Remember when Phil Mickelson got canceled?
It was February 2022, after comments surfaced he made a few months earlier about Saudi Arabia’s plan to invest billions of petrodollars in professional golf.
“They’re scary (expletive) to get involved with,” Mickelson allegedly told writer Alan Shipnuck. “We know they killed (Washington Post reporter Jamal) Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay.
“Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
The backlash was fast and furious. Sponsors dropped him. The media vilified him. Nine months after triumphantly becoming the “people’s champion” as the oldest major winner in history at age 50, Mickelson issued a statement (sort of) apologizing for his choice of words and slinked from public view before resurfacing on the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour and actively recruiting others to join him.
But darned if he wasn’t prescient, prophetic, even psychic.
Mickelson also told Shipnuck that players needed “leverage” to combat “manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics” by the PGA Tour and Commissioner Jay Monahan, “and the Saudi money has finally given us that leverage.”
On Tuesday, they reshaped the sport.
“Awesome day today,” Mickelson tweeted.
LIV Golf, the PGA Tour and Europe’s DP World Tour announced they have formed a “merger” that feels more like an acquisition. The exclusive financier of a yet-to-be-named, for-profit organization will be Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and it will have right of refusal on new investments that might dilute its influence. The chairman will not be Monahan but Yasir al-Rumayyan, the fund’s managing director who also runs the state-owned Aramco oil company worth an estimated $2.1 trillion (with a t).
It probably wasn’t a coincidence, the cynical set will note, that U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken just happened to be in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The deal was kept secret from all but a handful of people, knowing it was better to rip off the Band-Aid on an unsuspecting Tuesday morning than allowing the public to surgically dissect the source of the PGA Tour’s new financing over weeks. Senior tour staff didn’t know about it. Tiger Woods didn’t know about it. Nor did Rory McIlroy or any other players, many of whom spurned lucrative advances from LIV under presumably moral pretenses, not wanting to participate in sportswashing of Saudi Arabia’s dodgy human rights record through a white, dimpled sphere.
Unsuspecting pawns, all of them, who will soon be joined on tour by the crew that unapologetically took the LIV cash.
Mickelson might not be righteous but he was right about the inevitability of the age-old battle between money and morality. Of commerce vs. conscience.
Capitalism remains undefeated.
Two things happened. The first was the flurry of lawsuits between the rival tours that figured to drag on for years and drain PGA Tour bank accounts against an opponent with bottomless reservoirs of oil and, thus, money. The discovery process and court testimony also threatened to expose uncomfortable truths of two highly secretive organizations.
The second was that LIV’s format and purses forced the PGA Tour to react, increasing payouts and creating “designated” events where the top-ranked players were compelled to participate. Sponsors of those events had to fork out more for the elevated purses; sponsors stuck with lesser events griped about paying the same for weaker fields on a tour already weakened by LIV defections.
Golf courses are lined with trees. Money doesn’t grow on them.
This became strictly a business decision, then.
But wait. What about sportswashing and the moral high ground?
The PGA Tour looked across the sports landscape and didn’t see anyone else putting up much of a fuss.
The Saudis bought English soccer club Newcastle United, injected $450 million and watched it finish fourth in the Premier League — best in two decades — while the fan base wore mock headdresses in appreciation. NBA ratings remain robust despite the league’s deep ties to a Chinese government with its own human rights issues. People still watched a World Cup in Qatar despite horrid conditions and numerous deaths among workers who built the stadiums. Russia and China have hosted recent Olympics.
A few hours after the LIV and PGA Tour announcement came news that Real Madrid soccer star Karim Benzema signed a three-year contact with a Saudi club worth $321 million. Cristiano Ronaldo is already there. Lionel Messi could be next.
Even the PGA Tour could never completely extricate itself from Saudi money. The current tour stop is the RBC Canadian Open in Toronto. That’s Royal Bank of Canada, which helped Aramco launch its world record stock offering in 2019.
A year ago, Monahan told a CBS television audience that he knows two families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, where 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. “My heart goes out to them,” Mohanan said. “And I would ask any player that has left (for LIV) or any player that would ever consider leaving, ‘Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?’”
A year later: “I recognize that people are going to call me a hypocrite. … I accept those criticisms, but circumstances do change.”
It’s not personal, Rory. It’s just business.
That the announcement came the morning after final U.S. Open qualifying made it even more jarring. It is the ultimate meritocracy in sports, with 10,000-plus entrants, allowing everyman access to one of golf’s four majors, steeped in the purity and sanctity of competition.
Olin Browne Jr., who has toiled in anonymity on mini tours, reached his first U.S. Open at age 34 after trying since he was 17. Corey Pereira, who took the year off from a sputtering career to care for his girlfriend on her 10th round of cancer chemotherapyr, sank a 15-foot putt on the final hole to secure his spot at Los Angeles County Club next week.
There, he’ll walk into a sport that lost its innocence and, perhaps, integrity.
“It’s an amoral about-face by the PGA Tour and its leadership,” Golf Channel commentator Eamon Lynch, an outspoken critic of LIV, said Tuesday. “Let’s be clear here. If they did not actively recruit 9/11 families (to protest LIV), they were happy to hide behind them. They were happy to hide behind the grieving family of Jamal Khashoggi. They were happy to hide behind human rights organizations that protested Saudi abuses until it came time to burrow their noses into the trough themselves.
“We’ve gone from the position where it was individuals who were being stooges for the Saudis. Now the entire game has been reduced to that level.”
Welcome to the club, golf. Sorry the locker room is so crowded.
