And now the state is clear for Windom Clark.

Yeah!

He ticks down all the stars in Los Angeles to win the United States Open.

This past Sunday marked the end of the 2023 U.S. Open Golf Championship.

Underdog Windom Clark claimed his first major victory.

But that feel-good sports story wasn't the one dominating the golf world.

It was a different announcement made two weeks earlier.

The PGA Tour, European Tour and rival Liv Golf Circuit have announced a landmark agreement to merge and form a commercial entity to unify the sport.

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi and that announcement is the one that shocked the sports world.

The merger between the prestigious PGA Tour and the one-year-old Liv Golf had been unimaginable.

Upstart Liv is financed by the Saudi Arabian government.

The PGA and Liv had spent the past year in what could most charitably be called a very contentious relationship.

After all, for Liv Golf to become the prestigious league it hoped to be, it needed talent and to find that talent it went poaching in the PGA.

Over the past year the league offered more than $100 million in signing bonuses per player to woo top golfers like Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.

And the money wasn't just reserved for the best players either.

You see the PGA Tour isn't like the NBA where the league's minimum salary was more than $950,000 this past year in basketball.

The PGA Tour sees its athletes as independent contractors and the players earn their money based on their success on the golf course.

Liv Golf offered something different, a minimum payout of $120,000 for the player who finished dead last.

So some golfers saw that as a great opportunity for financial stability that's not always promised on the PGA Tour.

But as players signed with Liv Golf, the PGA Tour made sure that they knew it was not happy with the decision.

Just half an hour after the first ball was struck in the first event of this Liv Golf series, the PGA Tour issued a memo to its members and it starts off with talking with players who have decided to turn their backs on the PGA Tour by willfully violating a regulation.

It says that simultaneous to the players receiving this memo, the following players are all banned from playing on the PGA Tour suspended and no longer eligible to play on the PGA Tour.

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