We’re gonnna preface this by saying we don’t give a damn about pro golf and never will. Most of the made-up sports on ESPN2 – especially timbersports, pro paintball, snooker, and even drone racing – are more exciting to watch. We get that much of the appeal stems from golf itself being a sacred pastime for American men to escape from their wives and day drink with their friends for a few hours on the weekends. Which itself is perfectly fine, but viewers are fucking stupid if they think they’re watching anything other than a long informercial designed to suck money out of their wallets for new clubs, shoes, horizontally striped polo shirts, watches, “Sector Spider ETFs” or whatever bullshit some shyster on Wall Street bought ad space to sell during commercials.
Because this really isn’t about pro golf. It’s about the vitiation of American individuals and institutions by the effectively limitless wealth of a foreign autocrat. Kim Jong Un kept Dennis Rodman as his (private basketball) court jester, corrupting an eccentric man far past his prime and compromised by debt because the North Korean dictator couldn’t afford Michael Jordan.
Mohammed bin Salman ain’t Kim Jong Un. He commands both a vast personal fortune and his Kingdom’s even vaster sovereign wealth, the most sacred pilgrimage sites for the world’s 1 billion Muslims, a state with a capacity to inflict violence both on its own people and those of its neighbors, and an outsized weight on the global economy through Saudi Arabia’s status as a top producer of oil. A cruel son of a bitch whose goons murdered Washington Post journalist Jamaal Khashoggi. But he wants you to forget that because pro golf! With a cooler logo than the PGA!
On Thursday the PGA Tour suspended the memberships of seventeen professional golfers, including some of the tour’s biggest names for signing on to Prince Bonesaw’s new golf league, LIV Golf. LIV has guaranteed tens of millions of dollars to the now-former PGA Tour members Dusty Johnson, Graeme McDowell, Lou Oosthuizen, and Phil Mickelson – who’s been rumored to have received a $200 million guarantee. A degenerate gambler who reportedly was once $40 million in the hole, Mickelson joined the league despite referring to the Saudis as “scary motherfuckers” and decrying their attacks on human rights during early discussions about a Saudi-sponsored tour. Then he joined them anyway because the money’s still green, even if it’s stained with blood.
There’s something really wrong here. It’s with Trump, who’s hosting two of the eight LIV tournaments in its short inaugural season – one at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster on July 29th and 30th, and Blue Monster at Trump National Doral as the season finale October 27th through 30th – is a piece of shit who would host a golf tournament sponsored by Satan if the price was right. Same story with his son in law Jared who got $2 billion in investment cash from bin Salman – overriding a veto from the royal accounting eggheads who recommended that he decline – just for being a pal of the Kingdom during its brutal proxy wars with Iran before Trump lost.
Their corruption and amorality is nothing new. You can look at Trump hosting a Saudi tournament after the PGA spurned him over the Capitol insurrection the same way you look at Deutsche Bank funneling him Russian money after banks here told him to fuck off for being a bankrupt deadbeat.
Ari Fleischer is a scumbag. Not terribly surprising for him to be involved either.
But like we said, this is something different. It’s not Dennis Rodman jestering for Kim, or Nicki Minaj doing a private concert for the Angolan regime. Saudi Arabia is a hostile rogue state, purposely cutting oil production to cause political chaos for Joe Biden and help the Trump Regime return to power. And now they’re corrupting professional athletes more or less in their prime, buying them off to increase their malignant influence beyond our politics. Who knows what’s next.
Additional reporting by Jackinec, incorporated from his earlier article “PGA Tour dis-members 17 players for joining Saudi-sponsored league, Is new league another way for Saudis to pay Trump?” which was a pretty goddamned good headline. He shot an eagle on that one.