“Golf as a new sportswashing mechanism”

The proposed new Saudi golf league has top-echelon professional golf towards a deep fracture. Sportswashing is at its core.

The likes of Phil Mickelson and Bryson Dechambeau are being lured by the new Saudi-backed golf league. Fronted by Greg Norman, the tour is flush with cash that stems largely from the Saudi Arabian government’s investment fund.

Several of the world’s best golfers have reportedly been offered over $100 million to sign on – and turn their backs on the PGA Tour in the process.

As Collin Morikawa recently said, details are still very hazy, but what is known is that if golfers take the money and leave the other tours behind – they’re doing so while turning a blind eye to the atrocities and oppression of the Saudi Arabian government.

Sportswashing is nothing new – but brings with it dire, global consequences as Will Bardwell writes in his magnificent piece, Blind Men and Blood at the Lying Four.

If you need to read one golf article this week, it’s this one.

For victims of oppression whose governments are successful at sportswashing, though, the costs are unfathomable.

“I understand the politics behind it,” Tiger Woods said in December 2019, “but also the game of golf can help heal a lot of that, too.”

Woods — who is not a stupid person — is wrong. History underscores that regimes do not use sportswashing to introduce reforms. They use it to refuse them.

By the time Germany lit the flame at the 1936 Summer Olympics, Hitler’s anti-Jewish campaign had been underway for three years, and the bodies of the Holocaust’s first victims had long grown cold. In the weeks before the Games, the International Olympic Committee insisted that the Nazis remove antisemitic signage throughout Berlin; the signage came down — until the Games ended, when they went back up. There was no reform. There was a brief pause, and then death.

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