Barstool Sports’ Dan Rapaport slathered on sunscreen inside the U.S. Open media tent before considering what it’s like to be a golf writer covering the PGA-LIV story. “It sounds selfish to say, but it’s been a huge blessing for my career,” he said.
Rapaport and his fiancée got married in Chicago last Saturday. It seemed like it would be a slow time in the golf calendar. Four days before that, they had been driving from Cleveland to Chicago when Rapaport’s brother called and told him to check the news: The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund were ending their months-long war and forming a new company.
Rapaport, who is 28, turned the car around. He drove 80 minutes back to Cleveland. In a family friend’s house, Rapaport set up a content command center where he wrote stories, recorded podcasts, and fielded requests from TV bookers who wanted him to make sense of the news. CNN put him on the air opposite David Sanger, the New York Times White House and national security correspondent.
After working through the day, Rapaport was finally ready to attempt the Chicago trip again. Then he found out that Anderson Cooper’s show was eyeing him for a spot in prime time. So Rapaport drove a few hours down the road and rented a hotel room in Indiana. The spot on Cooper’s show didn’t materialize, but he did do a hit from the hotel for Good Morning America.
Rapaport is one of many writers on the golf beat who’ve been swept up by a story that writer Alan Shipnuck calls a “monster” and a “gift from the content gods.” Brendan Porath, a host of the Shotgun Start podcast, got invitations to appear on TMZ and NPR.
In the 18-month period in which LIV became a threat to the PGA, golf writers had their beat shift under their feet like political reporters who covered the Trump White House. The upside: more people reading your work, more podcast downloads (just put “LIV” in the title), and a chance to stretch your sportswriterly muscles by covering a story that touches on subjects like international terrorism and human rights.
The downside: Well, that’s familiar to White House veterans too. Golf writers have been accused of defending a side in the PGA-LIV battle too strongly or not defending it strongly enough. Their Twitter mentions—and, in one case, a physical mailbox—have filled with vitriol. After last Tuesday’s ceasefire, writers who’d attacked LIV on golfing and moral grounds found themselves experiencing the same psychic hangover as Rory McIlroy. The fundamental nature of the beat has changed. “Imagine if the most interesting thing in golf was Will Zalatoris’s putting stroke,” Shipnuck told me. “That’s where we used to be, right?”
When a whopper of a story like the PGA-PIF deal breaks, you can usually find one sportswriter who tries to tell you, “I’d been hearing this was about to happen …” This week, as I moved through the media tent at Los Angeles Country Club, nobody told me that. Golf writers said things like “the rest of the day felt like staring into the sun” and “I’m not sure I ate” and “I don’t know if I showered.”
“I was having a lovely afternoon,” said Jamie Weir, a Sky Sports correspondent. “I was out walking the dog.
“I suddenly get a text message from the desk, saying, ‘We need to get you on to talk about this merger ASAP.’ And I was like, ‘Merger—what?’”
“Remember a few years ago, when someone sent out that missile alert in Hawaii?” said Golf Digest’s Luke Kerr-Dineen. “I honestly thought it was a mistake.”
Six days after the news broke, reporters who showed up to cover the U.S. Open were handed blue baseball caps that said “MEDIA.” Similar caps were selling in the merch tents that said “EPIC” and “GRIT.”
Golf reporters have shown some epic grit lately. Not only did they learn from a CNBC tweet that PGA commissioner Jay Monahan and PIF governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan would be calling a truce. They had to scramble to cover the biggest story of most of their lives. “We throw the hyperbole out of ‘the biggest story in the history of golf,’” said Porath. “I don’t know that it is hyperbole.” Doug Ferguson, who has been covering golf for the Associated Press for 25 years, placed it second only to Tiger Woods’s 2009 car crash and the tabloid scandal that spiraled out from there.
What interests golf writers now about the PGA-PIF deal is how opaque it remains, one week and several tick-tocks later. Reporters know the deal’s general parameters (Monahan will be CEO of the new company; Al-Rumayyan will be chairman; the tour will have more board seats than the PIF). But nobody knows whether the LIV tour will survive or if the PGA holdouts will get paid for their loyalty or if the Justice Department will nix the whole thing.
