Coming soon, the Winter Olympics in the Saudi desert

National Post, 11 June 2023

The first rule of competitive sports is that leagues seek to eliminate the competition

The decades-long desideratum of the Canadian Open was achieved this week. The entire focus of the golf world was upon it, despite its usual secondary or even tertiary status.

Alas, the attention was not on the tournament itself, which opened on Thursday in Toronto, but rather on the news that broke on Tuesday, resulting in a heated meeting between the PGA commissioner and the touring players at the Oakdale club.

The dramatic news was that the PGA and European golf tours were merging with the upstart LIV tour, a Saudi backed alternative that disrupted the world of professional golf since its launch last year. LIV — Roman numerals for 54, the number of holes in LIV’s abbreviated three-round tournaments — offered the top golfers tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, to defect from the PGA to play in LIV events. Some of the top PGA players, notably Phil Mickelson, were all too happy to cash the Saudi cheques.

Moreover, LIV changed the rules of golf, compensation wise. While PGA players make a luxurious living, they do compete for the purses — some $9 million this week at the Canadian Open. If they play poorly, or get injured, they don’t get paid. LIV offered them guaranteed money, like some athletes in other sports

Nothing at all remarkable about all that. It happens from time to time that a rival league is set up to the dominant league, like the World Hockey Association and the American Basketball Association in the 1960s and 1970s. If they manage to survive long enough, and have a sufficient number of top stars — Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Julius Irving — then the dominant league will offer a merger.

The first rule of competitive sports is that leagues seek to eliminate the competition. Competition is for those who play on the rink, or the court or the course; monopoly is the preferred business model for those who sit in the luxury boxes.

So that the PGA would be amenable to eliminate the competition and take the Saudi cash directly ought not have been a shock to anyone. What did make it shocking was the PGA’s year-long denunciation of Saudi money as morally contaminating. It turned out that only Saudi money for other people is morally contaminating.

Donald Trump had welcomed LIV to his courses and Trump knows something about starting a rival sports league, as he did with the United States Football League, taking on the NFL behemoth in the 1980s. The world class grifter knows where the money is. The former president took time out from cataloguing his indictments to praise the PGA-LIV merger. It will be good for business.

It was fitting that the news would break the week the PGA was in Toronto. Canadians are having their eyes opened about how effective China has been at buying our elites in politics, business and academia — much of it quite legally. The Chinese learned well from the Saudis, who have been purchasing American elites in diplomacy, commerce and politics for generations.

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