“If Saudi Arabia wants to use the game of golf as a way to get where they want to go,” McDowell said, “I think we are proud to be helping them on this journey.” This trip, however, is what is needed: the Saudi-funded project, called the LIV Golf Invitational Series, which kicks off Thursday at an exclusive club outside London, represents nothing less than the proposed hostile occupation of an entire sport. , which takes place in real time, with the best golfers playing as a prize in a multi-billion dollar tug of war. In contrast to buying a European football team vanity market or hosting a major global sporting event, Saudi Arabia’s golf raid is not just a branding, not just another attempt by a country to use its wealth to redefine its global image. of its reputation- cleaning process that is widely ridiculed as a sports wash. Instead, Saudi Arabia seeks to take control of the golf course by winning, or in the cynical view, by buying the loyalty of some of the world’s best players. Its strategy has been bold – nine-figure offers, huge guaranteed paydays at every event – but it has directly targeted the structures and organizations that have governed golf for nearly a century. While the prospects for the success of Saudi Arabia’s plan are not at all clear – the series does not yet have a TV rights agreement or a series of corporate sponsorships needed to alleviate excessive start-up costs – its immediate impact on players and the seemingly Its bottomless financial resources could ultimately have an impact on the 93-year-old PGA Tour as well as the corporate sponsors and TV stations that have created professional golf in a multi-billion dollar business. “It’s a shame the game is going to be broken,” four-time champion Rory McIlroy said this week, adding, “If the general public is confused about who is playing where and what tournament this week, there and does not get into these events “, it becomes so confusing”. Professionals committed to playing in the first LIV Series event this week have tried (but not always successfully) to frame their decisions as golf-only decisions or as decisions that would secure their families’ financial future. However, accepting Saudi Arabia’s wealth in exchange for adding personal sparkle to its work, they have been at the center of a storm in which fans and human rights groups have questioned their motives. the PGA Tour threatened them with suspensions. and sponsors and organizations cut ties or at least distance themselves. All of this has opened the door to a sport that is renowned for its decency, a sport so deeply committed to values such as honor and athleticism that players are expected to punish themselves if they break its rules. Saudi Arabia, of course, is not the first country to use sport as a platform to capture its global image, seeking to renew itself and its economy by focusing away from everything from human rights violations to authoritarian rule and even the financing of terrorism. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and especially Qatar, which will host the FIFA World Cup later this year, have invested heavily in international sports over the past two decades. But Saudi Arabia’s golf venture may be the most ambitious attempt by a Gulf country to undermine the existing structures of a sport: In fact, it is trying to use its wealth to lure players away from the most important and best tournaments. established the golf course, the PGA Tour, creating what is a completely new league. Not that many of the players who participated this week were willing to talk about these motivations. McDowell admitted the same in his adventurous answer to a question that, among other things, raised the issue of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and the execution of 81 of its citizens on a March day. “We are here,” he said, “to focus on golf.” It was, after all, a difficult start. Even before the first ball hit this week at the Centurion Club just outside London, the cash-strapped LIV series – funded by Saudi Arabia’s state investment fund – had become a lightning rod for controversy. One of her biggest signatures, Phil Mickelson, sparked outrage in February when she praised the series as a “once in a lifetime opportunity”, despite acknowledging Saudi Arabia’s “horrific” human rights record and used a verbal expression to describe the government of the country as “dangerous”. The project’s main architect, former player Greg Norman, made matters worse a few weeks later when he dismissed the assassination of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Kasogi from Saudi Arabia, saying: “Look, we have all made mistakes.” Most, but not all, of the world’s top players have rejected the idea indefinitely: McIlroy, for example, scoffed at the project as a money grab in February. On Wednesday, while saying he understood the motivations of the players who had joined, he made it clear that he would never make the same decision. “If it’s pure money,” McIlroy said, “it never seems to go the way you want it to.” Even the rare chances for LIV players to defend their decisions directly to reporters this week were often strained. At a news conference on Wednesday, a group of players were asked if they would take part in a tournament in Vladimir Putin’s Russia or apartheid in South Africa “if the money was right”. A day earlier, Korean American player Kevin Na was caught on a live microphone saying, “This is inconvenient,” as his press conference ended with a British journalist shouting over the moderator. Despite repeated storms, many of the players who arrived in London this week for the first event in the series, the most lucrative golf tournament in history, appeared unprepared for harsh interrogations. Many have tried to divert questions by saying that they were just golfers or by making optimistic assumptions that golf is a force for good in the world. But some also stumbled when asked how these values were combined with the sale of their talents to Saudi Arabia as part of efforts to clear its image through the sudden and spectacular embrace of sport. In a particularly difficult exchange, a line-up of three big winners – McDowell, Dustin Johnson and Louis Oosthuizen – challenged who should face a question that included references to Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and homosexuals. Most of the players, however, seem to have come to the conclusion that the money was too good to pass up. The reported $ 150 million incentive for Johnson, the highest-ranked player in the new series, would be more than double the total cash prize he has won on a touring career. The cash prize offered to the last place finisher at the Centurion this week is $ 120,000, which is $ 120,000 more than it’s worth to be last in a PGA Tour event. The $ 4 million check for the winner, meanwhile, is three times the winner’s share of this week’s PGA Tour event, the Canadian Open. Money, in fact, may be the biggest lure of LIV Golf right now: Two more great champions, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed, are said to have been close to accepting equally high pay to join the series when it goes to United States this summer. , including a visit to New Jersey for the first of two scheduled events in Donald Trump’s classes. Saudi Arabia’s embrace of golf is part of a much broader, more aggressive focus on sport as a means for the kingdom to achieve the ambitious political and economic goals of its de facto leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Similar disputes involving the interests of Saudi Arabia have already plagued other sports, such as boxing, car racing and especially international football. But where previous Gulf ambitions have often taken the form of investing in a sport, the sudden push into golf by Saudi Arabia’s dominant wealth entity, the Public Investment Fund, seems like a brazen attack to control an entire sport. , at any cost. Tiger Woods, for example, reportedly turned down nearly $ 1 billion to join the LIV series, and other top stars have at least turned their heads. Undoubtedly the highest profile and perhaps most controversial figure in the series is Mickelson, a six-time champion who has been one of the PGA Tour’s most popular and marketable players for years. He has made no secret of the fact that his interest was linked to his contempt for the PGA tour, which he accused of “disgusting greed”. Mickelson, who has come under fire for his headlines about Saudi Arabia earlier this year and the decisions of many of his sponsors to cut ties with him, Mickelson reappeared in public on Wednesday but declined to give details. for its relationship to LIV or discuss PGA. “I feel the contracts have to be private,” said Mickelson, who is reportedly receiving $ 200 million to attend. However, any hopes that Mickelson, his new colleagues, or their new Saudi financiers had of quickly changing the narrative to action along the way, are unlikely to materialize any time soon. “I do not approve of human rights abuses at all,” Mickelson said in one of the most awkward press conferences of the week. Shortly afterwards, dressed in shorts and windproof, he went to the first jersey, where together with a member of the board of directors of the Public Investment Fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, they led the starting team in the first series LIV …
