This isn’t a revolution, it’s just a low-brow, low-rent It’s A Knockout

MAYBE they spent too much on executioners back home. Maybe they spent too much on those new green and white Newcastle United kits whose magical properties will make Eddie Howe’s side look like the Saudi Arabia national team next season while simultaneously managing to give the fans their club back.

Whatever the reason, there’s got to be some explanation for why an organiser as fabulously wealthy as the Saudis managed to make the first event of its breakaway LIV Golf series look like a low-rent, low-wattage, low-brow, low-end, poor man’s version of It’s A Knockout.

The black cabs, the old warplanes overhead, the fake soldiers in their red tunics and bearskins? These were not exactly the symbols of a revolution, which is one of the many overblown claims LIV Golf makes on behalf of itself. This wasn’t a revolution. This was just the coronation of an old king called Cash.

Shot just got real? ‘Cash just got real,’ you mean. Just say it. At least that’d be honest. There was only one reason why the players were at Centurion Club in Hertfordshire last week. ‘Boatloads of cash,’ Rory McIlroy suggested from the other side of the Atlantic. And he was right.

There is nothing wrong with chasing cash apart from the small matter of whose hand works the cash dispenser. Because, in this case, that would be the same hand that wielded the bone-saw.

The European Tour, now the DP World Tour, sanctioned an event in Saudi Arabia until recently, of course, which complicates its ethical position on LIV Golf so each person has to ask themselves where their red line lies, the line they are not prepared to cross.

That’s the problem with LIV Golf: whichever way you cut it, however much you talk about a golfer’s right to free agency, compare it to the formation of the Premier League or the IPL or say that the sport will benefit from being shaken up, you always have to keep coming back to the paymaster. And the paymaster is the kingdom that cuts up journalists with bone-saws, persecutes minorities and represses women.

And the job of the golfers who have signed up is not to win tournaments or build a career. The job of the golfers on the LIV tour is to make Saudi Arabia look good. The job of the golfers on the LIV tour is to make the kingdom’s policies look less unacceptable. The job of the golfers is to take attention away from repression. The job of the golfers is sports washing.

I have a huge amount of respect for some of the golfers who are on the LIV roster but I think they’ve made the wrong decision signing up for this series. They won’t lose any sleep over that opinion but judging by the reaction to their defection to LIV golf, they have lost a lot of admirers and a lot of fans. They have made themselves patsies for a despotic regime.

They have at least explored a whole host of new ways to describe dismembering a man while he is still alive, which was journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fate. ‘We all make mistakes,’ LIV’s front man Greg Norman said recently. ‘Reprehensible,’ was the adjective Graeme McDowell chose. Reprehensible? Not shouting ‘fore’ when you hook your drive off the tee is reprehensible. Chopping a bloke up with a bone-saw takes it a little bit beyond that.

As for the broadcast coverage of the event, fronted by former NBC commentator Arlo White, it was risible. In fact, risible doesn’t do it justice. It was pathetic. It was an abomination.

The commentary was so sycophantic, so adoring, so bankrupt, so unskilled and so cloying that it felt like the crudest kind of propaganda. It was like watching Saudi state television.

‘I’ve never seen as many smiles on the faces of elite sportsmen as I have seen this week,’ White said, early in the proceedings on Thursday afternoon. That’d be the cash, Arlo. And, by the way, pass the sick bucket. I watched some of it on the opening day and it looked desultory and joyless.

If you think they’re happy for any other reason than the money, if you think they got a thrill out of playing in a half-baked tournament, struggling to find ways of justifying what they have done, trying to answer whether they’d play if Vladimir Putin was paying them, then you’re deluded.

This is a mercenary tour and its players are out on a limb. Fortunately for them, it’s not the kind that gets lopped off in Chop Chop Square in Riyadh on Friday afternoons.

This is a mercenary tour and its players are out on a limb