Mohammed bin Salman has bankrolled a new rival to the P.G.A. Tour. What’s behind it?
as “the Crown Prince’s finger puppet” and called golfers who sign with LIV Golf “stooges for sportswashing.” Sportswashing is the attempt to improve a vile reputation by investing in popular sports or athletes—which the Saudis have also been accused of doing with Formula 1 racing andGolf may be to funnel Saudi money to you-know-who, since two of the eight golf courses on the 2022 schedule—one in Florida and one in New Jersey—have “Trump” in their name.
Fraught relationships with money are nothing new in golf. In 1930, the great amateur Bobby Jones “stormed the supposedly impregnable ‘quadrilateral’ ” by winning all four of that era’s major tournaments in a single calendar year, a feat unequalled before or since. Then, with no worlds left to conquer, he retired from competition, at the age of twenty-eight.
That, at any rate, is how the story is usually told. In fact, Jones retired at least partly because Warner Bros. had hired him to star in instructional films, and the United States Golf Association ruled that he was therefore no longer an amateur. Jones, who was a lawyer in his day job, looked down on people who played golf for money—he once referred to a typical pro as “an uneducated club servant”—and was unwilling to be labelled a professional in competition.
In the nineteen-sixties, television and Arnold Palmer helped turn competitive golf into a money sport. As that transformation was occurring, Jack Nicklaus and other star players came to feel that the P.G.A. was too focussed on sweater folders and not enough on them. A period of intense internal conflict ensued. The result, ultimately, was the establishment of an entirely separate organization, the confusingly named P.G.A. Tour. By almost any standard, the P.G.A.
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