Phil Mickelson responds to Jay Monahan’s LIV comment

Phil Mickelson provided a telling response to Jay Monahan’s claim that disruption has generated “momentum, growth and real action” across the PGA Tour. 

Monahan, the PGA Tour’s commissioner, said before The PLAYERS that the sweeping transformations made amid the upheaval caused by the rival LIV Golf League has allowed his circuit to “reimagine it’s future.”

“Over the last three years, it’s undeniable that the PGA Tour has been pressure tested like never before,” Monahan began, indirectly addressing the LIV-shaped elephant in the room. “External forces created an environment where we had to speed up where we always needed and wanted to go.

“But it’s the internal forces, and by that I’m talking about our players, that allowed us to take extraordinary steps to embrace the challenge and reimagine the future of the PGA Tour and the game.

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“The level of commitment and engagement from our players, not just as part of the change but as developers and leaders of the change, has made all the difference.

“Bottom line, we’re better for it. Disruption has generated momentum, growth and real action.”

It’s the last part that made Mickelson’s ears prick up.

The six-time major champion, who is in Singapore ahead of the fourth LIV event of the season this week, had a one-word reply to Monahan’s admission.

“Interesting,” the six-time major champion simply wrote on X.

Mickelson, of course, long advocated for wholesale changes to the PGA Tour before joining LIV and becoming a controversial firebrand for the Saudi Arabia-backed breakaway circuit.

In his infamous, incendiary comments made to Alan Shipnuck in which Mickelson said the Saudis were “scary motherf****** to get involved with, he added that the Gulf state’s investment into the game was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

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“They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse,” Mickelson told Shipnuck in 2022.

“As nice a guy as [Monahan] comes across as, unless you have leverage, he won’t do what’s right. And the Saudi [Public Investment Fund] money has finally given us that leverage. I’m not sure I even want [the league that would become LIV Golf] to succeed, but just the idea of it is allowing us to get things done with the [PGA] Tour.”

Three years on and Monahan remains at the centre of negotiations between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund – which funds the LIV circuit which he had desperately tried to thwart.

The commissioner provided little detail on how a unified men’s professional game would take shape in his latest updates, but stressed that the talks are “real” and are aided by the involvement of President Donald Trump.

“Those talks have been significantly bolstered by President Trump’s willingness to serve as a facilitator,” Monahan said. “President Trump is a lifelong golf fan. He believes strongly in the game’s power and potential, and he has been exceedingly generous with his time and influence to help bring a deal together.

“He wants to see the game reunified. We want to see the game reunified. His involvement has made the prospect of reunification very real.

Monahan, however, refused to acknowledge how the world’s best players would compete together more often and whether suspended LIV players could soon be re-assimilated back onto the PGA Tour.

“We appreciate Yasir’s [Al-Rumayyan, PIF governor and LIV chairman] innovative vision, and we can see a future where we welcome him on to our board and work together to move the global game forward,” he added.

“As part of our negotiations, we believe there’s room to integrate important aspects of LIV Golf into the PGA Tour platform. We’re doing everything that we can to bring the two sides together.”

Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.