So to Sun City the largest names in golf finally flocked. Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Seve Ballesteros, Lee Trevino, you identify them. Even Lee Elder, who just a few years earlier turned the primary Black golfer to play the Masters.
I observe Lee Elder as a result of South Africa’s brutal apartheid system, regardless of being condemned by the United Nations within the late Sixties, was in full throat by 1981. The minority Dutch settler colonial class was beating, jailing and killing the bulk Indigenous Black South Africans it segregated with impunity. The nation was a blight on humanity and, as such, a pariah on this planet.
That’s not not like what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia must be thought of after being incriminated within the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; persevering with to wage a years-old struggle towards Yemen — which the Obama administration joined and the Biden administration pledged to depart — that has killed or contributed to the deaths of greater than a quarter-million individuals and created arguably the world’s worst humanitarian crisis; and birthing nationals who executed the 9/11 assault.
Yet to Saudi riches a number of the largest names in golf flocked once more final week, like, you may say properly, Diptera to dung.
Brooks Koepka, Patrick Reed, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Sergio Garcia and dozens of others. They alighted at Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club close to Portland, Ore., the place this nation for the primary time hosted the fledgling LIV Golf Invitational Series. The winner was promised $4 million, far bigger than the largest bag at a PGA event.
LIV is financed by the Saudi monarchy that’s bombing Yemen, from a fund managed by its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was fingered with orchestrating the homicide of Khashoggi.
Dereliction is endemic to golf. It’s in its DNA.
Golf “lends itself to excessive wealth, solitude, and even selfishness — all of which can be seedbeds for a lack of ethics,” emailed Lane Demas, the Central Michigan University scholar who wrote the perfect ebook on golf I’ve ever learn, “Game of Privilege: An African American History of Golf.”
It is the one sport in my time masking the business that overtly selected racial discrimination over inclusion. I had simply completed masking Nelson Mandela’s summer season freedom tour of the United States in 1990 when, a month after I migrated to the sports activities web page, Butler National Golf Club in suburban Chicago passed on hosting the Western Open, because it had completed for 17 years, as a result of a brand new PGA rule required it to be open to all no matter pores and skin shade. Butler was all White.
The new PGA rule stemmed from an admission by Hall Thompson, the top on the time of Shoal Creek Country Club in Birmingham, Ala., the place the PGA Championship was being held that yr. He answered a query from a Birmingham Post-Herald reporter about Shoal Creek’s membership by saying, “We don’t discriminate in every other area except blacks.”
Legendary sports activities administration professor March Krotee, now at North Carolina State, wasn’t stunned by the LIV improvement. He was posted up in Kenya for a spell throughout the Nineteen Eighties and witnessed how South Africa’s financiers efficiently tugged the greed of golfers specifically.
“Now we have the LIV tour; who’s the head of the LIV tour?” Krotee requested rhetorically.
“Greg Norman,” I answered, pointing to the Hall of Fame golfer from Australia who’s LIV Golf’s CEO and commissioner.
“Who played in the Sun City golf tournament?” Krotee continued to quiz me.
“Greg Norman,” I mentioned once more.
“To me, the fly in the ointment is Greg Norman,” Krotee mentioned. “Because anybody that has the gumption from around the world to go play in the Sun City tournament was either ahead of his times or behind the times. Make your choice of what you think of that.”
Norman wasn’t alone then. His identify was on a U.N. blacklist of greater than 470 athletes and entertainers who snubbed probity for profit in Sun City and refused to signal a pledge towards apartheid.
Some within the music world banded collectively behind a song titled “Sun City” written by Steven Van Zandt, finest often known as the guitarist with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. It started:
We’re rockers and rappers united and robust;
We’re right here to speak about South Africa we don’t like what’s occurring.
It’s time for some justice it’s time for the reality;
We’ve realized there’s just one factor we are able to do:
I ain’t gonna play Sun City.
Tennis gamers had been on that blacklist, too. Shirley Povich famous in these pages in 1983 how Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl shared $700,000 within the finals of a four-player Sun City event. But John McEnroe earned my respect again then by refusing an excellent richer purse to play Sun City.
“Golfers all have their heads in the sand, all of ’em,” late, nice activist and tennis participant Arthur Ashe said then. “They are the most apolitical bunch of athletes I know. They’re all 5-11, blond, went to Oklahoma; they’re all right-wing Republicans. As a group, they don’t give a damn.”
Still don’t, apparently, with just a few notable exceptions. Rory McElroy didn’t disguise his disgust for his rivals who defected from the PGA Tour for LIV. Black golfer Harold Varner III mentioned he turned down LIV cash after consulting with, of all people, Michael Jordan, who infamously didn’t publicly support the candidacy of Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first Black mayor, towards one of many South’s extra notorious segregationist lawmakers, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms.
Golf is by its nature and conservation a egocentric sport. It isn’t about staff, save the jingoistic cups it assembles biennially. It isn’t worldly; it simply occurs to be performed across the globe. And it isn’t involved about the place or with whom it does enterprise.
LIV Golf hasn’t uncovered something about Saudi Arabia we didn’t already know. But it has highlighted a fact about golf that so many who play it and advertise have willfully ignored.