When the Saudi-backed LIV Golf was trying, early last year, to attract the PGA Tour’s top players, the legacy organization implied it would never align itself with a kingdom trying to “sportswash” its atrocious human rights record. Now, it appears, the PGA Tour wants to take a mulligan.
The PGA Tour and LIV have ended their brutal legal battle with the announcement Tuesday of a new entity combining their assets. The confusing agreement is still incomplete, but the emerging picture is ugly: All of the PGA Tour’s commercial business and rights will be owned by an entity with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of Saudi Arabia’s Arabian Public Investment Fund, leading its board of directors. That means the man widely regarded as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s right hand now has a grip on professional golf’s greatest athletes.
What happened to the PGA Tour’s horror at Saudi Arabia’s repression of regime critics? What about the regime’s appalling treatment of women and religious minorities? What about the murder and dismemberment of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018? What about imprisoning people for decades for their social media postings? The tour’s revised stance would seem to be, as 2020 U.S. Open winner and early LIV recruit Bryson DeChambeau put it in an interview with CNN: “Nobody’s perfect.”
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan declared upon revealing the deal, “This will engender a new era in global golf, for the better.” But the decision isn’t better for the PGA golfers who turned down what was reported to be hundreds of millions of dollars from LIV last year, and who will now find themselves taking paychecks from the same people anyway. And it certainly isn’t better for the families of those killed on Sept. 11, 2001, whose loss was exploited as a political talking point for the PGA when it was claiming to stand on principle as it battled it out with LIV. They say now in a statement that they feel “betrayed,” and no wonder.
It also isn’t better for the world writ large. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Wednesday morning with the Saudi crown prince to discuss tensions over issues that range from oil prices to policy toward Iran and Israel. Yet when it comes to extracting meaningful concessions, especially on civil liberties, the United States seems to whiff again and again. At least two U.S. citizens remain wrongfully detained in Saudi prisons; still more are “free” yet prohibited from traveling home. Saudi Arabia also refuses to return Khashoggi’s remains, or even to disclose their location.
The players and golf fans who believed PGA Tour higher-ups’ claims that their differences with LIV Golf were about morals rather than money got hustled. But they might not be alone. “They’ll get their guys,” Brooks Koepka, a player who took LIV’s payout, shrewdly guessed last year. They didn’t get only their guys, though. They got the whole game.
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