The PGA Tour’s board could balk.

Golf’s big deal — a planned partnership between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — is not how big deals are ordinarily done.

There were almost no outside bankers or lawyers involved in negotiations that led to a five-page framework agreement, and only so much input from the PGA Tour board. The initial pact had few binding clauses and did not assign values to assets. The plan that would, as the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, put it, “take the competitor off of the board” came as the tour faced a Justice Department investigation over antitrust matters.

“In some ways, this looks a little more like a settlement to me than an actual M&A deal,” said Suni Sreepada, a…