Mickelson a soft touch on the green(back)s
If nothing else, the Saudis have a subtle grasp of golfers’ susceptibility to temptation.
By reportedly offering the greatest bounty for their Super Golf League to Phil Mickelson, who at 50 must consider whether to forsake the main tour for a cool £72 million ($132m), they have chosen a player who is shameless about flashing the cash. When facing Tiger Woods in a multimillion-dollar, winner-takes-all match in Las Vegas in 2018, he happily posed with his arms stretched around a small mountain of greenbacks.
Asked once how much paper money he carried on him, he casually revealed the $11,000 burning a hole in his wallet at that particular moment.
You can see why Mickelson might be seduced by the project, even if its reputed £720 million bankrolling sounds almost too good to be true.
Jay Monahan, the PGA Tour commissioner, sounded dire warnings at a Wednesday meeting in Charlotte about banning any signatories to the Saudi breakaway from the majors and the Ryder Cup.
And yet Mickelson is the one figure, on paper, with whom such threats are unlikely to cut much ice, now that he is ranked 115th in the world and showing little sign, in his sixth decade, of adding to his five major titles.
Mickelson could be forgiven, too, for harbouring scant affection for the Ryder Cup, having lost 22 matches, the most by a single player in the event’s history.
At the tail end of a stunning career, he can hardly be impervious to the appeal of one last eye-watering payday, when the alternative is to be pensioned off on the Champions Tour.
Given that ethics are unlikely to play much of a role in deciding whether other players commit to the Saudi scheme — there has, after all, been a European Tour event in the state for the past three years — the most powerful deterrent lies in the havoc that the PGA Tour and European Tour could inflict on their futures in the game.
Monahan is using much the same rhetoric as Uefa’s Aleksander Ceferin deployed against the European Super League’s “dirty dozen”, vowing that any defectors would receive immediate bans and lifetime suspensions.
At the same time, a dark shadow has been thrown over the fast-approaching Ryder Cup, where Dustin Johnson, Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Henrik Stenson and Rickie Fowler are in contention to compete at Whistling Straits in September, juggling the demands of qualifying with the lure of cash beyond their wildest imaginings.
Money, as we have seen with the ESL, can make even those purportedly wedded to tradition behave in strange ways.
Given the fierce loyalties that players tend to display to the Ryder Cup cause, you would think they would recoil from the notion of being banned for the rest of their days. And yet petrodollars are a potent draw, even if the outcomes, if they accept them, are far from pretty.
Would Johnson willingly toss aside his Ryder Cup prospects? He does not have the fondest memories of the event, having withdrawn in 2014 due to personal reasons and allegedly been involved in a fight after the 2018 defeat in Paris with his friend Koepka, something which both players have denied.
Saudi Arabia, by contrast, has proved the happiest hunting ground, with its European Tour event bringing him two titles in three years, not to mention huge appearance fees.
Now, Johnson and his peers confront one of the defining decisions of their golfing lives: to stay with the pursuit of glory, or to throw away credibility for cash?
None of those approached have yet given any signal of their intentions, while Monahan, evidently, is not for turning in his resistance to the Saudi’s designs on the game. But the one certainty is that if these players are lured away, forsaking not just the majors but any future representation of their country or continent, they will never be forgiven.