This is something you've never seen before. We are about to party. Let's do this. It isn't your typical golf tournament. This is LiveGolf.

We're not from the country club. We love the game of golf. We're trying to have fun with it.

It's flipped the sport on its head. Forcing the PGA tour into a fight for survival. The celebrity The investors getting tangled in the fray. The likes of LeBron James and even Drake. Big investors coming to try and save an organization that for the longest time looked like this. Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer meet in a match that dangles $50,000 in first-price money.

Traditionally, PGA tour events are quieter. Golf etiquette is what you would think. Livegolf seeks to reinvent professional golf and make it more compelling to a larger audience. It's new, it's disruptive, incredibly controversial.

And that's because Behind Live Golf is one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, backed by a country with a troubling history of political repression, restricting women's rights, and the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It's a startup, ProTour, paying several big name golfers millions of dollars to leave the PGA Tour. But the money comes directly from the Saudi Arabian government.

Saudi Arabia has been able to distract from its human rights record, killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.

Saudi Arabia has invested $2 billion into this new golf venture alone, and it's triggering outrage across the nation, some calling it sportswashing.

Sportswashing is a form of information manipulation, where big governments and big corporations included use sports-related content and the media stories tied to sports in order to alter the information that reaches their target audiences. Saudi Arabia can use the media cycle of good sports stories in the United States to push out all those negative stories.

It's bankrolled by one of the largest investors in global sports, the Public Investment Fund, backed by the Saudi Arabian government. The PIF owns a minority stake in Disney, the parent company of ABC News. And they have money to blow, attracting the biggest names, poaching players from the prestigious PGA tour with unmatchable lucrative deals.

What role did financial compensation play in your decision?

I'll be lying if I said he wasn't a big part of it.

So much of the mainstream conversation about live golf is it's financing, that it comes from Saudi Arabia.

When you look at every industry, there's people that invest that you might not agree with.

But some people say this shiny new object is not distracting them from the truth.

Running out of the mountain pressure for Saudi Arabia to explain the death of a journalist.

How can you take hundreds of millions of dollars?

You think this is a pretty blatant attempt at sportswashing?

It's 100% the definition of sportswashing.

This type of savvy takeover isn't just happening in the world of golf. From MMA to soccer to cycling and even Formula One, the kingdom's influence continues to grow across the global sports industry. According to Global SWF, an organization that tracks sovereign wealth funds, the PIF has invested $13.5 billion dollars in over 20 sports since its inception. The Crown Prince, Mohamed bin Salmon, also known as MBS, recently outlining his plans for his country on Fox News. A weather for Sportwashing going to increase my GDP by 1.01 %.

And then we'll continue doing Sportwashing.

Two-time Masters champion, Bubba Watson, is one of the many high-profile players who left the PGA tour in 2022 and accepted a to your contract from LivGolf. And he has no regrets. What do you say to the people who have been critical of Liv and what they're trying to do with the sport here?

I'm doing something that's fun, energetic, and new. If you're going to grow the game of golf, this is the way I believe to do that. And so for me, it's all about me and my family, and so that's all I focus on.

The twelve-time winner on the PGA tour, join LivGolf at the very beginning, jumping into an unfolding proxy world that started when PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan dropped a bombshell announcement on CBS.

We made a decision last week to suspend those players, and they're no longer eligible for tournament play.

The PGA Tour's first reaction to Liv was very strong and very anti. And Jay Monahan, the Commissioner of the PGA Tour, came out very quickly and said, Anyone who plays in the Liv golf tour will effectively be banned from playing on the PGA Tour.

Was there any shock given Given how long you'd been a part of the PGA? Did it feel like betrayal in some way?

I actually threw in my resignation. So they suspended me even though I was out. I guess I put in my two-week notice. It's the same job. It's just a different company. I have nothing against any of those guys that stayed. Don't have anything against the critics. That's their opinions.

While fellow top golfers, Dustin Johnson, Rookes Kepka, even Phil Mickelson, were joining the new league aside Buba, PGA Tour veterans were coming to the defense of the PGA. Like current number two golfer in the world, Rory McElroy, telling BBC Sports he would never join the league. If live golf was the last place to play golf on Earth, I would retire. Tiger Woods reportedly turned down $800 million from the Saud to join Liv, bashing players on CBS who left the PGA tour.

I think that what they've done is they've turned their back on what has allowed them to get to the position.

The backlash increased as fans discovered the money was coming from that state-sponsored public investment fund. Those early Liv golfers being grilled on Sky Sports Golf. Isn't there a danger that you're also being seen as a toll of sportswashing. You could be seen as a Saudi stooge.

I don't condone human rights violations.

I don't know how I can be any more clear.

Saudi Arabia obviously has a horrific track record with human rights, with human atrocities that make people very uncomfortable.

At first, the PGA wanted to remind the public of that human rights record in an attempt to stop live, even allying themselves with the families of 9/11 victims who had been warning against Saudi Arabia's investment in American sports.

Some of the early criticisms that the PGA tour launched against the Liv golf tour were couched in moral terms. They really latched on to the advocacy of the 9/11 Families United, that the Saudi government had this connection to the 9/11 attacks and therefore could not be trusted to be an actor in the American economy or American society.

It was about, Hey, we're all on the same page here. I can share with you what I know about the Kingdom and their involvement in September 11th.

The Kingdom denies those claims, saying in their most recent statement, Any allegation that Saudi Arabia is complicit in the September 11th attacks is categorically false. Jay Monahan publicly aligned himself with the families affected on CBS.

As it relates to the families of 9/11, I have two families that are close to me that lost loved ones. And I would ask any player that has left or any player that would ever consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA tour?

What do you say to people who do say that Liv is providing shade for its financial backers and who say that this is just a form of sportswashing?

I have no comment on that. I just, again, point to the power of of what we're doing, the fact that we're attracting a young audience and ushering the sport into the future. That is good for the game of golf. That is good for sports.

But after over a year of tension and mounting lawsuits between rival colleagues, I'm an ironic twist. The historic organization of the PGA caved, joining forces with LiveGolf. The PGA says their back was against the wall, bleeding out money, and with big players abandoning ship, they needed capital, and they needed it fast. Monahan told the New York Times that's why they took the deal.

It was very clear that the PGA tour was facing an existential threat from a $700 billion sovereign wealth fund, and that sovereign wealth fund was determined to control the future of our sport.

Monahan announcing the new partnership side by side with the governor of the PIF, Yasser Al-Rumayan on CNBC. Just this picture alone is going to surprise a lot of people.

It's a historical day for the PGA Tour and the game of golf. There's been a lot of tension in our sport over the last couple of years. But what we're talking about today is coming together to unify the game of golf and to do so under one umbrella.

There had been so much rhetoric between the two league, between the two tours. It had been so combative, so fiery, so hostile. And for the announcement to come that the PIF and the PGA tour are coming together after everything that had been said was purely shocking.

A decision many never saw coming.

Jay Moynihan, the head of the PGA tour, really let the families of the 9/11 victims down, really let folks who care about the game of golf down.

No one felt more deceived than the families of the 9/11 victims.

We thought the PJT shared our values and shared our commitment to never, ever be in business with the kingdom. That's the way it felt until you wake up one day and they've turned on you also.

Our thanks to Ashan. For more on this story, watch the full episode of Impact by Nightline, Power of Play, the booming business of sportswashing, now streaming on Hulu. Hi, everyone. George Stephanopoulos here. Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel. If you'd like to get more videos, show highlights, and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel. And don't forget to download the ABC News app for breaking news alerts. Thanks for watching.