Hi, Doc, peace be upon you… want some Starbucks? I grabbed an extra. Anyway, where were we? Oh, right, last week I was getting all mopey about my standing among the world’s leaders, how I’m getting kicked around for starting this new golf league.
Everyone says I’m “sportswashing”. All over everything, word of the year, OED, Wikipedia, everywhere sportswashing. Anne Peterson in The Washington Post, she defines sportswashing as “attempts by the Saudi government to use sports to distract from a long record of alleged human rights violations”.
This other guy in USA Today says my guy Greg Norman is cheapening the sport of golf by “enriching himself at the teat of a tyrant”.
Slide that basket over here, would ya, Doc? These people make me ill.
Have you ever? All day, every day, the same thing – Khashoggi, Khashoggi, Khashoggi. Sportswashing, sportswashing, sportswashing. Nobody reads anymore. Nobody understands what I’m doing over here. Inherit the job, ruler of Saudi Arabia, and get back to me. Like I’m trying to sweep the dismembered remains of Jamal Khashoggi under a rug of professional golf.
Poor cousin Jamal. That was dumb. Ugh. We kill the one Saudi Arabian in the world people actually liked. In an embassy in Istanbul. And don’t get away with it.
I tell ya, Doc, it’s lonely at the top. Good coffee, though, right?
Trump and Biden, they get it. They understand. One gives me his golf courses and the other gives me a fist bump.
Still, Doc, I don’t know, all this talk about “the good of the game”, like it’s some sort of religious icon, encased in glass so you can’t get germs on it. What does that even mean, the good of the game? Good for its popularity? In all of history, there has never been more ink spilled on golf than this year. Because of my new LIV Golf League, by multiples. Everyone is winning.
Is it good for the PGA Tour? Who knows. Good for NBC? CBS? Jim Nantz? Jack Nicklaus? Tiger Woods? Eh, depends on your view. What about this new Australian hero, Cameron Smith?
“Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly,” Shakespeare wrote; Cam can keep doing what he’s doing, play in 20 tournaments next year, win four or five times, including another major championship or two, and make $20 million if he’s lucky.
Or, I can give him $100 million today, he can play 14 tournaments next year, not win one and still lay claim to being not only the best player in the world, but the smartest. A fraction of the work at his salary squared, and no pressure! No cuts, no competition, Sundays off.
It’d be Cam, Phil, Brooks, Dustin, 44 others and “the clown car”, with announcers Gary McCord (his phrase), David Feherty and Charles Barkley, who is fast becoming my favourite spokesman.
Oh, Doc, when I read what Barkley said in The New York Post, I almost teared up. “These are made-up words — sportswashing and blood money; everybody’s taken blood money … I don’t want to practise selective outrage … we all have ‘sportswashed’ something, so I don’t like those words, to be honest with you. If you are in pro sports, you are taking some type of money from not a great cause.”
That’s what Charles Barkley said, Doc. The first voice of reason we heard after two months of daily drumbeat. Millions of dollars a month I spend on public relations, and along comes the Round Mound of Rebound to completely turn the tide of public opinion, and he wasn’t even on the payroll, yet. Amazing.
I especially loved his quote at the end: “For $200 million I’d kill a relative.”
That’s the spirit!
For just about 3000 years people have used sports for business and political reasons. The Romans, the Greeks, the Nazis, the Americans… the Americans send an all-star baseball team including Babe Ruth to Tokyo, and their catcher, Moe Berg, is sneaking around the country for the OSS taking moving pictures from rooftops, the better to know where to drop their bombs.
But sportswashing? As if.
Dubai has European golf, North American soccer and English football, but no one says a thing. Saudi Arabia can’t have golf because Time Magazine’s Man of the year in 2018 was Jamal Khashoggi, and he wasn’t around to see it.
Is it okay that Russia is invading Ukraine while a woman from Russia wins Wimbledon? Okay that Alibaba owns the New York Nets? Whatever. Hitler had his Olympics. Mussolini had his World Cup. South Africa had its golf and tennis tournaments, and plenty of rugby. China? Well, China is everywhere — in English football, in American basketball…
Shoot, LeBron James plays NBA basketball just an Uber ride from Tiananmen Square, and no one says a thing. (See what I did there, Doc? In Hollywood they call that “product placement”. I just bought 5 per cent of Uber, along with 5 per cent of Boeing, which sponsors the great South African golfer Ernie Els, who doesn’t like LIV Golf but does like Boeing.)
In the real world, Doc, sportswashing is when someone you don’t like engages in sport. Dumb, racist, at least xenophobic. Were there such a thing, the football league in England would be the sports-laundromat.
