RBC Open in crossfire
GOLF Pact draws negative reviews before Canadian event
On the eve of the RBC Canadian Open, news of a merger between the PGA Tour, LIV Golf and the European tour shocked the golf world — including one of Canada’s best players.
“Nothing like finding out through Twitter that we’re merging with a tour that we said we’d never do that with,” tweeted Mackenzie Hughes, of Dundas, Ont.
It’s the second straight year the Saudi Arabian-funded LIV Golf will be at the centre of discussion at Canada’s lone PGA Tour event. Last year, the breakaway tour held its first event during the same weekend as the Canadian Open and poached some of the PGA’s best golfers with enormous signing bonuses, including Dustin Johnson, then the face of the Canadian tournament.
At the time, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan slammed LIV Golf, which came under heavy criticism as the latest example of sportswashing because of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing history of human rights abuses.
Now the tours are merging. The agreement combines the Public Investment Fund’s golf-related commercial businesses and rights — including LIV Golf — with those of the PGA and European tours.
Adam Ali, a professor at Western University whose current research focuses on the role of sports for international development, says news of the merger isn’t overly surprising. The Saudi regime benefits by further legitimizing itself in the global sports landscape — as it has with soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo’s transfer to the Saudi Professional League — and the PGA Tour gets a massive influx of money, he says.
Ali said much of the criticism directed at the PGA will centre on the
Saudi regime’s human rights violations and its discrimination of women and the LGBTQ community, but the United States has issues of its own.
“It seems like citing this kind of criticism is wielded only when Saudi interests don’t align with the interests of a western sport organization, but when they do the critiques aren’t as apparent.”
Western University lecturer Colin McDougall, an expert on sports management marketing who has written about LIV, said having a rival tour netted some positive results for PGA players from a business perspective. He used the PGA’s decision to help players with expenses — something the tour didn’t do before LIV arrived — as an example.
The field for this year’s Canadian Open — which doesn’t include any LIV players — is already set. The effect this merger will have on the event going forward is not yet clear.