“Sportswashing”… have you heard the term?
It’s a play on whitewashing something, i.e. trying to cover up what’s underneath. In the case of sportswashing, it is a recent term that describes an effort by the sheikdom of Saudi Arabia to mask or clean up their filthy human rights image by hosting an international major sporting league. In the current case, a professional golf tour with enormous purses and guaranteed money for the players has been designed.
Instead of the PGA Tour, where the best players in the world compete against each other with no guaranteed payday each week, the Saudi International League (LIV) players will get regular paychecks supplemented by bonus money based on performance, so it will function more like the NFL or NBA.
That is to say they will be entertainers, rather than competitors, kind of like golfing Harlem Globetrotters. (Question: Can we then expect entourages, platinum teeth grilles, and after-hours exploits at strip-bars from these well-heeled golf celebrities?)
Who is going to want to be associated with this barnstorming tour funded by tainted lucre?
Well, it appears that there is a market for this league: used-to-be-good PGA and European Tour golfers in the 35 to 50 age range who cannot realistically compete with the young flatbellies and who are too “young” for the PGA Champions Tour, which starts at age 50. LIV “competitors” will be guys on the downhill side of their career.
Such a league, to fit in between the PGA and Champions tours, is probably an idea whose time has come. The only bad thing about LIV golf is that it’s a publicity stunt by the Saudi government sovereign wealth fund for the purpose making the robed princes of the desert seem more legitimate than they really are.
Dustin Johnson, who is 37 and was the world’s Number One ranked player just a few years ago, is the key hireling of the LIV of the operation and was guaranteed $125 million to legitimize the league. (His father-in-law, hockey great Wayne Gretsky, must be proud.)
Phil Mickelson, a 51-year-old who won the PGA Championship in 2021, was previously slated to be the centerpiece of the LIV Tour but was shamed by the PGA and the media when it was announced a while back. He’s disappeared from public view, trying to figure out how to rehabilitate his image or come up with a new get-rich-quick scheme. Other “names” who are going to dip their beaks into the Saudi money trough include Sergio Garcia and a bunch of British used-to-be’s from the European golf tour.
I can see why washed-up players might be attracted to this Tour: oodles of money at a time when their earning potential from golf is limited and not-guaranteed. However, the source of the money makes decent people cringe.
These once-famous guys could also make money from doing porn movies, stealing Social Security checks from mailboxes, participating in Ponzi schemes, or becoming born-again televangelists… and hold their heads higher.
I wonder how they will sleep at night, knowing that they are being used to legitimize a shamelessly corrupt regime of bloodthirsty killers. Does anyone remember that 90 percent of the 9-11 bombing terrorists were Saudis, funded by Saudi royals.
Sportswashing is not exactly a new phenomenon. It was first done by Adoph Hitler in 1936 when the Nazis hosted the Olympics, trying to focus attention on his “superior” Aryan Race, while his Brown Shirts brutalized Jewish citizens in Germany.
Had the idea for a new, Washed-Up-Players League been sponsored by Nike, Rolex, or Elon Musk, I think it would have been welcomed by the PGA, the press, and the public. Why not give these used-to-be-famous guys a chance to make money while awaiting eligibility for the Senior (Champions) Tour? It makes sense in that way.
It would have been just the ticket for Rickie Fowler, a one-time hot shot now in his Thirties who can’t seem to get the ball into the cup anymore. Rickie, a handsome, engaging fellow liked by everyone, was a darling of the press and was in hundreds of commercials when he was younger. He’s an average player now, perfect for this exhibition league. And he likes money, fancy things, and notoriety.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Rickie, who once attended high school with my grandchildren in Murrieta, soils himself by signing up for the Blood Money Tour.
I hope he doesn’t.
However, maybe I just don’t get it, being the traditionalist that I am. Money has never been that important to me; I have never considered as the Measuring Stick of Life. Many people do, I guess, and will do whatever it takes to “succeed” in this way. If I had to make my income hawking phony “blessed” trinkets to gullible 90-year-old, TV-watching Christian spinsters, I’d shoot myself.
I may re-evaluate this position when Social Security and my County pension go down the tubes during the upcoming recession.
Hard times call for hard decisions, I suppose.