LAST UPDATE | 10 Jun 2022

I LOVE GOLF. Well, to be honest, that is the understatement of the century. I play golf whenever it is humanly possible, often to the detriment of more pressing and important obligations in life. In truth, I am obsessed with and addicted to it.

In recent years, when it comes to home entertainment, I have wondered how people find the time to take in so many TV programmes and binge on Netflix series. The answer, as my wife puts it, is that they “don’t spend 20 hours a week glued to bloody golf tournaments.”

I blame my son who, at age four, began watching with his father and then demanded that we join Wicklow Golf Club and get out there regularly. At age nine, my namesake already has a gorgeous, fluid swing and a solid all-around game. To my shame, after two decades largely away from golf courses, I am struggling to recapture the “glory days” when I was 17 and playing off a 12 handicap. Hope springs eternal, though. There are shining moments amidst the hacking.

LIV Golf Tour

This somewhat insular, and unduly scorned, golf ecosphere we inhabit is currently a global talking point. That stems from the new LIV Golf Tour, which asserts that it will “supercharge the professional golf landscape and create new value for fans and players alike.”

LIV Golf – its Roman numeral moniker is derived from 54 being the number of holes in its events and the equivalent of an 18 under par round on a par 72 course – is led ostensibly by Greg Norman, the Australian former world number one and major champion.

Norman has long been a critic of the Professional Golfers’ Association Tour in the United States. In the past, he alleged that it did not sufficiently compensate or tend to the outstanding players without whom it could not survive and he now accuses it of being “monopolistic” and “bullying” in its responses to the emergence of LIV Golf. He unsuccessfully backed a World Golf Tour in the 1990s that would have rivalled the US PGA Tour.

LIV Golf, however, is being bankrolled by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which has put billions of dollars behind it. Norman is reportedly being paid in the vicinity of $50 million annually. The legendary Jack Nicklaus was offered in excess of $100 million to serve as an ambassador for LIV Golf. And staggeringly, Tiger Woods has declined what Norman described as a “mind-blowingly enormous deal” that was rumoured to be worth nearly a billion dollars and is sticking by the PGA.

Nicklaus, Woods and many of the sport’s stars rebuffed approaches from LIV Golf partly out of loyalty to an established tour that has made them very wealthy, but also because of their discomfort at being essentially in the paid employ of a Saudi regime linked to a litany of human rights abuses. Even Phil Mickelson – who will be playing in LIV Golf competitions, having been attracted by a $200 million upfront payment – indicated that the Saudis could be “scary motherf**kers” and referenced the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Golf responds

The PGA has been swift to act. All those who are playing in the inaugural LIV Golf tournament in Hertfordshire have been suspended from the tour if they hadn’t resigned in the run-up to it. It will be difficult for fans to comprehend that the likes of Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Charl Schwartzel and Lee Westwood have become persona non grata. Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed, both huge figures, look set to join the ranks of the ostracised once they tee off, as they have pledged to, in the first LIV Golf event stateside.

There are serious questions arising in this milieu about sport, politics and what, if anything, is incumbent upon professional athletes, given the privileged positions they occupy. With respect to sport and politics, it is oft said that the two should be kept entirely separate, yet it is a fact that they routinely intersect.

Consider the Black Lives Matter movement and the controversies about whether participants should “take the knee” in support of racial justice. And in a memorable Nike ad campaign in 1993, basketball hall of famer Charles Barkley said that “I am not a role model. Just because I can dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”

I‘m afraid that I don’t have a hard and fast answer here. I share the grave reservations of countless individuals, organisations and nations about the government of Saudi Arabia. I find the moral ambivalence apparent at a press conference when LIV Golf signings Ian Poulter and Graeme McDowell were asked whether they would play in a tournament hosted by Vladimir Putin or in South Africa while apartheid was the law of the land disturbing.

On the other hand, hearing professional sporting bodies imply, even in a relative sense, that they are paragons of virtue raises my hackles. Most have a far from perfect track record and an array of dubious historic or present sponsors and partners. Further, I still accept Charles Barkley’s statement of purpose: athletes are not duty bound to lead by example.

What do everyday golfers think?

I view this complicated hullabaloo from an uncharacteristically agnostic perspective then. I do not approve and I do not disapprove of the golfers who have enlisted with LIV Golf.

I wish LIV Golf didn’t exist. I would prefer that Mickelson et al spurned the cash on offer and remained dedicated members of the PGA Tour. Nonetheless, I won’t condemn them.

Beyond approval and disapproval in a world that is grey, not black and white, I do know that my sympathies lie with the man from Hollywood, Co Down who made these comments:

I certainly understand the guys that went and understand what their goals and their ambitions are in their life, and I’m certainly not knocking anyone for going. It is their life. It is their decision. They can live it the way they want to…any decision that you make in your life that is purely for money usually doesn’t end up going the right way. Obviously, money is a deciding factor in a lot of things in this world, but if it is purely for money, it never seems to go the way you want it to.

Rory McIlroy is undeniably speaking from an exalted perch. Yet many of his colleagues casting their lot with LIV Golf also have more money than they could ever need. For them, is there such a thing as enough?

I admire McIlroy’s principled stance on this front. Whether Rory sees himself as a role model or not, as the parent of a young golfer, I know whose example I’d want my son to follow.

And as ever, to the consternation of the golf-sceptic in our house, we’ll be keeping a close eye on the PGA’s Canadian Open and sneaking in as many holes as we can this weekend.

Larry Donnelly is a Boston lawyer, a law lecturer at NUI Galway and a political columnist with The Journal. His book – “The Bostonian: Life in an Irish American Political Family” – is published by Gill and available online and in bookshops.