‘This Is Uncomfortable’: Saudi Arabia Upends Genteel World of Pro Golf

ST. ALBANS, England — First, the Saudis signed up a handful of the best-known names in golf to headline their new global tour, tempting players like Phil Mickelson and a few other past champions with staggering paychecks. Then they lured even bigger stars, the kind whose talents could make the series a credible rival to pro golf’s existing gold standard, the PGA Tour.

On Thursday, the PGA Tour struck back. In a sudden escalation of an increasingly bitter fight for control of elite professional golf, the tour suspended 17 players who are participating in the first event of the new tour, the LIV Golf International Series, not long after they had hit their first tee shots. In a statement, the PGA Tour’s commissioner declared that the rebel pros — and any other player who joined them — were “no longer eligible to participate” in the events that for decades have been the highest level of pro golf in the world.

The tour’s action, which seemed designed to ward off one of the biggest threats the nearly century-old tour has faced, significantly raised the stakes in a fight that has consumed professional golf in recent months. The feud features star players, Saudi billions and manicured courses — all in the genteel world of elite golf, an unlikely, and perhaps uneasy, forum for a public spat over money.

“These players have made their choice for their own financial-based reasons,” the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, wrote. He then warned other players tempted by Saudi offers that they would endure the same punishments, and lamented “all this talk of money, money and more money.”

That money, though, is the point: The LIV Golf Invitational Series represents not just another Gulf investment in a popular sport but a brazen and calculated attempt to supplant the elite level of that sport while casting some of golf’s best players as the prize in a billion-dollar tug of war.

“If Saudi Arabia want to use the game of golf as a way for them to get to where they want to be, and they have the resources to accelerate that experience,” one of the LIV Golf signings, the former U.S. Open champion Graeme McDowell said this week, “I think we’re proud to help them on that journey.”

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 example of what critics say is a reputation-cleansing process that some deride as the “sportswashing” of its global image.

Instead, Saudi Arabia’s sudden entry into golf is part of a layered approach by the kingdom — not just through investments in sports but also in spheres like business, entertainment and the arts — to alter perceptions of itself, both externally and internally, as just a wealthy, conservative Muslim monarchy.

Those investments have accelerated rapidly since 2015, when Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began his ascent to become the de facto ruler and spearheaded a massive overhaul aimed at opening up the kingdom’s economy and culture. He started putting Saudi Arabia’s name in the news in ways not connected to its dismal human rights record, its stalemated military intervention in Yemen or the murder by Saudi agents of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

“It is consistent with the way the Saudis have been using sport over the past five years, to try to project an image of the new Saudi Arabia, to change the narrative away from Khashoggi and Yemen and to talk about Saudi Arabia in a more positive light,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, who studies Gulf politics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

But in staging the most lucrative tournament in golf history — this week’s total purse is $25 million, the winner’s share is $4 million, and the last-place finisher is guaranteed $120,000 — Saudi Arabia is also relying on a proven strategy of using its wealth to open doors and to enlist, or in a cynic’s view, buy, some of the world’s best players as its partners.

Some of the touches at its debut on Thursday might have felt kitschy — red phone boxes and a double-decker bus, sentries dressed like British palace guards and a fleet of black cabs to deliver the players to their opening holes — but there was no hiding what was at play: In its huge payouts and significant investment, the series’ Saudi backers have taken direct aim at the structures and organizations that have governed professional golf for nearly a century, and the PGA Tour specifically.

“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 Saudi plan’s potential for success is far from clear. Despite the high-profile golfers and its big-money backing, the LIV Golf series was not able to secure a media agreement in the United States and will, for now, be broadcast on lesser-watched streaming services in much of the world. Nor was it able to attract major sponsors or tempt broadcast partners like ESPN, CBS, NBC and Amazon, who are in the first year of a nine-year agreement that has them collectively paying hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the PGA Tour.

But 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 corporations and broadcasters who have built professional golf into a multibillion-dollar business.

