A soulless, surreal exercise
The Blood Money Classic, you could call it. Or perhaps just the Festival of Greed. Either way, a verdant corner of Hertfordshire has just borne witness to one of the most momentous acts of secession in sporting history.
No sooner had Phil Mickelson swaggered on to the first tee in his aviators than he discovered he could not just bank £200 million (NZ$390m) of Saudi cash without consequence, as the PGA Tour banned him and 16 of his fellow defectors with immediate effect. Not that he knew it, as he gave a self-serving speech about growing the game, but his opening tee-shot here at Centurion was about to double as the starting gun on golf’s civil war.
It was difficult to believe that any of this was real, that what seemed at first an absurd proposition had been made flesh. But yes, sport’s most obscene cash-grab has arrived, with all manner of ersatz accoutrements attached. The first tee was encircled by a phalanx of supposed Grenadier Guards, until one military expert pointed out that their uniforms were wrong and that they were merely hired actors from down the road.
A penny for Ian Poulter’s thoughts, perhaps. Admittedly, his going rate is rather higher these days. But as he signed his soul away to LIV Golf, Mohamed bin Salman’s project to annexe an entire sport, you wondered if he imagined his life flashing before him. This is a man who grew up just 20 miles away in Stevenage, who started out selling sweets at the pro shop in Leighton Buzzard. Now he was being paid an eight-figure sum to turn up to an invitational in his home county. You wanted to be seduced by the romanticism. And yet there was also sadness in seeing ‘‘Mr Ryder Cup’’ being reduced to a Saudi shill.
The essential problem with golf’s most bizarre spectacle is that it is not truly a tournament at all. There is no cut, no sense of jeopardy. There are no world ranking points to amass, no Ryder Cup spots to chase. The only intrigue lies in watching a few phenomenally rich men become even richer. For a day at least, there is a certain novelty in seeing Centurion, a corporate resort course beside the M25, offer an event whose prize purse is 66 per cent greater than that of the Masters. Beyond that, it becomes a soulless exercise in avarice.
Greg Norman, LIV Golf’s master puppeteer, is using a corporate approach known as the ‘‘whale tactic’’ to try to make the show credible. In Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, he has snared an impressive pair of whales, with two more major champions to come in Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed. But beyond this pod of whales is a disconcerting amount of plankton..
As ever, the stars claimed their right to silence on any thorny questions. But their complicity in sport’s most brazen case of sportswashing cannot be swerved. LIV Golf is even uglier as a concept than the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Formula One drivers only turn up in Jeddah because their sport compels them to, but these golfers, from a position of immense privilege, have consciously chosen to align themselves with an odious regime.
Oliver Brown is a sports columnist for the Telegraph.