PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — For three-plus years, the PGA Tour’s top players have been peppered with questions about the future of the sport amid the ongoing fracture brought on by LIV Golf’s emergence.
The message at the Tour’s flagship event has gone from denial and defiance to confidence and hope as commissioner Jay Monahan works to complete a deal to reunify the sport. However, there has been no significant movement on a merger in some time, and Justin Thomas, for one, has felt fatigue set in among Tour membership.
“Definitely,” Thomas said Tuesday before the 2025 Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass. “I think this is the third time I’ve played this tournament while this has been going on in some way, shape or form. Yeah, I think we’re kind of like past the level of exhaustion. At least it’s not consuming everything we’re being asked about.
“You just get a couple things here and there, but there’s just so many of us, really on both sides, both us on Tour and I think the LIV players, that we don’t really know what’s going on and we’re just playing golf and hoping for the best and because there’s a lot that we don’t know and that we can’t control or do letting the higher-ups do it.”
Thomas understands the deal is complex but still thought, or at least hoped, golf’s civil conflict would have been over by now.
“There’s just so much that goes into it,” Thomas said. “I’m glad I don’t know more, or I’m not more invested because I think it would be mentally draining, physically draining. It just would be exhausting.
“I think it’s very obvious we all just want to get it resolved, but this is something that’s pretty serious, so it’s not like you or anybody can say, alright, this is what we’re going to do without it being perfect. … But obviously like the rest of us, we would love for it to be done sooner rather than later.”
LIV’s emergence led to skyrocketing purses on the PGA Tour. This week’s $25 million purse at the Players serves as a shining example of how the breakaway circuit has benefited those who stayed loyal to the PGA Tour.
At the Genesis Invitational, Rory McIlroy said players, due to increased purses, have benefited from golf’s divide. Thomas agrees that there has been some benefit to LIV’s arrival, as it led to needed changes and gave players more power, but he still doesn’t agree with the methods of those who fractured the sport.
“I think you would be stubborn, and as stubborn as I am, to say that, you know, a lot of things that have happened have been because of them and what’s gone on,” Thomas said. “There’s a handful of guys or there’s a couple guys like a [Phil Mickelson] or a [Bryson DeChambeau] that how they went about it maybe isn’t exactly how I would have, but they did make a lot of points or say some things that were — that had some value to them or had some truth.
“But it is just how it all transpired. I obviously wish it could have just gone differently, but that’s neither here nor there. But do I think that a lot of things that have happened on our tour and in our game are because of that.”
Monahan sounded confident in recent weeks that a deal with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF) was close, but that tone shifted during last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational as whispers of a breakdown in communication between the two sides continue to bubble up.
On Tuesday, Monahan gave his yearly address and noted that there has been progress in talks with the PIF but that “hurdles” remain. Monahan said that the PGA Tour will look to “integrate” parts of LIV Golf into the PGA Tour but they will not make a deal that “jeopardizes” what makes the PGA Tour great.
Most of the PGA Tour’s membership, Thomas included, are ready to put this era behind them and for golf’s new reunification era to begin. But more than three years into the PGA Tour-LIV feud, the end seems much further away than any party will admit.
