Golf’s civil war rumbles onto the grand slam stage this week when the US Open begins on Thursday with a $10 million prize-fund that brings to mind some memorable words uttered by the late Australian media mogul, Kerry Packer.
It was Packer who marched into the Australian Cricket Board in 1976 bidding for rights to televise cricket. He led with: “There is a little bit of the whore in all of us, gentlemen. What is your price?”
After a grimly dispiriting week in which the squalid reality of the LIV Golf Invitational Series became all too apparent, there’s little doubt about the price many of the world’s top professional players are ready to charge for lying down with the Saudi regime. And it’s a lot more than $10 million.
The reported €1.6 billion tied up in the breakaway series is on a different level to the US and European tours and even the threat of not being allowed play in major tournaments isn’t preventing players from lying back and thinking of MBS.
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That’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who the world knows approved the capturing and killing of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. Saudi diplomacy on that occasion consisted of a journalist being strangled and his body cut up with a bone saw.
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Tied in with deplorable human rights abuses inside Saudi itself, as well as its role in conflict in Yemen, the country’s attempts to apply a sickly veneer of glamour onto a much more sinister reality involves perhaps the most blatant case of sportswashing yet seen.
It’s a lot of things but subtle it isn’t. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, chaired by MBS, has been pumping billions into various sports and basically putting it up to governments, governing bodies and prominent sporting figures to name their price.
Plenty are depressingly happy to play ball. Lots of ‘whataboutery’ has been volleyed back in response to the condemnation pouring down on LIV and there are undeniable hints of sanctimony from some critics whose social conscience hasn’t been quite so evident in the past.
But golf does face a fundamental crisis in having its structures threatened by a naked power-play of the financial bottom line.
Because behind all the blustering guff about freedom of choice, golfers being independent operators looking out for their families, and even Graeme McDowell’s hoary old line about supposedly working to affect change from within, everyone knows the score.
Players have been bought to gussy-up and tramp fairways so a government can pretend to be something it isn’t. Tart it up anyway you like but they’re simply hard-faced stooges for a deeply cynical regime banking on the old trick of money trumping morality.
And there’s a good chance it’ll work too, because when momentum takes over it can take on a force and logic all of its own.
Cricket found that out with Packer. The ACB sniffily turned down his offer leaving a jilted suitor to stew and devise his own competition, one that ultimately led to cricket being turned on its axis. Packer decided limited overs was the future and so was born World Series Cricket, a concept that basically dominates the game today.
There are echoes of what happened then to what’s occurring now in golf.
Packer threw massive money at the project, attracted huge but dissatisfied names like Dennis Lillee and Viv Richards, and heavily promoted an audience-friendly format that entertained viewers previously mostly reared on a diet of lengthy test matches.
There was an inevitable split with the game’s governing body, lengthy and expensive court cases, and lots of angst about the ‘soul’ of the game before uneasy peace broke out.
The legacy of Packer’s money-bombing initiative is all over modern cricket where the one day game reigns supreme. His obituary in Wisden pointed out how, for better or worse, his intervention “created the finances, shape and tone of the modern game.”
Apparently, the Australian could cut an ominous figure, although his sins were mostly commercial and sportswashing wasn’t even a term then, whereas the LIV Series’ non-commercial nature only underlines the cynical motivation behind it.
But the potential for this project to wind up being a catalyst for change in golf is there.
There is a familiar ring to its aim of delivering a shorter and more exciting model of a game desperate for new and younger audiences. This tour lives up to its title with stroke play taking place over just 54 holes and with a team element too presided over by high-profile captains.
This is a blueprint Packer would recognise. Greg Norman even referenced him last year when praising his compatriot’s work in cricket.
“All Kerry did was enlarge the sandbox and gave the sport better opportunities. When you see that, in its most simplistic form, that’s what should and will happen with golf. We’ll give these guys a bigger sandbox they can all play in,” he said.
That an obviously bright individual like Norman can fiddle his moral compass to the extent he can peddle such lines with a straight face and ignore the wider context says much about the ethical quicksand this enterprise squats on.
However, time changes and the Saudi fund appears ready for the long haul. The ultimate impact on golfing politics and the game itself is hard to predict. But it’s uncanny how quickly a breakaway enterprise can get assimilated into the establishment when tempers cool and expediency reigns.
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Before he died in 2005, Packer wound up a member of cricket’s ultimate establishment organisation, the MCC. At his inauguration he was compared to Don Bradman in terms of influential figures in the history of Australian cricket. The interloper had been fully absorbed.
There’s a much more baleful motive to this golf revolution. The Saudi impulse brings to mind another old line about sex being one of the most beautiful, natural wholesome things money can buy. But don’t rule all sides eventually settling on a mutually convenient and satisfactory price.
