Opinion: Golf’s swing to Saudi money feels rough, but it was inevitable

Danny Lee struggled to find any form in his latest stab at the US Open. Photo / AP

OPINION:

In golf there’s a saying: “there are no pictures on the scorecard”.

Your ball could have hit a tree, find a bunker or even struck a Saudi Prince taking a leisurely stroll along the fairway – it matters not, if you strike your next shot to the back of the green and roll in a miraculous long putt. As long as you made a birdie, it doesn’t matter how.

This week’s shock announcement that the PGA Tour will be joining business with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, backers of the rival LIV Golf Tour, is one of the biggest U-turns in recent sporting history. But in the end it was inevitable. With litigation looming and both tours overspending, despite all the animosity between the groups, joining powers makes sense.

That doesn’t mean the overwhelming influence of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in yet another sport shouldn’t feel wrong.

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan would no doubt like to take a mulligan about now. The PGA Tour had constantly taken the moral high ground since the creation of the rebel LIV Golf Tour. Monahan swung freely at the bad guys, including making the point of LIV’s Saudi Arabian backers and links to the September 11 terror attacks.

Now the PGA Tour is in business with them, golf’s establishment figures find the Saudis altogether more palatable. As PGA Tour star and world No 3 Rory McIlroy put it: “At the end of the day money talks and you’d rather have them as a partner.”

To borrow McIlroy’s line: Money was talking at the start of the day as well. That’s how golf got here. Players like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith were lured away from the PGA Tour to join LIV, each claiming a payday of around NZ$240m-NZ$330m. The only downside really was having to shrug off pesky questions about human rights issues and the dismemberment of a journalist. That and spending more time with Bryson DeChambeau.

McIlroy, with his moral compass, was left to earn a mere NZ$14m last season.

Joining the LIV circuit was always about money, not a new golf product where players only play three rounds under tacky team names like RangeGoats.

The Saudis have a lot of money and they can use it to influence everything in the world -- sport being among the easiest to grab. Golf is just the latest and won’t be the last. Sportwashing wins again.

More than 1.5 billion people watched the Fifa World Cup final in Qatar, despite the atrocities and treatment of the workers who built the stadiums. They were quickly forgotten when Lionel Messi was stepping up in the final’s penalty shootout. Same with the Winter Olympics in Beijing last year. Human rights abuses be damned when someone hits three triple corks.

How quickly we forgot to care. The flicker of concern about the working conditions of the people who made your golf hat is gone long before you reach the first tee.

Saudi involvement has undeniably made golf better. The LIV Golf tour, which this year included a victory for Kiwi Danny Lee worth $6m, is nothing special – and at times it’s been unwatchable. But with a competitor in the market, the PGA Tour was forced to put more money on the line and created elevated events where we see more of the best players squaring off against each other.

Should fans care that golf is the latest sport to be ruled by the Saudi Public Investment Fund? Yes. But will they care when ultimately the golf will be better for it? No. It’ll be a birdie on the scorecard.