Wednesday afternoon, hours before his return to the PGA Tour, Tiger Woods sat before a bank of microphones and uttered a line that would have lit the golf world on fire just a couple years ago.
“Ultimately,” Woods said, “we would like to have PIF be a part of our tour and a part of our product.”
“PIF” is the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the source and driving force of golf’s current bone-deep schism.
Funny how perception can change completely in just a few short years.
Two years ago, Phil Mickelson turned the golf world upside down with his thoughts about Saudi Arabia’s regime and its potential effect on the PGA Tour.
“They’re scary motherf*****s to get involved with,” Mickelson said, in what has become one of the most famous quotes in golf history. “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
Six months later, as LIV Golf began operations, former U.S. Open winner and inaugural LIV member Graeme McDowell came under withering criticism for his answer to a question about how he could take money from a nation with documented human rights violations: “I think we all agree, the Khashoggi situation, that was reprehensible. No one’s going to argue that. But we’re golfers.”
The fury over the idea of Saudi money arriving in professional golf flared white-hot in golf media and Golf Twitter. The critics of LIV Golf invoked Saudi Arabia’s documented human rights abuses, condemning the entire LIV effort as “sportswashing” — an attempt to paper over a nation’s sins with the distracting spectacle of sports. Many players who remained with the PGA Tour bought into that line of reasoning, and so — publicly — did the Tour itself.
Around the same time McDowell made his comments, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan took aim at the source of LIV Golf’s funding, the Saudi Public Investment Fund. “I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not know that there are significant implications” to taking Saudi Arabia’s money, he said in an interview. “And I would ask any player that has left or any player that would consider leaving, have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”
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