Shane McGrath
Sports stars can’t turn a blind eye to injustice when it suits
EMBARRASSMENT is not the feeling ordinarily stirred by Pádraig Harrington. When he addressed the decision of the European Tour to hold an event in Saudi Arabia next year, however, it was hard not to cringe. ‘Then, of course, the question comes when you go to something like this, are you helping by going, or by not going are you pushing them away and making society poorer and weaker and less open by shutting them out?’ he asked.
As he went on to say in extensive comments to the Press Association, ‘I’ve played a lot of golf in different countries and if you started to get down to the nittygritty at times you’d go, “Well, there have been questionable places we’ve gone to”.
‘But on the other side you are opening up society in those countries and helping.’
Harrington is an intelligent man, so at some level he may, hopefully, appreciate the wretchedness of the decision taken by the European Tour.
Sport is played in lots of places that, to use his word, are ‘questionable’.
Manchester City are currently the most admired soccer team in the world, after all, and their entire success is down to the largesse of an absolute monarchy in Abu Dhabi, where human rights are routinely ignored, where the freedoms unthinkingly assumed in the west are extended only to some, and where immigrant labourers, who make up the bulk of the population, are treated as a sub-class.
This didn’t get much air-time in the documentary about City that drew much admiration at the start of this season.
With each passing month the likelihood of FIFA actually seeing through their plan to play the 2022 World Cup in Qatar hardens into reality.
The most popular sporting event in the world is going to be played in punishing heat thanks to a decision that has been undermined from the outset by allegations of bribery and corruption.
The European Tour has long since established a presence in the Middle East, too, from the replacement of an order of merit with the Race to Dubai, which concludes with the Dubai World Championship later this month, to the Desert Swing series at the start of each year.
It is the addition of a date in Saudi Arabia that led to Harrington being questioned earlier this week.
The European Tour made the announcement last March, with its chief executive Keith Pelley saying ‘We are very excited to be taking the first steps toward bringing professional golf to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the first time’.
No great controversy attended the news then, but the emergence of details surrounding the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Ankara last month has changed the situation rather dramatically. Gruesome details continue to emerge about how Khashoggi, a journalist critical of the Saudi rulers, was murdered and his corpse then dismembered.
The revulsion that followed the leaking of details of his murder has been accompanied by scrutiny of high-profile business dealings with Saudi Arabia.
An economic conference held in Riyadh was boycotted by western countries, but the story has taken on a sporting focus in the past week. Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are due to play an exhibition match in Jeddah in December. They were asked before the Paris Masters if they would go ahead with that plan, given the outcry over the murder of Khashoggi.
‘Of course I’m aware of all the situation,’ said Nadal. ‘But I had a commitment since one year ago to play there. And my team is talking to them, to analyse the things.’
Djokovic, meanwhile, managed this craven warble: ‘I personally always try to be very apolitical. I don’t like to involve myself in any political exchange or situations. And it’s unfortunate that we are both drawn into this right now.’
Unfortunate is a relative term when a journalist is being dismembered in an embassy because he has irritated monarchs. They are still to announce their decision, but it seems impossible that they can go ahead with the date. Roger Federer made life uncomfortable for them when revealing he had turned down the opportunity. Now the pressure is on golf. Harrington correctly alluded to the ‘questionable’ places where players have teed up in the past. Yet precedent is no justification. Eventually there must be a point when even sport, for all its moral feebleness and its long and shameful association with rich, corrupt regimes, finds the world permeating its cossetted bubble.
The European Tour event in Saudi Arabia should not go ahead. This grotesque regime should be shunned.