The PGA Tour has requested a federal choose to deny a short lived restraining order to three of its suspended members who left to compete on the rival LIV Golf Invitational Series and are looking for to take part in the FedEx Cup playoffs, arguing the gamers cannot “have their cake and eat it too.”
The three suspended members, Talor Gooch, Matt Jones and Hudson Swafford, are looking for aid from a federal choose to compete in the FedEx Cup playoffs, beginning with this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, Tennessee.
In a motion filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Monday, attorneys representing the PGA Tour known as the gamers’ injunction request “legally baseless.” A listening to to think about the gamers’ motion for a short lived restraining order is scheduled for Tuesday in San Jose, California.
“Despite knowing full well that they would breach TOUR Regulations and be suspended for doing so, Plaintiffs have joined competing golf league LIV Golf, which has paid them tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed money supplied by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to procure their breaches,” the motion mentioned. “[Temporary restraining order] Plaintiffs now run into Court seeking a mandatory injunction to force their way into the TOUR’s season-ending FedExCup Playoffs, an action that would harm all TOUR members that follow the rules. The antitrust laws do not allow Plaintiffs to have their cake and eat it too.”
In an announcement Monday, LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman reiterated his circuit’s perception that gamers are free brokers and should not be compelled to play completely on one tour.
“I believe players have the right to play when and where they choose so their talents can take them as far and high as possible,” Norman mentioned. “I believe all players — whether they choose to play with LIV or the PGA Tour — understand and appreciate the purpose and importance of the players’ legal actions, across the globe. The PGA Tour is trying to cast this as ‘us’ against ‘them.’ The players know better.”
The three gamers and eight others, together with Phil Mickelson and Bryson DeChambeau, filed an antitrust lawsuit in opposition to the PGA Tour final week.
“The punishment that would accrue to these players from not being able to play in the FedEx Cup Playoffs is substantial and irreparable,” the golfers’ attorneys wrote in the lawsuit, “and a temporary restraining order is needed to prevent the irreparable harm that would ensue were they not to be able to participate.”
The PGA Tour’s attorneys famous that Gooch, Jones and Swafford waited almost two months to search aid from the court, “fabricating an ’emergency’ they now maintain requires immediate action.”
“It doesn’t,” the tour’s attorneys wrote in the motion. “Their ineligibility for TOUR events was foreseeable when they accepted millions from LIV to breach their agreements with the TOUR, and they knew for a fact that they were suspended on June 9. The harm they now allege from their suspensions is 100% economic and capable of redress with money damages.
“Indeed, a number of different LIV gamers together with 4 different Plaintiffs in this case acknowledge there is no such thing as a emergency or irreparable hurt; they too have certified to play in the FedExCup however haven’t requested the Court for the extraordinary aid sought via this motion. The Court ought to use its equitable powers to redress actual emergencies, not engineered ones by events who knowingly accepted multi-million-dollar payouts to place themselves in the state of affairs they’re in.”
The top 125 players in the FedEx Cup standings are eligible to compete in the FedEx St. Jude Championship at TPC Southwind. Gooch is 20th in the standings, Jones is 65th and Swafford is 67th.
“LIV isn’t a rational financial actor, competing pretty to begin a golf tour,” the tour’s attorneys wrote in the motion. “It is ready to lose billions of {dollars} to leverage Plaintiffs and the game of golf to ‘sportswash’ the Saudi authorities’s deplorable status for human rights abuses. If Plaintiffs are allowed to breach their TOUR contracts with out consequence, your entire mutually helpful construction of the TOUR, an association that has grown the game and promoted the pursuits of golfers going again to Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, would collapse.”
There are 122 players currently in the field for the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Three players who qualified aren’t participating in the first leg of the playoffs: Tommy Fleetwood (private), Daniel Berger (again damage) and Lanto Griffin (again surgical procedure).
