Inside Phil Mickelson's Backdoor Dealings With the Saudis' LIV Golf ...

Phil Mickelson has always been obsessed with money, owing to a life of conspicuous consumption (his own Gulf-stream IV, etc.), a visceral hatred of paying taxes, and a self-described gambling addiction. In 2013, he made a flippant comment to reporters bitching about California’s state income tax, touching off one of the many uproars in his messy public life. Mickelson’s next stop on the PGA Tour after that comment went public was at a pretournament press conference at Torrey Pines Golf Course in La Jolla, California. Before going into the media center, he huddled in the parking lot for nearly an hour with his publicist and a couple of Tour officials, plotting the best way to talk himself out of yet another jam of his own making.

One of the other assembled men said, “The problem, Phil, is that fans don’t want to hear complaining from a guy making forty million dollars a year—”

Mickelson cut him off: “It’s fifty million.”

Mickelson had good reason to keep track of every dollar. In 2016, he became ensnared in the insider trading case of the renowned gambler Billy Walters. Named as a relief defendant, he repaid to the government $932,738.12 for his “alleged ill-gotten gains” plus $105,291.69 in interest but was never charged with wrongdoing. As part of their investigation, government investigators conducted a forensic audit of his finances from 2010 to 2014. According to a source with direct access to the documents, Mickelson had claimed $40 million in gambling losses during that period. That may or may not explain why he chased the PGL money and then the Saudi dough so hard.

But Mickelson had other motivations for wanting to watch the PGA Tour burn while siding with the guys holding the matches. He had long butted heads with Tour commissioner Tim Finchem and his successor, Jay Monahan. He hated how bloated the Tour had become. Brandel Chamblee recalls a long-ago B.C. Open at which he and Mickelson had been paired. “Knowing that I was on the Player Advisory Council,” says Chamblee, “he spent the whole time in my ear saying the PGA Tour should be reduced to only thirty players—nothing but the stars. He was totally oblivious to the fact that it would eliminate my job.” Mickelson hated the opposite-field events conducted for the Tour middle class in the same weeks as the World Golf Championships, rightfully pointing out that they diluted the Tour’s overall product. He hated putting on a show for the fans for two practice rounds and two tournament rounds, all the while signing a million autographs but not earning a dollar in the weeks he missed the cut. He really hated that the PGA Tour barred players from accepting appearance fees, whereas every other major circuit allowed the top players to scoop them up. He hated that in his best year he had earned “only” $6.9 million on the Tour while the stars in team sports were making five and six and seven times that. As he became a snarky social media presence, he came to hate the Tour’s stringent media rights policies, which prevented him from monetizing his own highlights. He hated that the NBA was making money for its players by selling NFTs while the Tour, per usual, lagged behind. Both in public and in private he raged against all of that, but Finchem and then Monahan simply patted him on the head and sent him on his way like a petulant child. Mickelson longed to be validated and even celebrated as an agent of change. He needed to be right and for the world to know it. The Saudis were the perfect bedfellows: desperate for star power and leadership to launch their breakaway league, they were happy to give Mickelson everything he had always wanted.

The week of the 2021 PGA Championship altered the trajectory of Mickelson’s life—and of professional golf. Majed Al-Souror, CEO of Golf Saudi and the Saudi Golf Federation, rented a big house near the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina, and a steady procession of agents and players swung by to listen to sales pitches. Many had been down a similar road with the Premier Golf League, the would-be competitor to the PGA Tour that never got off the ground, but the PGL founder Andy Gardiner had been selling merely an idea and the dream of future riches; Al-Souror had cash on the barrelhead, and loads of it. The numbers were so big as to provoke disbelief, even giddiness. On the putting green and driving range, in the locker room and parking lot, there was a new refrain: “‘What’s your number?’” says James Hahn, the PGA Tour veteran. “Everyone had a number.” For many it was strictly theoretical but still a fun exercise.

With that as a backdrop, Mickelson summoned one of the defining performances of a legendary career, storming to victory at that PGA Championship and, a month shy of his fifty-first birthday, becoming the oldest man to win a major championship. It was the ultimate mic drop. His legacy complete—give or take a U.S. Open—he had only one thing left to do: reinvent himself. Golf Saudi had already been dangling a monster offer. According to a veteran agent who had many discussions with Al-Souror and who ultimately sent a couple of players to LIV, “I have it on good authority that they had been offering Phil a three-year deal in the low nine figures. After he won the PGA, it went to four years and the dollars nearly doubled.” That represented generational wealth and confirmed what Mickelson had always believed: he deserved LeBron money, Curry money, Brady money, Trout money.

