I'm Mr. Green, for example. I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

And when I find my ball in a Friday egg.

Friday. The dreaded Friday.

Friday. Friday. Friday. Friday. Friday.

Friday. Friday. I'm about ready to run off the golf course course.

Welcome to the Friday podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison. And today we're discussing live golf's legal fight with a PGA tour.

Last week, a California judge denied an effort by three live players to obtain a temporary restraining order that would have allowed them to participate in the PGA tour's FedEx Cup playoffs.

So that initial skirmish is over in the tour one, but the same players, along with several others, have a larger antitrust suit against the PGA tour.

And that one is ongoing. The live group is also likely to explore legal challenges to other organizations and golf, including potentially the official world golf ranking to get a much needed

expert perspective on all of this. I'm talking today to Gabe Feldman. Gabe is a law professor at Tulane University.

And he specializes in antitrust and sports law. He's also the host of between the lines, a podcast about sports and the law.

So Gabe, why don't we start with the fundamentals here.

The plaintiffs in this big antitrust suit are Phil Mickelson, Bryson Deschambeau, Ian Poulter, and seven other players who signed on with the Saudi-backed live golf series and were promptly suspended by the PGA tour.

So what is the basic legal rationale that these players believe they have to sue the tour?

Yeah, so there's two rationales. One is under contract law where they basically say, and this came up in the TRO, that the PGA toured and filed their own rules in suspending those three players not letting them play in the FedEx playoffs.

The antitrust claim, which is the bigger claim and the claim that will proceed with that big group that you mentioned, is at its base that the PGA tour has engaged in a bunch of behavior.

And we can talk about what those things are, but they've engaged in behavior, including disciplining and suspending the players in a way that harms competition in the professional golf market.

And with their claims, since they're the players, they really have to say either that they have been harmed because they now have lower salaries, lower endorsement income, whatever harm they might be able to allege or that consumers are harmed.

Because the product is somehow worse off or lots of arguments that might come up, they focus primarily as we might expect on the harm that they suffered or will suffer.

And so what they have to prove, essentially, as any antitrust plaintiff would have to prove, is that the conduct that the defendant engaged in here the PGA tour was unbalanced, harmful to competition.

Which means you look to see, what's the harm to competition they cause? And are there any what the law calls pro competitive benefits that they achieved?

Is there anything that good that came out of this? Any innovation? So you might have, let's say, tours coming together and they're able to produce a better product.

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