SAND TRAP

 Saudi money and Donald Trump roil "the gentleman's game."

- ZACH HELFAND

When a professional golfer wants Whe to pass along a rumor, he'll tell you that he heard it "on the range."The pro driving range conjures a serious place where serious men who abide by dress codes and honor systems tweak swing paths and spin rates, but this impression is incomplete. The range, the one location where everyone in the sport gathers, is also golf's back room. Pre-round chat may concern course conditions, or who is sleeping with whose wife. Recently, the range has been preoccupied by one topic. Since late last year, representatives of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the multibillion-dollar investment vehicle for the kingdom, have been quietly recruiting players for a new super-league that they hope will rival the P.G.A. Tour. They were calling it LIV; the name derives from the Roman numeral fifty-four, to denote what they consider "a perfect score in golf," and is pronounced as in "live large." LIV life was lucrative. The Saudis, who'd devised a twelve-team league, planned to spend two billion dollars, much of that on guarantees for players. "You'd hear numbers," a longtime golf manager told me. "You'd hear a hundred million' a lot." Tiger Woods was said to have declined a package valued at seven to eight hundred million dollars. One line I heard often on the range this summer was that there are only three types of pro-those who've taken Saudi money, those who are thinking about taking Saudi money, and those who aren't good enough to be offered Saudi money.