Mickelson became increasingly enmeshed with the Saudis. He and three other players he declined to name—but whom various insiders would later cite as Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, and Bryson DeChambeau—hired lawyers to write the operating agreement for the new league, codifying that the players would get their way. That was either smart business or supreme disloyalty—perhaps both.

Throughout the 2021 season, the whispers grew louder: the Saudis are coming. Then, two days before Halloween, the pieces on the chessboard finally began to move when Golf Saudi announced that it had hired a CEO for a new venture called LIV Golf Investments: Greg fucking Norman. Who else could it have been? For three decades, ever since his dreams of his renegade World Tour had been shattered by Finchem and mocked by his peers, Norman had been waiting, lurking, hoping, praying for one last chance to stick it to the Tour. Making Norman the figurehead of whatever the Saudis were scheming wasn’t merely a hiring; it was a declaration of war. “They could not possibly have selected a more divisive, controversial, or, frankly, disliked figure than Greg Norman,” says Deane Beman, Finchem’s predecessor and the man who built the modern PGA Tour. “It was a very clear signal that they did not want to work within the existing structures of professional golf.”

In all the hoopla surrounding Norman’s hiring, there was no mention yet of a top-tier new circuit with extravagant purses to compete against the PGA Tour, only that LIV Golf had committed $300 million over the next ten years to the Asian Tour to back a new ten-event series of tournaments. (LIV is the Roman numerals for 54, theoretically the perfect score in a round of golf if every hole is birdied on a par 72; but wouldn’t a perfect round feature at least one eagle?) The investment in the Asian Tour provoked much confusion. It had long been a backwater of professional golf, a last chance for players not good enough to make it in the United States or Europe. Why on earth would anyone pour $300 million into a tour known for its bureaucratic inefficiency and sometimes dodgy tournament offerings? In fact, the Golf Saudi press release summarized the situation quite well, saying that the Asian Tour investment would “set in motion a number of momentous developments for professional golf worldwide.”

Mickelson approved of Norman’s hiring. The two have never been close but have always recognized each other as kindred spirits. “We respect each other’s point of view,” Norman says. “We understand market value and that the [PGA] Tour works for us, we don’t work for the Tour. Phil asks tough questions. He’s not here to placate anybody. He’s got a mind of his own and his own opinions, which can be incredibly strong and poignant.”

So the Saudis had made their first gambit. (One of Mickelson’s favorite TV shows is The Queen’s Gambit. “It fits his obsessive personality,” his wife, Amy, told me.) Now all eyes were on Mickelson. Everyone in the interconnected golf world knew he was working both sides of the street; he had already reached out to a variety of players to quietly gauge their interest in the new Saudi superleague. “I think Phil recruited every player on the PGA Tour except for me,” says one veteran who ultimately signed with LIV Golf. “I started wondering, Do I have BO? Bad breath? Why won’t Phil call me? It sort of hurt my feelings.”

After a dalliance with the PGL and amid a flirtation with the Saudis, Mickelson, incredibly, began pitching yet another breakaway tour, this one largely underwritten by a billionaire from the sports betting world and the private equity behemoth Silver Lake. The unnamed league proposed an eight-event team series that would be tucked into the PGA Tour schedule. Six of the events would have $20 million purses, while the other two would offer $50 million. Half of the league would be owned by investors and half by players. If this sounds familiar, it’s because, a PGL source says, “Phil got access to all of our work and started shopping it around.” Talks went as high as Monahan and Ed Herlihy, the chairman of the PGA Tour’s board of directors. Herlihy is a leading mergers and acquisitions attorney and also an influential member at Augusta National. He ended further discussion of the new league with a succinct verdict: “If it’s not one hundred percent owned and controlled by the PGA Tour, it will be viewed as hostile.”

The story about the thwarted league was broken by the New York Post in February 2022 in an article by Mark Cannizzaro, who has a close relationship with Mickelson. (Cannizzaro also covers the NFL, and Mickelson has been known to pump him for usable intel; Mickelson wrote the foreword to Cannizzaro’s book about the Masters.) In the Post story all the sources were anonymous, but at least one sounded suspiciously like Mickelson: “The Tour could have ended the threat of the Saudi league had they done this. This would be a collaborative effort. It was all worked out . . . until [Herlihy] shut it down in one sentence. It undermines everything the Tour has been saying about who they are—that this is owned by the players, this is run by the players. That is complete b.s.’”