Since when did golf have conscience?

THE golfers taking the blood-stained Saudi dollar deserve all the flak they are getting. And all credit to the journalists holding them to account.

But to watch golf – a sport steeped in racial inequality, sexual inequality, and elitism – get itself into a lather over a human-rights scenario is wryly amusing.

Those who have not sold their soul to a reprehensible regime deserve our appreciation.

But it is impossible not to see the irony of the two main tours being seen as paragons of virtue.

The European Tour is, of course, no longer the European Tour because it flogged its name to a Dubai logistics company.

The PGA Tour sold out to FedEx a good while ago.

And away from the tours, how about two of the sacred Majors?

There appears to be no more iconic event in sport than The Masters but this is a tournament held at a club that, until not that long ago, had no black members and no female members. Augusta National has always reeked of snobbery.

And so have many of The Open venues, some of which, in the not-too-distant past, have made women decidedly unwelcome.

And then of course we have the money. So much of it.

Those teeing it up in the LIV Golf Invitational in St Albans yesterday have been rightly accused of being interested in only one thing.

The dough.

But last year the PGA Tour gave former world No.1 Tiger Woods (above) $8million purely because he gets a lot of social-media hits.

Perhaps that money could have been better used in encouraging underprivileged kids to take up the game, in providing facilities for them, equipment for them.

There is no defending the players who have made themselves the latest accessories to Saudi Arabia’s concerted sportswashing project.

But professional golf has always been about obscene money and has seldom had a social conscience.

Which means this sorry development was horribly inevitable.