Phil Mickelson Responds To Tiger Woods’ PGA Tour Loan Claim

Earlier in the year, Phil Mickelson suggested the PGA Tour could offer greater financial incentives to its players, and claimed the organisation has plenty of money at its disposal. Then, after LIV Golf was launched, the Tour appeared to prove his point by introducing a series of changes, including purses of at least $20m in several of its newly elevated events.

However, Tiger Woods, who is in the Bahamas to host the Hero World Challenge, has refuted the notion that the PGA Tour is flush with money - which has inadvertently drawn a response from one of his great rivals. 

When asked if the likes of Mickelson, who were criticised for joining LIV Golf, were owed an apology given the extra money their actions have ensured for PGA Tour players, he said: “No, absolutely not, no. We took out an enormous loan during the pandemic in which that, if we had another year of the pandemic, our Tour would only be sustained for another year. So we took out an enormous loan. It worked, it paid off in our benefit, hence we were able to use that money to make the increases that we’ve made.”

That led to CBS Sports golf writer Kyle Porter tweeting: "Phil: “They’re sitting on $800M.” Tiger: “We took out an enormous loan during the pandemic.""

It didn’t take long for Mickelson to respond. He wrote: “Pga tour IRS 990 form from 2018. 1.6 billion in stocks 700 million in cash 1.15 billion in non-liquid assets. This is from the non-profit section. The for-profit section hasn’t been stated since 2012 but was more than the non-profit part at that time. This can all be googled.”

Later, Sports Illustrated correspondent Bob Harig also took to Twitter to confirm that the PGA Tour has responded to Woods’ claim. He wrote: “The PGA Tour clarified today that it did not take out a loan to deal with the pandemic in 2020, as Tiger said during his news conference. The Tour used reserves and “mitigating actions” and would have seen a significant reduction in reserves w/o a return to golf in June 2020.”

Harig then said the Tour had speculated what Woods might have been referring to. He wrote: “The Tour also clarified that Tiger might have been referencing the fact that reserves would have dipped below $100m without a return to golf in 2020.”

Regardless of the PGA Tour's finances, Woods was adamant that there's one thing it can't compete with - the huge sums available to Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund that finances LIV. However, he did point out there are other ways the PGA Tour could remain an appealing prospect. He said: "Well, the message is that we can't compete dollar for dollar with the PIF, just we physically can't do that. But what we can do is talk about better opportunities for younger players getting onto the Tour."

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