Golf world’s two big titans turn to D.C. muscle for help with their marriage

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and the PGA Tour have brought in some political heavy hitters as they seek to save their blockbuster deal to join forces from an increasingly hostile Congress.

On Wednesday Paul Keary, co-founder and chief executive of the CEO-consulting giant Teneo, registered as a foreign agent working for the Saudi Public Investment Fund to help sell the deal with the PGA Tour.

Teneo has represented PIF — which bankrolled the upstart LIV Golf and the golf league’s litigation against the PGA Tour until this month’s stunning detente — since 2021. But it’s the first time Keary has registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, DOJ filings show.

At least two other big names in Washington also have registered under FARA to help the Saudi fund on the PGA deal. Among them are Geoff Morrell, whose short lived tenure as chief corporate affairs officer for the Walt Disney Company included the beginnings of Disney’s ongoing brawl with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Nate Tamarin, a longtime aide to former President Barack Obama.

The PGA Tour, meanwhile, has retained progressive public affairs firm Bully Pulpit Interactive as its new communications agency following the announcement of the deal. Another firm that had worked with the Tour dropped it as a client in favor of representing the 9/11 victims community, which has steadfastly opposed the deal.

In addition to boasting other corporate clients like Instacart, McDonald’s and Goldman Sachs, Bully Pulpit has also represented political clients like the 2020 Biden campaign, the DNC, the DSCC, the Human Rights Campaign, and Everytown for Gun Safety. Its staff have circled in and out of the Biden White House, including with the recent hiring of Ben LaBolt as White House press secretary.

The ramped up communications support is the latest round of monthslong warfare that previously pitted a small army of lobbying shops and PR firms against one another, fighting over claims that LIV was a Saudi attempt to “sportswash” its poor human rights record on one side and that the PGA Tour was a monopolistic endeavor on the other.

Those battles came to a halt when the LIV-PGA deal was announced. But the partnership has largely fallen flat across Washington.

The bipartisan heads of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on Wednesday called executives from the PGA, LIV and PIF to testify for the panel’s investigation into its deal, an invite PGA said it looks forward to accepting.

Another Democratic committee chair has launched his own probe into the various tax breaks and exemptions the PIF and PGA Tour claim and pledged to investigate the national security implications of the deal, while a Republican congressmember has introduced legislation to revoke the PGA’s tax-exempt status altogether and other lawmakers have asked the Justice Department to probe whether those working for new golf entity will need to register as foreign agents.

Lawmakers have pointed to the PGA Tour’s own biting criticism of LIV’s ties to Saudi leadership and the kingdom’s human rights record and alleged that the deal amounted to a Saudi takeover of an iconic American sport.

For its part, the PGA Tour pointed fingers back at the Hill, writing in a letter to senators that lawmakers had left the league “on our own to fend off” costly litigation and attacks by its Saudi rivals. The Tour has also maintained that litigation left it little choice financially, and downplayed the control its Saudi financiers will have over day-to-day operations of the new joint venture.

But its rollout of the deal was rocky, with the PGA’s own players caught off guard and outraged, and the Tour walking back its initial framing of the union as a merger when it was already in the midst of a federal antitrust probe. The Tour has begun working to mollify its players, and appears ready to do the same in Washington.