LONDON – The golf champions were seated during a press conference to promote their new Saudi-funded tournament when a reporter raised the awkward human rights issue of the oil-rich kingdom. The 2010 US Open champion Graham McDowell took it over, to the apparent relief of the players sitting next to him.
“If Saudi Arabia wants to use golf as a way to get to where they want to be,” McDowell said, “I think we’re proud to help them on this journey.”
But the trip is the goal: a Saudi-funded project called the LIV Golf Invitational Series, which kicks off Thursday at an exclusive club outside London, is no less than a proposed hostile takeover of the sport, which is happening in real life. time, with the best golfers selected as a prize in tug of war with high stakes, billions of dollars.
Unlike the vain purchase of a European football team or hosting a major world sporting event, Saudi Arabia’s raid on golf is not just a branding exercise, not just another effort by a country to use its wealth to redefine its global reputation. – cleaning process, widely ridiculed as sports washing.
Instead, Saudi Arabia is seeking to take control of golf by winning or cynically buying the loyalty of some of the world’s best players. His strategy is bold – nine-figure offers, huge guaranteed paydays at every event – but it is aimed directly at the structures and organizations that have run golf for nearly a century.
Although the potential for success of the Saudi plan is far from clear – the series still lacks a TV rights deal or a set of corporate sponsorships needed to blunt its extravagant start-up costs – its direct appeal to players and seemingly bottomless financial resources could ultimately account has implications for the 93-year-old PGA Tour, as well as for corporate sponsors and television operators who have turned professional golf into a multibillion-dollar business.
“It’s unfortunate that this will ruin the game,” four-time grand champion Rory McIlroy said this week, adding: “If the general public is confused about who’s playing where and what tournament this week, and ‘Oh, he plays there and doesn’t enter These events “just get so confusing.”
The professionals who committed to playing in the first event of the LIV Series this week tried (not always successfully) to formulate their decisions as fundamental only to golf or as solutions that would protect the financial future of their families. Yet, by accepting Saudi riches in exchange for adding personal brilliance to his project, they are putting themselves at the center of a storm in which fans and human rights groups are questioning their motives; The PGA Tour threatened to remove them; and sponsors and organizations sever ties or at least distance themselves.
All of this has led to rifts in a sport known for its dignity, one that is so deeply committed to values such as honor and athleticism that players are expected to impose penalties themselves if they break its rules.
Saudi Arabia, of course, is not the first country to use sport as a platform to smooth its global image to seek to rebrand itself and its economy, focusing on everything from human rights abuses to autocratic rule. to even the financing of terrorism. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and most notably Qatar, which will host the World Cup later this year, have all invested heavily in international sport over the past two decades.
But Saudi Arabia’s golf venture may be the most ambitious effort so far in the Gulf to undermine existing sporting structures: in effect, it is trying to use its wealth to lure players away from the most famous tournaments and tournaments. well … an established golf chain, the PGA Tour, by creating an entirely new league. Not that many of the players who took part this week were eager to talk about these motives.
McDowell acknowledged this in his meandering answer to a question that raised, among other topics, the Saudi war in Yemen and its execution of 81 of its citizens in one day in March. “We’re just here to focus on golf,” he said.
After all, it was a difficult start. Even before the first ball was hit this week at the Centurion Club just outside London, the money-laden LIV series – funded by the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Saudi Arabia – has become a lightning rod for controversy. One of his biggest signatures, Phil Mickelson, sparked outrage in February when he praised the series as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, although he acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s “terrible” human rights record and used profanity. to describe the country’s government as “dangerous”. The project’s chief architect, former player Greg Norman, then made matters worse a few weeks later when he rejected the assassination of Saudi Arabia and the dismemberment of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Kashoghi, saying, “Look, we all made mistakes.”
Most, but not all, of the world’s best players turned down the idea unexpectedly: McIlroy, for example, mocked the project as a money-grabbing in February. On Wednesday, saying he understood the motivation of the players who joined, he made it clear that he would never make the same decision. “If it’s pure money,” McIlroy said, “it never seems to be the way you want it to be.”
Even the rare chances of LIV Series players defending their decisions directly to reporters this week have often been strained. At a news conference on Wednesday, a group of players were asked if they would take part in Vladimir Putin’s tournament in Russia or in South Africa for apartheid, “if the money was right”. A day earlier, Korean-American player Kevin Na was caught on a live microphone saying, “This is awkward,” while his press conference ended with a British reporter shouting over the moderator.
Despite repeated firestorms, many players who arrived in London this week for the first event in the series, the most lucrative golf tournament in history, seemed unprepared for difficult questions. Several have tried to divert questions by saying they are just golfers, or by optimistically speculating that golf is a force for good in the world. But some also stumbled when asked how these values matched the sale of their talents to Saudi Arabia as part of efforts to clean up its image through the sudden and spectacular embrace of the sport.
In a particularly awkward exchange, a group of three main winners – McDowell, Dustin Johnson and Louis Ostheusen – objected to who should address an issue that includes references to Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and homosexuals.
However, most players seem to have come to the conclusion that the money is too good to miss. The announced $ 150 million incentive for Johnson, the highest-ranked player to jump into the new series, will be more than double the total prize pool he has earned on tour in his career. The cash prize offered to the last Centurion finisher this week is $ 120,000, which is $ 120,000 more than the last one in a PGA Tour event. Meanwhile, the $ 4 million check for the winner is three times the winner’s share offered at this week’s PGA Tour, the Canadian Open.
In fact, money may be the biggest lure for LIV Golf right now: two other big champions, Bryson Deschambo and Patrick Reed, are said to be close to accepting such big salaries to join the series when it moves. in the United States this summer, including a visit to New Jersey for the first of two planned events in courses owned by Donald Trump.
Saudi Arabia’s golf embrace is part of a much broader, aggressive focus on the sport as a means to achieve the ambitious political and economic goals of its de facto leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Similar controversies over Saudi interests are already lurking in other sports, including boxing, car racing and, above all, international football.
But where previous Gulf ambitions have often taken the form of investment in sports, the sudden push for golf by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment organization, the Public Investment Fund, seems like a brazen intent to attack to control the entire sport. in any case. price. Tiger Woods, for example, has reportedly turned down nearly $ 1 billion for the LIV Series, and other top stars have at least turned their heads.
Perhaps the most famous and perhaps the most controversial figure to join the series is Mickelson, a six-time grand champion who has been one of the PGA Tour’s most popular and best-selling players for years. He made no secret of the fact that his interest was linked to his contempt for the PGA Tour, which he accused of “disgusting greed”.
Tightened by loud criticism of his headlines in Saudi Arabia earlier this year and the decision by several of his sponsors to sever ties with him, Mickelson reappeared on the public scene on Wednesday, but declined to give details about his relationship with LIV or discuss PGA. “I feel that the contractual agreements should be private,” said Mickelson, who reportedly received $ 200 million to participate.
However, all the hopes that Mickelson, his new colleagues or their new Saudi financiers might have had for the story to move quickly to action on the course are unlikely to materialize any time soon.
“I do not approve of human rights abuses at all,” Mickelson said at one of the most embarrassing moments of a week-long press conference.
Shortly afterwards, wearing shorts and a windbreaker, he walked to the first T-shirt, where he and board member of the Public Investment Fund Yasser al-Rumayan led the group to open …
Add Comment