for non-golf-attention-payers: for the past couple years there's been a small upstart golf association called LIV Golf1 -- underwritten by the Saudi Public Investment Fund -- which has been attempting to compete with the PGA, which has been a professional golf monopoly in North America for over 100 years. over the past couple years they bought out a handful of major professional golfers with big guaranteed paychecks, then the PGA attempted to enforce the anti-barnstorming2 clauses in their contracts, then they and/or LIV countersued the PGA on antitrust grounds.
as part of the merger, the PIF is getting a stake in PGA, and I can't help but wonder if this was their entire strategy to begin with. can't knock the hustle, but given the people hustling I absolutely can.
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tagline: "golf but louder". @aidan and I once looked up what actually made it Louder and the only thing we could find other than branding is that the pace of play is slightly faster because of the way they order groups of players moving around the course.
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the history of professional sports in the united states (also other places, but it was really prevalent in the US for a long time) is full of freelance players and teams going from city to city and playing exhibition matches for whoever will book them, and then as professional sports was fully industrialized post-war all of the sports associations decided that they wanted to get their beaks wet and made all of their athletes sign exclusivity agreements.