News: Jon Rahm, the 2023 Masters champion, signs with the Saudi-backed LIV golf tour, for $300 million per many reports.
Like a game of whac-a-mole, some number of PGA Tour golfers claim betrayal. Predictably, too, some number of writers scream about 9/11 or Jamal Khashoggi or blood money or sportswashing.
As challenging as it is for some people to read or hear what’s next, these things must be said, because journalism is about the truth.
Jon Rahm in triumph at the 2023 Masters // Getty Images
This whole sportswashing thing is a misguided concept. No government has a claim to moral high ground.
For those fixated on the Khashoggi case – which, to be clear, is horrific – I give you rendition, waterboarding, Abu Ghraib and the enduring calamity that is Guantanamo.
As for 9/11: I vividly recall being woken up just after 6 in the morning California time that September morning by my sister-in-law, calling from Virginia. We turned on the television just in time to see the second plane hit the South Tower.
I teach journalism at the University of Southern California. The sophomores in my newswriting class were born in 2004. For them, 9/11 is history. It happened three years before they were born.
Too, 9/11 led the United States government to prosecute a war in Iraq under false pretenses and then to invade Afghanistan. In all, 20 years of war, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars in treasure. For what? To ultimately abandon thousands of Afghan women and girls to the Taliban?
This is the moral high ground? This is the shining city on the hill the United States would make itself out to be and tell others how to behave?
Following that logic:
There’s no morality with the LIV-PGA thing. It’s just business.
This is a point the Olympic marketing and global sports expert Terrence Burns made recently in a business school seminar at Emory University, saying, “Global sport is a huge business. Period. It’s a new asset class. That’s why the Saudis invest in it. Period. For ROI, not hearts and minds.”
So, if you were Jon Rahm, one of the best in the world at what you do, and someone offered you $300 million, what would you do?
Don’t be a moron. Of course, you’d say yes. That is generational wealth.
As for Saudi Arabia – it’s opening up in all kinds of ways to the wider world. Just this week, the Global Esports Federation is holding its annual championship there. At the International Boxing Assn. assembly a few days ago in Dubai, the Saudi delegation included the 30-year-old female vice president who, a few years back, was a student at – where else, USC.
Beyond, all those tempted instinctively to criticize the Saudis – you’re missing the point.
If you want to get into the geopolitics of what’s what, morality aside:
The malign actor in that part of the world – the one that all of us, even across the oceans, need to worry about – is not Saudi Arabia.
It’s Iran.
Hamas and Hezbollah are Iranian proxies.
Everyone should understand, and clearly, that the conflict in Gaza is existential. Hamas wants nothing less than to destroy Israel. Hezbollah, same.
If they were to succeed, their brand of Islamist radicalism would not stop at Israel. Not hardly. Europe would be next. Do you think the United States would be immune? Don’t be naïve.
The Gulf states, including the Saudis, assuredly understand this. Indeed, it is in the interest of western civilization for this conflict to have one definitive outcome.
This is the farthest thing from hyperbole. It is that real.
Are the Saudis perfect? Hardly. No one is. But if Jon Rahm wants to make his money, good for him. And while Saudi Arabia is opening up to the world, let’s all be clear about where the real problem is – Iran.
Don’t anybody be under any misimpression otherwise.