The centre cannot hold. All that is pure is gone. They’re shaving Aslan’s mane up there at the Centurion Club in Hemel Hempstead. And it has, of course, been genuinely shocking to see the grand old community game of professional golf, with its deep social ties, the beating heart of our post-industrial towns, reduced so easily to a row of shrugging men in leisure wear doing stuff on their own for money.
This is after all the people’s game, or at least the People Like Us game, still played on every cobbled street and in every playground, providing that playground is at least 300 yards wide and fenced from public access; a place where all you need is the ball, the green grass, hundreds of pounds of equipment and not to be in the inner city. Who could have guessed that professional golf would be so vulnerable to greed and self-interest?
Yes, it’s time to laugh at the golfers as they pretend, but also don’t pretend, to care about things. It was hard not to be gripped by the press conference exchanges before the first LIV Golf event this week. The new pop-up circuit is run by Saudi Arabia’s PIF as part of Vision 2030, the cultural project that is also a way of buying influence, outreach and soft power: art, music, sport, a football club.
Golf has duly coughed up its own platoon of freelancers and old stagers with a grudge. And it is already a more-ish spectacle. Here is a pin-headed frat boy wrestling with self-interest and social duty. Here is a row of sullen baseball caps looking not just baffled but outraged at being asked actual questions about actual things by that small group of British sports news journalists who are still willing to do this.
It may have been an essentially futile exercise, like asking a horse its opinion on the novels of Anthony Trollope. But it was also oddly refreshing, and indeed a surprisingly useful exchange.
I don’t propose to analyse here what this might do to the PGA or to discuss in granular detail how all this affects the chances of Holden Buttplug III at the prestigious Stinger Missile Systems Open. Firstly because other people will do this much better. And secondly because in many ways it doesn’t matter.
Golf is not a sport with any deep sense of public ownership or social conscience. George Orwell called it “an inherently snobbish game, which causes whole stretches of countryside to be turned into carefully guarded class preserves,” and golf has never really done much to prove this is not the case.
Its value lies in providing entertainment, otherworldly beauty and a level of sporting difficulty so mind-bogglingly extreme it has a kind of alien quality. Given golf is by its nature an exclusionary, high-cost pursuit, does it really matter where this happens or for whose benefit? As long as a pastel coloured shape is standing on a deep green wash performing a sublime calculus of arc and swing, as long as there’s a fizz and a gasp and the miracle of feel and flight, golf is fulfilling its one public service, which is to provide opaque but compelling TV product.
The obvious counter to this is that seeing the propaganda needs of a bloody regime normalised and explained away by people who run sport degrades our public life. The message is that anything and anyone can be bought. Dress it up in moral relativism. Cash the cheques.
On the other hand golf is also providing a service here. Stripped of the pretence that this is all for the fans or has any cultural purpose, it is in effect a refined version of all elite sport. Here is a thing that exists purely to enrich those who control it with no need, unlike other sports, to dress it up or apologise.
So we watched as one by one players at the Centurion Club pretended to have sound reasons for joining the breakaway, and then just gave up and effectively said it was for the money. Phil Mickelson looked notably baffled and sweaty, projecting all the calm moral authority of an evangelical Republican presidential candidate squinting into the police cruiser headlights as he’s hauled out of a Las Vegas ditch in a rubber gimp vest.
Mickelson said he was, like, really worried about the fate of Jamal Khashoggi, because that was totally bad, and in the same breath talked about how he’s really enjoying hiking and skiing and improving his work-life balance. Lee Westwood talked about people being “scared of change”.
Ian Poulter genuinely didn’t seem to understand the questions, although his sponsors EA Sports might struggle to reconcile their own recent statement declaring support for LGBT+ people around the world and issuing “a call for love and joy in the face of hate and bigotry”, while also supporting Poulter as he promotes a country where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment, torture or execution.
In the end most of them basically admitted that this is about personal interest. And in this sense golf is at least offering clarity and the only really honest response for any sport that takes money from a nation-state intent on laundering its reputation. Instead it has become habit, in the style of Amanda Staveley at Newcastle United, to pretend that this is all somehow progressive or iconoclastic or based on spreading happiness.
Openness is what is required. Sport needs a genuine reset in how it deals with its use as a nation-state tool. Until now this has been an open frontier, without policy or guidance or an adequate vocabulary. So we get lost in spin and whataboutery – the arms trade happens? Is this now the standard? – not to mention endless exhausting contradictions. Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé will preach about human rights, while promoting Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Jos Buttler will wear the Aramco Orange Cap and also a T-shirt covered in slogans about tolerance.
We cling to words like “sportswashing”, which is too weak and also inaccurate, because this is in the end hard power not tinkering with a reputation. Sport needs to be clear on how far it wishes to go down that road. With their shrugs, their nihilism, their naked self-interest, the golfers of the LIV are at least being honest with us.
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