The pros who committed to play in the first LIV Series event tried to frame their decisions as principled ones solely about golf. Yet in accepting Saudi riches in exchange for adding their personal sheen to the 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 barred them from returning; and sponsors and organizations are cutting ties or distancing themselves.

All of it has opened rifts in a sport already grappling with its own longstanding image problems related to opportunity, exclusivity and race, but one that reveres decorum, and professes to be so wedded to values like honor that players are expected to assess penalties on themselves when they violate its rules.

Saudi Arabia is, of course, not the first country to use sports as a platform to burnish its global image. Its wealthy Gulf neighbors, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and most notably Qatar, which will host soccer’s World Cup this year, all have invested heavily in international sports over the past two decades.

But Saudi Arabia’s venture into golf may be the most ambitious effort yet by a Gulf country to undermine the existing structures of a sport. In effect, it is trying to use its wealth to lure players away from the most prominent tournaments and the most well-established circuit in golf, the PGA Tour, by creating what is an entirely new tour. Not that many of the players taking part this week were eager to talk about those motives.

McDowell admitted as much in his meandering answer to a question this week. “We’re just here,” he said, “to focus on the golf.”

It has been a rocky start. Even before its first tee shot was struck, the LIV Series — financed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — had become a lightning rod for controversy. One of its biggest signings, Mickelson, provoked outrage in February when he praised the series as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” even as he called Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights “horrible” and used an expletive to describe the country’s leaders as “scary.”

The project’s main architect, the former player Greg Norman, made things worse a few weeks later when he dismissed Saudi Arabia’s murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi by saying, “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.”

Most, but notably not all, of the world’s top players have rejected the new series out of hand: McIlroy, for example, derided the project as a money grab in February, and on Wednesday he made clear he would not take part. “If it’s purely for money,” he said, “it never seems to go the way you want it to.”

Even the rare chances for LIV Series players to defend their decisions to reporters directly this week have often been tense. At a news conference on Wednesday, a group of players were asked if they would take part in a tournament in Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia or apartheid South Africa “if the money was right.” A day earlier, the Korean American player Kevin Na was caught on a live microphone saying, “This is uncomfortable,” as his news conference ended with a British reporter shouting over the moderator.

Most of the players, though, seem to have concluded that the money is just too good to pass up. The reported $150 million inducement to Dustin Johnson, the highest-ranked player to join the new series so far, would be more than double the total prize money he has earned on tour in his career.

The money, in fact, may be LIV Golf’s biggest lure at the moment: Two more major champions, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed, were said to be close to accepting similarly large paydays to join the series when it shifts to the United States this summer, though it was unclear if the PGA Tour’s new threat on Thursday might change their minds.

Others, though, have eagerly embraced the project. Mickelson, arguably the most high-profile and perhaps the most controversial figure to join the series, has made no secret of the fact that his interest was tied to his contempt for the PGA Tour, which he accused of “obnoxious greed.”

Chastened by loud criticism of his headline-making remarks about Saudi Arabia earlier this year, and the decisions of several of his sponsors to sever ties with him, Mickelson on Wednesday re-emerged on the public stage but declined to provide details of his relationship with LIV or discuss the PGA.

“I feel that contract agreements should be private,” said Mickelson, who reportedly is receiving $200 million to participate.

After he completed his round on Thursday, Mickelson said he would participate in all eight LIV events this year and all 10 next year. He declined to confirm he had signed up for four years. In 2024, which would be the tour’s third year, LIV plans to host 14 events.

Any hopes that Mickelson, his new colleagues or their new Saudi financiers may have had of the narrative shifting quickly to action on the course, though, are unlikely to be realized anytime soon. In his final pretournament news conference this week, Mickelson felt the need to declare in one more uncomfortable moment in a week full of them that “I don’t condone human rights violations at all.”

Soon afterward, dressed in shorts and a windbreaker, he was off to the first tee, where he and a board member of the Public Investment Fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan, headlined the opening group in the first LIV Series pro-am.

Ben Hubbard and Kevin Draper contributed reporting.