Donald Trump obviously has a lot to do after winning the United States Presidential election this month as he looks to fill his cabinet and prepare to take office in January. But in a shocking turn of events, it sounds like he’s dedicated some of his time helping unify professional golf.
The PGA Tour and LIV Golf are in the midst of negotiations as the two rival professional golf leagues are looking to unify in some capacity. The negotiations haven’t exactly been all that fruitful considering that the initial deadline to agree for the two rival leags to agree on a deal passed more than 11 months ago.
But it sounds like Donald Trump is dedicating his efforts to helping unify the two leagues, even though he has quite a lot on his plate already.
According to a report from the Washington Post, Trump has spent time with people from both sides of the negotiations as he tries to help broker a deal that would save professional golf as we know it.
“Even as he was filling out his Cabinet selections Friday, the president-elect played a round of golf with Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to two people familiar with the meeting. And at a UFC event Saturday night in New York, Trump sat between Elon Musk, the billionaire tech mogul, and Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which launched LIV Golf in 2022 to compete with the PGA Tour,” Rick Maese reported for the Washington Post this weekend.
“While the exact nature of and details from the meetings are uncertain, multiple people familiar with the process say the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund continue to discuss a partnership, even though an initial deadline to agree to terms passed more than 11 months ago.”
This is especially shocking considering that during an appearance on the “Let’s Go!” podcast with Jim Gray and Bill Belichick earlier this month, Trump indicated that these negotiations were not a priority because he thinks the country has “much bigger problems” that he should be worrying about.
Still, he also indicated that he thinks he could help broker a deal in about 15 minutes.
“I would say it would take me the better part of 15 minutes to get that deal done,” Trump said on the podcast. “I’m really going to work on other things, to be honest with you. I think we have much bigger problems than that. But I do think we should have one tour and they should have the best players in that tour.”
We’ll have to see whether or not Trump’s conversations were fruitful.
