major championship, you know, since 2022. Guess who won a major in 2021 who they want to give a giant middle finger to? Phil Mickelson. Like, they could have extended that window one more year and Phil would have been eligible. But that was Tiger Woods and others just saying, just turning the knife on Phil. So, yeah, they can craft some very narrow language that could get Bryson back, could get Jon Rahm back if they want to. And you may have seen this today, this is a broke today, Pablo, that the Tour is revamping its social media policies for its members
41:34 Speaker 01 and giving them more latitude for what they post, how much they post, how much content they can capture at tournaments. Clearly, this is directed toward Bryson as a carrot. And it'll benefit other players, it'll benefit the Tour, like, they've always been a few steps behind. So this is overdue anyway, but the timing is not an accident. Well, there's this whole wooing process going on, and Bryson's talking about, well, maybe I won't go back to the Tour. I'll just play YouTube golf now to stay sharp. And so now the Tour has to figure out how they can sustain itself wildly overpaying its players. But that, they've won the war, but now can they survive the peace? You know, that's the question for the Tour. The chess pieces are always moving on the board, and that's what's so delicious about this.
42:14 Pablo Torre? It seems like the president likes the cut of his jib, Alan.
42:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
42:19 Speaker 07 Bryson's amazing. I mean, as I say, he's somebody that can put on 25, 30 at one point. I guess he put on almost fifty pounds. You remember, he looked like a linebacker for the
42:29 Speaker 01 He was very heavy.
42:30 Speaker 07 And he decided he didn't like himself at that weight. It was all muscle, guy. It was crazy. He looked like a massive football player. You wouldn't want to play him in hockey. And he said he didn't like it. He developed too much speed. This is a problem with people. He had too much speed. He wanted to bring it down a little bit. So he lost it. He can put on weight, like up and down like a yo-yo, and he doesn't take the shot, okay?
43:00 Speaker 07 He doesn't need the fat shot. He just, I said, "Do you ever take this shot?" He didn't even know what the hell I was talking about. What shot? No, he can put it on. He's a scientist. He's like a scientist with his body.
43:11 Speaker 01 When he did put on those fifty pounds in a very short period of time, and it's in my book, Live and Let Die, I detailed his diet. And someone close to Bryson, I asked him this, I said, "How is, you know, how is he processing this? Like, that's gotta be hard on your body." They said, "Well, his bowel movements are volcanic." So I've always loved that word.
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45:21 Pablo Torre? We haven't really even talked about Phil Mickelson.
45:25 Speaker 01 I know.
45:26 Pablo Torre? Who's MIA right now for reasons that everyone is, again, texting about, but no one will say out loud for reasons that I think only inspire follow-up investigations on my show and perhaps on your cellphone. But the question of like, wait a minute, he's fighting to reopen this oil pipeline off the coast of California. We showed in a previous episode an extraordinarily graphic text having to do with President Trump.
45:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
45:55 Pablo Torre? And also, by the way, the federal government is looking into that same company, Sable Offshore. And he's like currently, in this episode, also receiving votes for being messy. That's where golf is right now.
46:09 Speaker 01 More than that, he was one of the key pieces. And he's a founding father of Live Golf. And he helped pay the lawyers who wrote some of the constitution of Live Golf. Like, he's been there from the beginning. And this whole thing is disintegrating around him. And he's completely gone underground. It's wild. You're talking about one of the key protagonists in this entire drama. And even though he's been out of sight, it doesn't slow anything down. The story has so much momentum that you can lose a Phil Mickelson. Second most important golfer of our lifetime.
46:44 Pablo Torre? Yes.
46:45 Speaker 01 And the greatest content machine the sport's ever known. And, and nothing skips a beat. Like, it's absolutely incredible.
46:52 Pablo Torre? Yeah, I will merely quote Phil Mickelson here at the very end from November 8th, 2025, at 7:23 PM Eastern, when he replied to my tweet by saying, quote, "I've never heard of you and have no idea who you are, but given what I know to be true and what you report, you're tabloid and I'll wait for the right opportunity." Period. Thumbs up emoji. Phil Mickelson, if you are out there and listening, I dare say that the right opportunity may have arrived. And if you want to talk to me, or Alan Shepnek, if I may speak on your behalf for a second here, Alan, I think both of us would love to hear from Phil. Both of us would welcome the opportunity for a follow-up episode.
47:31 Speaker 01 It's time. I mean, he's gonna have to emerge at some point. And there's gonna be an accounting, you know, it's just inevitable. The people need to hear Phil because in some ways, he's been vindicated, you know. His, his two biggest beefs to me were that the, the players on the PGA Tour did not have enough say in their governance, and that they were underpaid. And as soon as Liv arrived, the tour blew up its entire governance structure to give the players all the power. He was right about that. And they turned the spigot on, and the money started flowing out of the reserves. And so Phil was right again. But because of who he is and the way he conducts his business, no one wants to give him credit.
48:11 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's time for him to speak. It's time for him to make like Alan Shepnek and just open up a vein.
48:18 Speaker 01 Yes.
48:20 Speaker 01 I, I can't top that. I, I think we're done here, Paul.
48:31 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
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