PGA Tour executives set to be grilled by Congress about deal with PIF, LIV Golf

WASHINGTON — A pair of PGA Tour executives are set to field questions from members of a Senate subcommittee this morning, as Congress continues to scrutinize the golf tour’s proposed deal that would see it effectively merge with Saudi-funded LIV Golf.

PGA Tour chief operating officer Ron Price and Jimmy Dunne, the Tour board member who played a significant role in orchestrating the deal, are both scheduled to testify in front of members of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in a meeting room on Capitol Hill beginning at 10 a.m. ET.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is the chairman of the committee and has been publicly critical of the deal, which will unite the two once-warring factions in golf under the same commercial umbrella.

In excerpts of his opening remarks that were released on the eve of the hearing, Blumenthal says this isn’t simply about golf, but rather “how a brutal, repressive regime can buy influence – indeed even take over – a cherished American institution simply to cleanse its public image.”

“A regime that has killed journalists, jailed and tortured dissidents, fostered the war in Yemen, and supported other terrorist activities, including 9/11. It’s called sportswashing,” Blumenthal says.

“It is also about hypocrisy, and how vast sums of money can induce individuals and institutions to betray their own values and supporters, or perhaps reveal lack of values from the beginning. It’s about other sports and institutions that could fall prey – if their leaders let it be all about the money.”

The subcommittee initially requested testimony from PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, but he has been out with an unspecified medical issue since June 13. He is set to return to his post on Monday.

Greg Norman, the chief executive of LIV Golf, and Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, were also asked to appear. But Blumenthal and subcommittee ranking member Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., said in a statement last week that the two LIV representatives said they would be unavailable “due to scheduling conflicts.”

“Consistent with our subcommittee’s practice, we look forward to working with both witnesses to find a mutually agreeable date for them to appear in the very near future,” the senators said in their statement.

The subcommittee’s inquiry into the PGA Tour-LIV Golf deal is one of two parallel probes underway in the Senate. The other is being conducted by the Senate’s finance committee and overseen by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. The Department of Justice has also been investigating the deal.

Tuesday’s hearing comes about 36 hours after The Washington Post reported that a PGA Tour board member had resigned over concerns with the deal. The newspaper reported that Randall Stephenson, the former chairman of AT&T, wrote in his resignation letter that the framework agreement “is not one that I can objectively evaluate or in good conscience support, particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.”

Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was killed at a Saudi consulate in 2018. The aforementioned intelligence report concluded that the country’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, signed off on the operation − one of several incidents that activists point to as evidence of Saudi Arabia’s widespread human rights abuses.

Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad.