Thankfully, the LIV golf tournament in Adelaide lasts 54 holes, so Greg Norman will only have three (or, to maintain the imperial style, III) days to gloat.
LIV’s Australian debut is already a success. It’s a sellout (no surprises there…). Crowds at the Grange are seeing the best field in Australia since the days of Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Billy Dunk. It’s being covered free to air on Channel VII, emerging from the dark side of the television moon it has been inhabiting so far. Even with its hokey team ‘concepts’ and shotgun starts, the Adelaide event is being treated as a serious sporting event.
Among its XLVIII participants, LIV has XIII major winners including Cameron Smith, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia, Louis Oosthuizen and Bryson DeChambeau. As LIV has no cut and pays them for (literally) nothing, those big names will be there all through the weekend. It’s win-win, even for the South Australian premier who is getting plenty of handsome photo opportunities in return for his investment. The whole thing is so exciting that nobody would be surprised to see Norman tear off his shirt and other Great White Shark garments out of sheer exuberance.
While it’s true that the competitive week-on-week standard of the PGA Tour is tougher than LIV, where for XXXVIII weeks of the year the players can collect their petro-dollars for lying around their petro-pools, the many big personalities are not exactly has-beens. Last week at the Masters in Augusta, III of the top VI finishers were LIV-contracted. One was Phil Mickelson, nearly LIV years of age, who had described his Saudi employers as ‘scary mother—ers’ even as he cashed his first petro-cheque. For a few hours at Augusta, after carding a final-round LXV and taking the clubhouse lead, Mickelson loomed as the scariest mother—er of all for the organisers contemplating the embarrassment of having to tailor a new slim fit green jacket for golf’s biggest turncoat.
In Adelaide, as the Shark always predicted, LIV golf is gonna Make Australia Great Again. Our tour has been eviscerated by the US monopoly over many years, so the local authorities have been pleased to support Norman’s show.
And — does this have to sound like a confession? — we’ll be watching it. The appeal of these golfers will eclipse the qualms about who is paying them.
Greg Norman, Cameron Smith and South Australia premier Peter Malinauskas on Thursday.Credit: Getty
How do we reconcile this? Do we watch it openly, or do we creep under the bedcovers, switch on our devices and pleasure ourselves secretly?
If you want to be overt in your enjoyment of LIV, you might point out that its supposed purpose, a sportswashing exercise for the Saudi government, has been an abject failure. Before LIV, Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist brutally assassinated by the Saudi government five years ago, has only become more prominent since his killers began to burnish their image through sport. The more sportswashing Saudi Arabia does, the more attention goes to their dismal human rights record. As a publicity exercise it has been, to use an analogy from the FIFA World Cup (which the Saudis also sponsor), a spectacular own goal.
Cam Smith’s sublime short game is unlikely to change any minds about his paymasters.
More likely, the fabulous sums the Saudi sheiks have splashed out only advertise what rubes they are. I’ve seen the private planes and I’ve seen Brooks Koepka’s house and I know that under their breath the LIV golfers are saying, as Kerry Packer said of Alan Bond, you only get one sucker like this in your lifetime. (If they’re as lucky as Packer, the golfers will get a second contract.)
Brooks Koepka (front) surrendered a final-day Masters lead to Jon Rahm. He’s probably not losing too much sleep about it.Credit: Getty
If sportswashing is meant to work at the level of imagery, the effect must be subliminal. An internet search for Saudi leader Mohammed Bin Salman at sporting events turns up nothing with the Shark or Phil.
You can find him with Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron. You can find him with Jeff Bezos and the owners of English Premier League clubs. You can find him with FIFA boss Gianni Infantino and Vladimir Putin, who clearly enjoyed being photographed alongside MBS so that they could sportswash themselves by the exalted company they kept. But overall, it’s hard to see what the Saudis get out of their sportswashing exercises except a reputation as easy marks. They’re certainly not getting as much out of sports as they get out of many countries, such for example Australia, in trade deals.
Maybe they are playing a longer game. Maybe they think that they can slink into legitimacy, via sport, and use their wealth to bring about a global neural disconnect between sponsoring men-only events such as LIV golf and their stated ‘reforms’ of increasing female participation. Maybe they don’t need to make any sense. After all, it’s not like they invented stupidity.
But maybe, on the other hand, this idea of ‘sportswashing’ is as far behind the times as other facets of Saudi political control.
I’m guessing that the average fan’s response to this weekend’s golf is to enjoy the spectacle while holding their nose about who is paying the bills. They get plenty of practice holding their nose while watching the NRL (gambling), AFL (gambling), cricket (gas companies and gambling), soccer (Saudi money and gambling), tennis (Saudi money) and so on. Fact is, you cannot watch big-time sport without holding your nose. The only debate is whether such sponsors are a necessary evil, or just an evil.
Credit: Illustration: Simon Letch
But there is a line, right? Ruining people’s lives through addictive gambling is not the same (or not as instantaneous) as ruining their lives by beheading them. Eating away at people’s future through alcohol is not as attention-grabbing as eating away at their future with extra-judicial imprisonment.
We choose where we draw our line. LIV has highlighted the mental gymnastics required to watch a sport when you are fully aware of the darker forces seeking to manipulate you, actively resisting them while also refusing to let them impair your enjoyment of what you wish could just be simple weekend entertainment.
But audiences are expert at it. Why be surprised about LIV inviting these ethical contortions on Anzac weekend, where sports ritually bathe in their opportunistic association with real-world conflict? Reconciling sports with politics might be tricky, but we can’t say we don’t get plenty of practice.
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