As we know, the framework agreement between PGA Tour and PIF (the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund) sanctioned the immediate ceasefire regarding any ongoing legal dispute. In compliance with the agreement, in the following days the parties presented a joint application in which they expressed their Willingness to renounce any reciprocal claim, thus also precluding any possibility of re-proposing the cases in the future.
Pga Tour and Pif
So, courtrooms, chapter closed? This is not quite the case, but not by the will of the signatories of the agreement. The New York Times had a hand in it, presenting another request, of a very different tenor. The subject of the dispute triggered by the US newspaper are the documents produced by the parties during the case which, I remind you, concerned the alleged violation of antitrust rules by the PGA Tour. The NYT maintains that at least a part of these documents, classified during the case and destined, according to the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, to remain so, must be made public, in the name of the right to information. According to the NYT lawyers, the public interest must prevail over the “potential competitive damage” feared by the lawyers of the Tours, in particular by the pool of those of LIV Golf. In the last session held in the District Court, Judge Beth Labson Freeman did not reject the NYT’s motion, which requires the publication of 62 documents. However, you said that 48 of these documents are classified on the basis of correct principles of “just cause”. Even on the hearings of the Senate Committee, PIF and PGA Tour had to bend to the will of the USDepartment of Justice. In the framework agreement, an important passage is the mutual commitment not to try to hoard “other’s” players. Well, this promise was removed from the agreements, because it would have represented a potential and very dangerous charge in the event of a verification by the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice. We await developments. Stay tuned. The PGA Tour became its own organization in 1968 when it split from the PGA of America, which is now primarily an association of golf professionals, such as instructors and club managers.
Tournament players first formed their own organization, the Association of Professional Golfers (APG). Later, in 1968, the players abolished the APG and agreed to operate as the PGA “Tournament Players Division”, a fully autonomous division of the PGA, overseen by a new 10-member Tournament Policy Board. The name then officially changed to “PGA Tour” in 1975.