The Premier League: the world’s greatest platform for the world’s most popular sport. The team owners are: a gambler (Brighton), a pornographer (West Ham United), a deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates (Manchester City), a Saudi prince (Sheffield United … oh wait, that’s us), three Chinese billionaires (three teams), one recently dispossessed Russian oligarch (Chelsea), a Wall Street tycoon (Burnley), an Egyptian billionaire (Aston Villa), a commodities trader and his partner, the producer of The Cosby Show (Liverpool), a British-Iranian billionaire with a Russian holding company (Everton), and so on and so forth…
But sportswashing, anyone?
Melinda Gates goes to Wimbledon and gives them millions for women’s tennis. Sportswashing, anyone call it? Nooooooo, of course not. It’s a charitable donation from Mrs Microsoft, therefore it is good.
How about Emirates Air? They sponsor the US Open Tennis Championships, along with JP Morgan Chase and American Express. Sportswashing, sportswashing, sportswashing anyone? JP Morgan and Thomas Edison built GE, which is building a world that works for me.
Bechtel, the big American company? They are busy building Jeddah in my country, which will resemble The Jetsons by 2030, or thereabouts. Anyone mind? No, and neither does anyone in the US seem to mind that we have one of the great alliances in world history, one that comes at a certain cost to my domestic tranquillity.
You know who doesn’t use this stupid ‘sportswashing’ word, Doc? Smart people; businesspeople; people who know their history; worldly people; and anyone who doesn’t believe one person has the right to judge another.
The only people who can justifiably use the word are those who make a living pointing out human rights violations and anyone who falls into their trap.
I love this PGA Tour guy. His spokesman says my record on human rights “is certainly something anyone who does business with the LIV Saudi Golf League should be informed of and something we have sought to educate our membership about.” Gag me!
Educate our members. I’d love to be a fly on the wall of that classroom. All the human rights violations in my country, and maybe not so many in the US. Probably nothing on Abu Ghraib, or Epstein, or Vietnam, or your two million prisoners, or your fast-eroding women’s rights… oh, please, in Saudi Arabia our children do not have to rehearse school-wide lockdowns. Inform away!
This one golfer I got, Paul Casey, an old English fellow, used to be an ambassador for UNICEF. He says it right — I’ll read you the quote in The Independent: “Anybody who says sport isn’t political, that’s rubbish. Sport is very political, and we’ve seen it through the years…”
Really, it’s the economy, Doc. Dollars and cents. I need to get some tourists over here. I need to win the hearts and minds of all those golf fans in the US. I need to make some bank on something other than oil.
Read my Vision 2030! It says right there: “Goals include reinforcing economic and investment activities, increasing non-oil international trade, and promoting a softer and more secular image of the Kingdom.” Bingo! Kinder, gentler, LIV Golf!
It’s amazing, Doc, I pay all these people in the US millions of dollars a month, people in Boston, Washington, New York, even Des Moines, wherever that is. I pay the best lawyers, lobbyists, and public relations people, too. One of them, KARV, they get $120,000 a month, plus-plus-plus, you know what I’m saying? Just to make things nice.
I’ll read what it says on their website: “KARV designs and builds impactful reputation management programs for individuals requiring bespoke strategic communications support and sophisticated reputation management counsel.”
Hey, KARV, how’s this teat of a tyrant’s taste? Good, I bet, at $120,000 a month, plus-plus-plus. Impactful reputation management my ass. I should just do what Trump did and send the money right to the people.
I enrich their bankers, their politicians, their corporations… And people go nuts over golf. They just don’t get it. This “distraction” has made a martyr of Jamal Khashoggi. It isn’t about hiding the memory of his death. It isn’t about making people forget that Saudi Arabians hijacked the planes on 9/11.
This golf league is between me and the sheikh in Dubai. He has his football team, I have mine. He has his golf league. Mine is coming along. He has his tower. Mine is going up, and it will be the tallest in the world, 600 feet taller than his… part of a city unlike the world has ever seen, Allah willing.
His Vision 2021? Boooorrrrring. My Vision 2030? They could make a Hollywood movie, it’s so beautiful. In fact, Doc, you could say the student has become the master. Pretty soon LIV Golf will own the world. The PGA Tour will become our American branch, and Europe will remain in the hands of DP Golf, Mr Dubai Ports, my mentor and friend Sheikh Mohammed bin Rachid Al Maktoum.
This man, like a father to me. He has an airline, six wives, like thirty-something kids, including one or two daughters no one’s seen for years, not even Instagram… his big boujee city with all the tourists and all the mod cons you could ever want, a cover spread in Vanity Fair.
What my old friend will never have is Mecca, Medina, or the 300-year-old legacy of the House of Saud. He won’t have my yacht, my chateau, my DaVinci or Aramco, either. He’ll have his golf, and I’ll have mine, and like everything else, and I mean everything else, mine will be bigger than his.
Jeff Blanchard is a freelance writer. He has worked for the Associated Press, CBS News and the Wall Street Transcript, has written for The Cape Cod Times, was editor of The Cape Codder and was an op-ed contributor to the Providence Journal.