Rory McIlroy’s softened stance towards LIV the result of sportswashing at its finest

Rory McIlroy’s rapprochement this week with the upstart LIV and the players who jumped ship from the PGA to the Saudi backed tour was mature and diplomatic. Gallantly defeated, McIlroy put a brave face on inevitability.

A “bit of a mistake on my part” he said, backtracking on his criticism of the players that accepted millions to leave the PGA. He also expressed the view that his hard won but privileged financial position among the top players in the world is only available to a few, those with his kind of ability and profile.

McIlroy was being kind. He didn’t mention greed among the game’s elite or lament how easily golf was bought. He didn’t talk about the headwinds LIV critics face, or, when your own governing body, the PGA Tour, undercuts the ground you stand on. He also didn’t mention the core issue of embracing an authoritarian regime that executed 196 people in 2022.

[ LIV and PGA Tour are friends again, supping from same source of filthy lucre ]

McIlroy can read the tea leaves better than most, and while defiance had not entirely departed as he struck the more conciliatory pose, there was a weary recognition that nobody now could put the toothpaste back in the tube.

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It seemed as though he had taken his personal defiance of LIV as far as he could and from here the smart money was on detente, not having public disputes with other top golfers and of not being the face of the resistance. Instead, McIlroy has read the room, is no longer LIV’s arch critic and will watch whatever is about to happen, happen.

“At the end of the day, we’re professional golfers and we play to make a living and make money, so I understand it,” he said.

[ Graeme McDowell’s LIV place is in peril – was it all worth it? ]

The hatchet buried, LIV has beaten down its principal dissident. The sport has been purchased. It is a commercial and promotional entity first, a franchise that might claim to stand for something a distant second. But everyone knew that to be the case once the groundbreaking deal was struck in June. Like any respectable peace deal, it agreed that enemies should become partners.

Uniquely for such a seismic pivot in direction, no details were made public. Then a few days ago the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, said in a memo to players that the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), were “working to extend” their negotiations into the new year.

That could unfold badly, or not, as US Democrat senator, Richard Blumenthal, chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has taken a keen interest in the proposed merger. The pact raises questions not only about sportswashing to distract from state human rights atrocities, but also about the degree to which the Saudis are using their oil profits from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to control more elements of American culture. In the US, that’s a big deal.

According to a July editorial in The Washington Post, the issue has rare support across the House with both Democrats and Republicans demanding to know more. That includes hearing directly from head of the Saudi wealth fund, Mr Al-Rumayyan, about what role he intends to play in US golf and “how that dovetails with the fund’s larger investment goals in the United States.”

As outlined in The Post, Sen Blumenthal is also asking for a list of “all US assets currently held by the Saudi fund; all US-based contractors, consultants, public relations firms, strategic consultants, crisis consultants, lobbyists and law firms that have done work for the fund; and any records relating to Project Wedge, the codename for what became LIV Golf.”

It should be noted that The Post has skin in the game following the 2018 state-sponsored assassination of one of their contributing columnists, Jamal Khashoggi. A squad of agents who flew to Istanbul, where Khashoggi was located, killed and dismembered, arrived aboard two private jets owned by Mr Al-Rumayyan’s fund. Saudi involvement in the 9-11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers is also never far from US minds.

[ Was Pádraig Harrington right to say Ireland exports military technology to Saudi Arabia? ]

Mr Al-Rumayyan’s PIF also brazenly stonewalled the Senate last August, although, when two PGA Tour officials were questioned, it was revealed the deal contained a non-disparagement clause prohibiting officials and players from criticising the Saudi regime.

But how many might have wished McIlroy had quietly but defiantly stood his ground, dug in his heels and observed the new reality from an acceptable distance. Would it have been possible for him to have successfully played the game and glowered at it from within?

Like James McClean or Colin Kaepernick or Billy Jean King, whether you agreed with them or not, how many wished McIlroy had soldiered on, a soloist with a clear conscience, occasionally finding himself in conflict but sticking to the road he set out along at the beginning.

Even he, who seemed more visceral and honest earlier this year when he declared “I still hate LIV. Like, I hate LIV. I hope it goes away” had to give. This week’s expression from him of being “too judgmental”, that was the hallmark of sportswashing at its finest.

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