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The man in the Aston Martin skipped the valet stand and cruised through the South Florida parking lot alone, his window lowered. Even at a distance, his hair and side profile announced Greg Norman.
Few golfers have been more talented, more ubiquitous or more divisive across the nearly 50 years since he turned professional.
He spent 331 weeks as the world’s top-ranked golfer, and won the British Open twice. But there were letdowns at other majors: eight runner-up finishes, including three at the Masters Tournament, which concludes Sunday at Augusta National Golf Club.
He had swagger and marketing savvy. But there was an ill-fated attempt in the 1990s to create a World Golf Tour that infuriated the PGA Tour and, later, perhaps Mr. Norman’s most contested act: serving as the commissioner of LIV Golf, the league bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, starting in 2021.
The circuit’s emergence split the men’s game and left the Australian golfer widely derided as a glib, greedy apologist for Saudi Arabia and its human rights abuses. Now, the PGA Tour that once condemned LIV is trying to cut a deal with the wealth fund and its leader, Yasir al-Rumayyan.
In February, about a month after Mr. Norman left his job as LIV’s chief executive, President Trump hosted a meeting between Mr. al-Rumayyan and Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner. Talks seem to have stalled since, with the PGA Tour rejecting a wealth fund proposal that would have permitted LIV to continue. And on Friday, a report released by Democrats on a Senate investigative committee said that the Saudi investment in the PGA Tour “does not make business sense unless it is an effort to buy long-term influence.”
