Tiger Woods said there's a "long way to go still" in the PGA Tour's ongoing negotiations with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, which finances the LIV Tour.

"Well, I think we're working on negotiations with PIF," Woods told reporters (h/t ESPN's Mark Schlabach) Tuesday at Louisville, Kentucky's Valhalla Golf Club, home of this year's PGA Championship.

"It's ongoing, it's fluid. It changes day-to-day. Has there been progress? Yes, but it's an ongoing negotiation, so a lot of work ahead for all of us with this process. And so we're making steps and it may not be giant steps, but we're making steps."

The PGA Tour announced plans in June 2023 to unify with PIF under the umbrella of a "new, collectively owned, for-profit entity."

"The parties have signed an agreement that combines PIF's golf-related commercial businesses and rights (including LIV Golf) with the commercial businesses and rights of the PGA TOUR and DP World Tour into a new, collectively owned, for-profit entity to ensure that all stakeholders benefit from a model that delivers maximum excitement and competition among the game's best players."

Woods is one of six player directors on the PGA Tour's policy board alongside Patrick Cantlay, Peter Malnati, Adam Scott, Webb Simpson and Jordan Spieth.

Woods' remarks come after Jimmy Dunne, seen as of one of the architects of the original framework agreement between the PGA Tour and PIF, resigned from PGA Tour Policy Board due to his feeling that there has been "no meaningful progress" toward an official merger.

"Since the players now outnumber the Independent Directors on the Board, and no meaningful progress has been made towards a transaction with the PIF, I feel like my vote and my role is utterly superfluous," Dunne wrote in part (h/t Sean Zak of golf.com).

Per Zak, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan sent a late-night text to PGA Tour golfers on Monday, writing that "we continue to make meaningful progress behind the scenes in our negotiations toward a potential agreement with the PIF."

Numerous high-profile golfers talked about the potential merger this week as the PGA Championship nears.

One of them was two-time major winner Jon Rahm, who left for the PGA Tour before this season.

"Some decisions and negotiations can't be taken lightly, so it should take quite a bit of time to get it done properly," Rahm said, per Martin Dempster of The Scotsman.

"I wouldn't want to see something rushed just to get a resolution. They should take their time to make this work properly. I don't know if that takes one, two, three, five, six years. I don't know what that might be like. But I don't feel like I'm in any rush to make something happen today. You need the people that do this for a living that are far smarter than I am to get together to come together to be able to make it work."

Spieth also expressed optimism for the future and rejected the notion that this is a player-driven effort to get the agreement fully in place.

"I think we're going to be at a really, really good place where the players on the PGA Tour can feel really good about it, as well as not having players making business decisions," Spieth said in part.

"Like, that's not — if you're in the room, it's very obvious that players are not dictating the future of golf and the PGA Tour. Like, you need to have everyone's perspective on both sides of it, and everyone that's involved within [PGA Tour] Enterprises. You have a lot of strategic investors that know a heck of a lot more than any of us players.

"So that's a false narrative that the players are determining all these things. That's not even what Jimmy [Dunne] was saying. Jimmy was saying more of the balance of things, and I think that balance is being restored."

All in all, the game of golf continues to be in great flux, and we continue to see an odd situation where the sport's greats only unify four times a year on centerstage for the majors before parting ways for the majority of the season.