Story we are following from the New Yorker:
When the P.G.A. Tour announced last week that it was merging with liv Golf, its Saudi Arabia-backed rival, the reaction from the sports commentariat was uniform. “Money wins,” Jason Gay wrote in the Wall Street Journal, quoting “Succession” ’s Logan Roy. The New York Times’ Kurt Streeter wrote, “They said it was about principles, but it was always about money.” He continued, “Human rights, it turns out, are a bore and obstacle. Sportswashing, as it is known, is powerful and effective.”
The sportswriters have a point. In pro sports these days, it is nearly always about the money. Since televised sports replaced religion as the opium of the masses, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing billionaires, major corporations, and sovereign wealth funds buying up teams and franchises. On Saturday, in the final of the uefa Champions League, Manchester City, which is majority-owned by the royal family of Abu Dhabi, defeated Inter Milan, which is majority-owned by a Chinese retail conglomerate. Gulf Oil Money 1, China’s Nouveau Riche 0.
Sign up for the News & Politics.
The latest from Washington and beyond, covering current events, the economy, and more, from our columnists and correspondents.
E-mail address
E-mail address
Sign up
By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
It’s also true that the P.G.A. Tour and liv Golf both had good reason to reach an arrangement. liv Golf was struggling to make much impact, and the P.G.A. Tour, which liv sued in federal court last year, claiming that the Tour had engaged in anticompetitive practices and restraint of trade, wasn’t relishing a lengthy legal battle with a deep-pocketed adversary. The P.G.A. Tour has also been eager to put the entire controversy behind it. With the 2023 U.S. Open taking place at the Los Angeles Country Club this week, Jay Monahan, the commissioner of the P.G.A. Tour, is doubtless hoping that public attention will switch away from Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist whom Saudi government operatives murdered and dismembered in 2018, and back to Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, and the other players at the top of the world golf rankings. But the collective memory is perhaps not as short as Monahan thought. And, over the past few days, we have seen his ascent to the top of the world hypocrisy rankings.
Last year, after liv signed up some top American players—including Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, and Phil Mickelson—Monahan and his colleagues played the 9/11 card. They warned other P.G.A. Tour players to consider the ethical repercussions of jumping to liv. “As it relates to the families of 9/11 . . . I would ask any player that has left . . . have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the P.G.A. Tour?” Monahan told CBS.
“The P.G.A. Tour had staked its ground on making the moral case against liv and the Saudis,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, an advocacy group that Khashoggi founded, told me. “To discover that was nothing but a negotiating tactic to get a higher price for the P.G.A. came as a bit of a shock, because it was a tactic that came with costs.”
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge
One of those costs is that the P.G.A.Tour-liv merger is now attracting critical scrutiny on Capitol Hill. “So weird,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, commented on Twitter. “P.G.A. officials were in my office just months ago talking about how the Saudis’ human rights record should disqualify them from having a stake in a major American sport. I guess maybe their concerns weren’t really about human rights?” In the House, California Democrat John Garamendi has introduced a bill to strip the P.G.A. Tour of the tax-exempt status it has retained despite raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from broadcast deals and corporate sponsors. “Jay Monahan should be ashamed of the blatant hypocrisy and about-face he and the rest of P.G.A.Tour’s leadership demonstrated by allowing the sovereign wealth fund of a foreign government with an unconscionable human-rights record to take over an iconic American sports league and avoid paying a penny in federal corporate income tax,” Garamendi said.
At a press conference last week, Monahan tried to justify his one-eighty by saying that “circumstances change” and arguing that a merger with liv will be good for the P.G.A. Tour—and for golf generally. He also said that it was attractive to “take the competitor off of the board.” But that statement brought up a second hurdle facing the P.G.A. Tour-liv merger: U.S. antitrust laws. Even before the deal was announced, the Justice Department had been investigating the P.G.A. Tour for possible violations of competition statutes.
PGA doesn’t have the most important tournaments that exist in golf they have no control over them the thing that almost everybody cares about the PGA has no control over now some think that the PGA Championship the PGA actually has control over and they don’t they actually don’t there’s a backhanded way
That they kind of do but in the essence of the tournament itself they don’t own it so you have the Masters which is widely regarded as the the biggest Tournament of a mall right um that is certainly its own entity has nothing to do with the PGA Tour you move on to the
US Open well it’s called open for reason anybody is allowed to play in the US Open if you qualify and then you move on and then you have the Open Championship which is more known as the British Open here in the states that is another tournament that is open to where anybody
Can play in as long as you qualify and then you have the PGA Championship and the thing is is that these tournaments have come to realize that they just want the