“I still don’t think we have anywhere close to the full story of what ultimately spurred this partnership, at least from the tour’s standpoint,” said Golf Digest writer Joel Beall.
For their part, the golfers in the interview tent at LACC told reporters they couldn’t offer any help.
“I literally know as much as you know,” said Matt Fitzpatrick, last year’s U.S Open champion.
“I really know as much as you guys know,” Cameron Smith, a LIV golfer, said a few minutes later.
“Yeah, I don’t know anything,” said Collin Morikawa, before pivoting to a pitch for his charity.
The players sounded suspiciously on-message. But most writers believed they weren’t sandbagging, at least all that much. “When stuff gets leaked, a lot of times it’s from players,” said CBS’s Kyle Porter. “Nothing got leaked because the players didn’t know anything. And they still don’t, really.”
In a time of layoffs, you could do worse than holding down a job as a golf writer. You get to travel. You get to play courses you’d never otherwise be invited to. As No Laying Up’s Kevin Van Valkenburg explained, you can talk to famous athletes in ways you can’t in other sports because golfers aren’t confined to a locker room swarming with media minders.
Like any beat, covering golf can have a certain sameness. “Writing about birdies and bogies is just boring,” said Rapaport. “And asking the same questions about, ‘Oh, that up and down on 16, how important was that for you to get to the final group?’—it’s going through the motions. Over the last two years, we’ve been gifted this incredibly juicy story line.”
“It’s a great story,” said New York Times golf writer Alan Blinder. Before joining the sports section four years ago, Blinder covered hard news for the Times’ national desk. He was drawn to college sports partly by the upheaval that would be caused by realignment and the NIL ruling. Last year, after watching another beat-consuming story emerge, Blinder moved to golf.
“It’s a story that touches on so many different parts of modern society,” he said. “It touches on business. It touches on geopolitics. It touches on sports. It touches on human emotions and human ideas of betrayal, power, and greed—all of those things. There are literally proverbs about some of these topics. Now they’re all wrapped into one sprawling, chaotic news story.”
The story brought new elements to the golf beat. One was a sense of conflict. “I remember when the big controversy in golf was hoodies,” said Shipnuck. “It was the shape of the grooves on a wedge. It was the length of a putter. We used to care about that stuff. It’s the equivalent of people giving Barack Obama shit for wearing a tan suit, and then Trump came along.”
The PGA-LIV story gave golf writers the gift of the awkward press conference. The first great batch of these occurred last June, at LIV’s inaugural event in London, when Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood were asked whether they’d play at a tournament hosted by Vladimir Putin. (In a coincidence, both the London press conference and Woods’s image-rehabilitation tour were overseen by former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.) Last Tuesday, when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Bryson DeChambeau about Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who was assassinated by Saudi agents in 2018, DeChambeau explained that “nobody’s perfect.” The next day, Monahan sputtered to explain how he had invoked 9/11 families before making the deal.
“There’s been a lot of press conferences that you’ve sat in,” said Weir, “and you’ve thought, ‘Surely you must have expected the sort of questions that were going to come. How can you be so ill-prepared?’”
The most fascinating new element the story brought to the golf beat was the Woj bomb. “Golf has never really been a transactional sport, if you think about it,” said Sports Illustrated’s Bob Harig, who covered all of Woods’s major wins. “There’s no trades, there’s no offseason rumors.” Porter told me: “As humans, we love drama, and golf doesn’t have a lot of drama outside of Sunday afternoons.”
The LIV defections were way more freighted than James Harden’s potential move from the 76ers to the Rockets. Some of the most famous golfers in the world were picking sportswashing over resistance, money over principle. And there were new waves of defections every few weeks.
“I saw an offer sheet for one player,” said Golf Digest’s Beall. “The agent was like, ‘He’s gone. He’s already been signed.’ And the guy never went.” Multiple writers told me they found transactions reporting so murky that they swore off it.
