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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Author
PGA Tour officers, together with 15-time main champion Tiger Woods, are assembly with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Funding Fund in New York on Tuesday, sources confirmed to ESPN.
The edges try to come back to phrases on a deal that will inject greater than $1 billion from the PIF into PGA Tour Enterprises, the brand new for-profit entity launched by the tour and Strategic Sports activities Group.
The conferences are scheduled to final a number of days, sources advised ESPN.
PGA Tour Enterprises chairman Joe Gorder and Fenway Sports activities Group proprietor John W. Henry are a part of a transactional subcommittee that’s negotiating with the Saudis, together with Woods and golfer Adam Scott.
The X flight monitoring account radaratlas2 famous Tuesday that jets owned by Woods, the Saudi oil and pure gasoline firm Aramco and the PGA Tour arrived within the New York space Monday.
The conferences between the PGA Tour and the PIF had been criticized by the 9/11 Justice group Tuesday. The group of 9/11 survivors, first responders and relations of these killed within the terrorist assaults on Sept. 11, 2001, have accused the Saudi Arabian authorities of supporting the terrorists.
“Tomorrow, we commemorate the twenty third anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, but right here we’re at this time, in New York Metropolis, down the road from Floor Zero, and the PGA Tour and Tiger Woods are negotiating with them,” 9/11 Justice president Brett Eagleson stated in a press release. “As has been confirmed in the previous few weeks by CBS reporting, the Saudi Arabian authorities performed a task within the horrific assaults of 9/11. It’s disgusting, unacceptable, and extremely painful that the Tour and Woods would do that — particularly now.”
Eventually month’s Tour Championship in Atlanta, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan stated talks with the PIF have been “enhanced” and are “stronger” than they’d been previously, hinting {that a} deal could possibly be reached to carry the fractured sport again collectively.
The PGA Tour, DP World Tour and PIF, which has financed the rival LIV Golf League the previous three years, signed a framework settlement on June 6, 2023, to type an alliance.
The deadline for that settlement expired Dec. 31, however the sides have continued to hammer out the small print of a possible deal.
“I’d say that the precedence, it has been enhanced,” Monahan stated on Aug. 28. “It is stronger. That is a direct results of dialogue and dialog and actually beginning to discuss concerning the future, future product imaginative and prescient and the place we are able to take our sport.
“I believe whenever you get into productive conversations, that enhances the probability of optimistic outcomes and that enhances the spirit of these very conversations. I believe that is the place issues stand.”
