The Great White Shark has caught his biggest fish.
Greg Norman, the front man for the controversial Saudi-backed LIV Golf series, on Monday landed 51-year-old Phil Mickelson, The Post has learned exclusively.
LIV Golf this past week announced 42 of the 48 players in the field for its first event, Thursday through Saturday outside of London, and world No. 13 Dustin Johnson was the biggest name on the list. Now the event will also feature Mickelson, who’ll be playing a tournament for the first time since Feb. 6 when he competed in the Saudi International.
Johnson’s participation came as a surprise considering he’d publicly backed the PGA Tour in February. But a report out of the United Kingdom in The Telegraph, said Johnson was offered about $125 million by LIV Golf to join its series of tournaments.
Mickelson’s compensation hasn’t been announced nor confirmed, but there was one report saying he’s being paid $200 million. Sources told The Post that negotiations between LIV Golf and Mickelson’s camp have been going on for weeks and there was a point last week that LIV believed Mickelson was on board. That negotiation finally was completed on Monday.
Things went so down to the wire that Mickelson wasn’t on a plane to London until Monday, a source told The Post.
“Phil Mickelson is unequivocally one of the greatest golfers of this generation,’’ Norman said. “His contributions to the sport and connection to fans around the globe cannot be overstated and we are grateful to have him. He strengthens an exciting field for London where we’re proud to launch a new era for golf.”
A complication for Mickelson in his re-emergence to the game has been the public fallout from comments he made to a writer (in a conversation Mickelson asserted was private) that ripped both the PGA Tour and the Saudi venture.
Since his comments were published, Mickelson issued a public apology and stated that he was going to take some time away from the game and has been in a state of self-exile.
The six-time major championship winner skipped the Masters, which he’s won three times and calls his favorite event, and last month’s PGA Championship, at which he was slated to defend the title he won in 2021.
“First and foremost, I want to apologize to the many people I’ve offended and hurt with my comments a few months ago,’’ Mickelson said in a statement he put out on Twitter. “I have made mistakes in my career in some of the things I have said and done. Taking time away and self-reflecting has been very humbling. I needed to start prioritizing the people that I love the most and work on becoming a better version of myself.
“I have spent this time with Amy and loved ones. I have been engaged and intentional and I continued therapy and feel healthy and much more at peace. I realize I still have a long way to go, but I am embracing the work ahead.
“I am ready to come back and play the game I love, but after 32 years this new path is a fresh start, one that is exciting for me at this stage of my career and is clearly transformative, not just for myself but ideally for the game and my peers. I also love the progressive format and think it will be exciting for the fans.’’
Interestingly, Mickelson went on to say in his statement that he’s “thrilled to begin with LIV Golf’’ and that his plan is to “also intend to play in the majors.’’
That seems to mean that he’ll be at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., next week to play in the U.S. Open. The U.S. Open is the only major missing for Mickelson to complete a career Grand Slam and it’s the tournament he covets most.
With PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan having taken a hard-line stance on players who play in the Saudi events, threatening sanctions that could include banishment from playing on the PGA Tour, it seems Mickelson and the other players who’ve committed to playing next week’s LIV event have chosen sides.
Rickie Fowler, another highly popular PGA Tour player is not in the London field this week, but a source told The Post that he’s “very close’’ to signing a contract with LIV.
The Norman-led tour is run by LIV Golf Investments, which is backed by Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is essentially the financial arm of the Saudi Arabian government. This has been a hot-button topic in the sport, drawing much criticism.
In his comments to Alan Shipnuck, who’s writing an unauthorized biography on Mickelson, Mickelson called the Saudis “scary motherf–kers to get involved with,” adding, “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.
“They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse. As nice a guy as [Monahan] comes across as, unless you have leverage, he won’t do what’s right. And the Saudi money has finally given us that leverage. I’m not sure I even want [the SGL] to succeed, but just the idea of it is allowing us to get things done with the [PGA] Tour.”
Prior to those published comments, Mickelson was quoted on the record by John Huggan of Golf Digest in February, calling out the PGA Tour for “obnoxious greed’’ in his quest to push the tour to take better financial care of its players, particularly the stars who drive the tour.
Mickelson called out the PGA Tour as the gatekeepers of “roughly $20 billion” in media assets and “hundreds of millions of digital moments” that rightfully belong to the players.
“I don’t know where things are headed, but I know I will be criticized,” Mickelson said in the Golf Digest interview. “The media rights are but a small fraction of everything else. And it is the Tour’s obnoxious greed that has really opened the door for opportunities elsewhere.”
Now we know where “elsewhere’’ is for Mickelson.