The PGA-LIV story consumed a huge chunk of golf writers’ output, just as the NIL ruling and conference realignment has on the college beat. Ferguson estimated that more than 70 percent of the AP columns he publishes every Tuesday have touched on LIV issues. Even in Woods’s world-conquering prime, he never accounted for more than 40 percent of Ferguson’s columns.
Part of the allure of the PGA-LIV story is that it’s both important and clickable. “Our podcast is always much more popular when something dramatic has happened with LIV,” said Porath. Consider the story’s bookends. Last February, Shipnuck published a story in which Phil Mickelson shrugged off human-rights abuses in Saudi Arabia. The story put Fire Pit Collective, the site Shipnuck founded after leaving Golf magazine, on the map. Hours before last week’s news broke, Shipnuck had finished writing a book about LIV. He’s now adding three new chapters.
On Tuesday, after Monahan and Al-Rumayyan broke bread on CNBC, the hosts of the No Laying Up podcast gathered to record an emergency podcast that actually justifies the term. “The Great Merge” is already the show’s most-downloaded episode ever.
Because the PGA-LIV story is so sprawling, a lot of golf writers have found it tricky to cover. “We have some credentials to talk about golf,” Porath told me as we walked along LACC’s 11th fairway on Monday. “But in the last week I’ve had to try to understand antitrust, Department of Justice machinations, M&A, international relations, and terrorism.”
The golf writers I met didn’t shy away from the task. Journalism is about making sense of unfamiliar subjects, and few people are inspired to take up sportswriting because of an interest in U.S.-Saudi relations. But golf writers were wary of offering big takes on subjects that were still relatively new. “There’s a lot of nuanced issues where it helps to have a learned tour guide,” said Shipnuck, “and that’s kind of our role here.”
Like the politics beat, the PGA-LIV story has a way of thrusting writers into a social-media vortex. Whose side are you on, anyway? At the outset, some writers were happy to write critical columns about LIV. Others preferred reporting news and laying out moral questions. Either way, they were skewered on Twitter by pro-LIV accounts. Porter told me they fill his mentions when he tweets about Rory McIlroy, even if the tweets have nothing to do with LIV. “It’s been more emotionally difficult to be online over the last year than at any point throughout my career,” he said.
LIV golfers like Mickelson and Lee Westwood joined in, putting writers in direct combat with their subjects. Relations between some players and reporters got frayed. As Kerr-Dineen told me: “‘You guys are making this a story’—I’ve gotten that a lot. That’s not true. It’s not a media-fabricated story.”
Just like their counterparts at the White House, golf writers became characters in a drama, whether they wanted to or not. Last July, Golf Digest’s Beall went to Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, course to report on a LIV event, which turned into a Trump rally with fans chanting “four more years.” When Beall returned to the media center, he said he found the bag that contained his laptop and notebook was filled with water. No one could adequately explain how that happened. Beall said angry letters were mailed to his home.
After Tuesday’s announcement of the new PGA-PIF entity, Rory McIlroy called himself a “sacrificial lamb.” Golf writers who spoke out about LIV didn’t feel they were doing the PGA Tour’s bidding. But they were defending some of the same principles that Monahan had professed, only to see Monahan toss them aside.
“You’ve heard a lot of players talk about betrayal,” Beall told me in the media tent. “I think a lot of writers in here feel betrayed because they’ve also had to go through so much this past year.”
Porter said the PGA Tour put itself in a bad financial position by getting into a spending battle with LIV. “They didn’t have foresight,” he said, “and as a result everybody feels a little bit used in the process.”
Beall detected a certain lack of excitement in the press corps. “I know he’s got a lot of work to do with the players,” he said of Monahan. “But I don’t think he realizes how much work he’s got to do with his media partners.”
Last Tuesday’s news was not the end of the PGA-LIV story. “Around every turn, there’s just another fresh twist,” said Weir. On Thursday, as Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele shot U.S. Open–record rounds of 62, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice had informed the PGA it would be examining the deal for antitrust violations.
When I got home from the course Thursday night, I flipped on CNN. Barstool’s Dan Rapaport, now married, was being interviewed by Kaitlan Collins. He’d landed in prime time after all. As Rapaport told Collins, “I don’t think this is going to end anytime soon.”
