Fore! Or Red Alert!

"I recognize everything I've said in my past positions…I recognize people are going to call me a hypocrite. Anytime I said anything, I said it with the information I had in the moment." 

PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan admitted after announcing a merger between the PGA and his previous vitriolic target, LIV.

“I still hate LIV. I hate them… I hope it goes away.” 

PGA Superstar Golfer, Rory McIlroy

It’s no secret that playing golf is fading in popularity everywhere, particularly among low-attention-span Y and Z Generation who are staying away in droves. It is viewed as expensive – as younger players face other costs from housing to tuition loans – and because of the country club cachet, notwithstanding lots of very inexpensive public courses, there is a notion of old-world elitism and Trumpian conservative values. Trump’s ownership of numerous golf resorts has added a negative twist to more tolerant and liberal younger generations. So, let’s figure how to make golf even less popular among these rising generations.

You could start with a nation that is heavily engaged in what we describe as “sports washing”: investing heavily in global major league sports, building massive ultra-modern sports venues, buying top-of-the-line sports teams and paying the best players in a given sport outrageous sums to play in new competitive leagues… all to cast a new and distracting positive image among nations with a deeply sullied reputation. Like an absolute monarchy where the king can order executions at will, where women have virtually no rights, with one of the most conservative fundamentalist religious mandates, and one where citizens that have offended the monarchy can be murdered without serious legal consequences within diplomatic installation in foreign lands.

In 2018, the Saudi government lured a US based Saudi citizen journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, into a Saudi consulate in Turkey, where he was smothered to death, with his body carved into parts to allow the evidence of the murder to disappear. Khashoggi’s crime? He was highly critical of the Saudi monarchy, in particular, of the new de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS). Fighting a stalemated war of attrition in Yemen, where mass starvation is taking more likes than military casualties, MBS has generated a very negative reputation, even as he battles conservative clerics to allow more freedoms to Saudi women. MBS has openly courted Donald Trump, including investing $2 billion in Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s private equity fund.

One of the most controversial Saudi sports washing venture, the LIV Golf League, began a few years ago: “The early framework for a new golf tour to rival the PGA Tour became public in 2019 with announcement of a league to be known as the Premier Golf League. PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan responded by implying that golfers who choose to play in a new league would be barred from PGA Tour events. Later in 2020, the PGA European Tour and the PGA Tour formed a ‘strategic alliance’ to work together on commercial opportunities, scheduling, and prize funds for each tour's membership… The Premier Golf League held talks with Saudi investors about a financial partnership, but Golf Saudi (a division of the Public Investment Fund) instead funded a new entity in 2020 which had its own plan to establish a global professional league, often referred to as the ‘Super Golf League’. This entity formally launched in October 2021 as LIV Golf Investments, with former professional golfer Greg Norman named as CEO.” Wikipedia

The Saudis were soon offering prime golf superstar players nine figures to jump ship from the traditional PGA. With the likes of Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka, LIV soon signed 26 of the top ranked 100 golfers in the world. The PGA banned the defecting players, and PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan declared the new league to be an “existential threat” to the PGA. Litigation kicked in as this the mutual hostility kicked into the courts. Loyal PGA players treated the LIV defectors as crass opportunists willing to sacrifice the sport for cold, hard cash. There was mutual hatred and a litany of hurled insults.

Then, on June 6th, the PGA and LIV announced that they would merge, a shock to the entire sports world, adding the European tour to the mix. To make matters so much worse, the new combination will be chaired by Saudi Public Investment Fund governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan, with Monahan as chief executive and an executive committee that will include PGA Tour policy board chairman Ed Herlihy and board member Jimmy Dunne. There is still rancor between players in the PGA and those who defected to LIV… now expected to play together, perhaps even on the same side with Ryder Cup competition. So far, the only folks who seem to have benefited are the insiders who architected the merger.

Sam Farmer, writing for the June 7th Los Angeles Times, note: “This hasn’t been just ‘disruption and distraction.’ The Saudi-backed LIV Golf Invitational Series was painted, maybe rightly so, as a cataclysmic threat to the game. It pitted player against player — the loyalists who stood by the PGA Tour, sometimes turning down the guarantee of generational wealth, and the players many viewed as traitorous for switching sides to accept money that was ‘dirty’ because of Saudi Arabia’s history of human rights violations.”

The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins (June 7th) also pulled no punches: “[L]et’s start with this simple question first: Why would the PGA Tour join forces with a vermin-populated fourth-rate start-up such as LIV Golf, a comedic failure that can’t command any ratings, headed by that king of the white mice, Greg Norman?... Bought. That’s the only word for [PGA Commissioner Jay] Monahan and his henchies on the PGA Tour policy board, who have made an otherwise inexplicable — and still vague — deal to work with LIV and the European tour to form a new global enterprise, funded by the Saudis. They were bought. The only question is for how many bills.” In a world where getting kids to participate in junior sports is a way to build discipline and character, we seem to be sending a very different message: Even dirty money can overrule friendship, commitments and genuine competitive decency.

I’m Peter Dekom, and except for money flowing into the hands of a few, the net “values” result is that even more potential golf superstars playing as young kids and teens will look at golf… and just move on.