Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf Series Upends Genteel World of Golf

LONDON — The golf champions were settled in their chairs at a news conference to promote their new Saudi-financed tournament when a reporter raised the uncomfortable question of the oil-rich kingdom’s human rights record. The 2010 United States Open champion, Graeme McDowell, to the obvious relief of the players sitting alongside him, took it on.

“If Saudi Arabia want to use the game of golf as a way for them to get to where they want to be,” McDowell said, “I think we’re proud to help them on that journey.”

That journey, though, is the point: The Saudi-funded project, called the LIV Golf Invitational Series and kicking off on Thursday at an exclusive club outside London, represents nothing less than the proposed hostile takeover of an entire sport, taking place in real time, with golf’s best players cast as the prize in a high-stakes, billion-dollar tug of war.

Unlike the vanity purchase of a European soccer team or the hosting of a major global sporting event, Saudi Arabia’s foray into golf is no mere branding exercise, not just another effort by a country to use its wealth to redefine its global image in the reputation-cleansing process widely derided as sportswashing.

Instead, Saudi Arabia is seeking to seize control of golf by winning, or in a cynics’ view buying, the loyalty of some of the world’s best players. Its strategy has been bold — nine-figure offers, huge guaranteed paydays at each event — but it has taken direct aim at the structures and organizations that have governed golf for nearly a century.

While the Saudi plan’s potential for success is far from clear — the series does not yet have a television rights deal or the array of corporate sponsorships necessary to blunt its extravagant start-up costs — its direct appeal to players and its seemingly bottomless financial resources could eventually have repercussions for the 93-year-old PGA Tour as well as the corporate sponsors and television broadcasters who have built professional golf into a multibillion-dollar business.

“It’s a shame that it’s going to fracture the game,” the four-time major champion Rory McIlroy said this week, adding, “If the general public are confused about who is playing where and what tournament’s on this week and, ‘Oh, he plays there and he doesn’t get into these events,’ it just becomes so confusing.”

The pros who have committed to play in the first LIV Series event this week have tried (not always successfully) to frame their decisions as principled ones solely about golf, or as decisions that would safeguard the financial future of their families. Yet in accepting Saudi riches in exchange for adding their personal sheen to its project, they have placed themselves at the center of a storm in which fans and human rights groups have questioned their motives; the PGA Tour has threatened them with suspensions; and sponsors and organizations are cutting ties or at least distancing themselves.

All of it has opened rifts in a sport famed for its decorum, one so deeply committed to values like honor and sportsmanship that players are expected to assess penalties on themselves if they violate its rules.

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