Saudi coup will make golf’s powerbrokers tremble

Johnson reneging on his pledge to remain loyal to the PGA Tour is an act of avarice that stains his reputation

Dustin Johnson’s shameless volteface in joining the Saudi golf breakaway, just 100 days after he affirmed his loyalty to the PGA Tour, is one to send a shiver of dread through the game’s traditional bastions of power.

Unlike his fellow defector Sergio Garcia, this is not some past-his-prime, one-and-done major champion. This is a figure who, only 19 months ago, won the Masters with a record score of 20 under par, and who held the world No1 spot longer than any player since Tiger Woods.

If he can be seduced into forsaking his lifelong allegiances for the sake of some gaudy cash-grab, then cold business logic suggests that anyone can.

Except Johnson has revealed himself down the years as a man with fewer scruples than most. As a two-time winner of the Saudi Golf Invitational, and as a beneficiary of vast appearance fees, his first reaction to Riyadh’s involvement in a rival tour was to say: “I think what they’re doing could potentially be good for the game of golf. I’m excited to see what happens.”

Events of the past 24 hours should leave no doubt as to where Johnson’s sympathies lie. On Feb 20, he confirmed definitively that he would be shunning the Saudis’ blandishments, declaring: “I feel it is time to put the speculation to rest. I am fully committed to the PGA Tour.” Ultimately, the statement was nothing that a last-gasp £100million offer could not hastily rewrite.

Johnson has emerged as even more brazenly unprincipled than Phil Mickelson, the man who said he would overlook Saudi complicity in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in favour of a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the tour operates”. While Mickelson is unexpectedly absent from the 42-man field for the LIV Series’ first event next week, Johnson is only too happy to be the poster boy for a regime described by a United States intelligence report as having butchered a journalist.

Loyalty, in his book, could go hang. It mattered not that next week’s Canadian Open had already issued posters with his face at their heart, or that the event was backed by the Royal Bank of Canada, which since 2018 has paid him a fortune as a primary sponsor. All he prized, as an already phenomenally rich man, with more than £60 million in oncourse earnings alone, was the chance to become richer still.

As such, what truly sticks in the craw is the suggestion by Johnson’s agent, David Winkle, that the Saudi project was in “his and his family’s best interest to pursue”. We have heard this risible self-justification before. Garcia, outraged at the European Tour’s refusal to grant him an exemption to compete in Saudi Arabia this year, lamented: “They have to understand that we are trying to

achieve things for our families.” You would have thought the Spaniard was on the breadline, not the former owner of two private jets with a lifestyle of supreme opulence in Switzerland and Orlando.

With a journeyman such as Richard Bland, who has grafted for decades on tour for precious little glory, you can perhaps understand the rationale for jumping ship. But what of somebody like Lee Westwood?

There are no reasonable grounds to suggest that Westwood, at 49, needs to top up his bank balance. He leads the European Tour’s all-time money list, with a net worth estimated at £35 million. In a fit of drunken rage after falling short at the 2013 USPGA, he taunted one detractor by asking: “Have you seen what’s parked in my garage?”

For the top players signing up, this is not some noble crusade to help enhance the earning potential of those struggling further down the rankings. It is merely the difference between being able to afford 10 supercars or 20. Westwood, who has cultivated a reputation as a straight-talking type, is perfectly at liberty to admit this. Instead, when asked about his move at last month’s British Masters, he sought refuge in feeble whataboutery, at one point even praising the Saudis for their pace of reform. “Lots of countries around the world have got issues, and they’re trying to improve,” he shrugged.

Nobody disputes that Westwood and his ilk are entitled to take the money. But equally, their critics are perfectly entitled to view it as an act of avarice that stains their reputation. The behaviour of Johnson, reneging on promises just 14 weeks after giving the PGA Tour his word, is of a piece with the moral void at the heart of this Saudi enterprise.