A Primer on Sportswashing in Golf (ft. Will Bardwell and Dr. Helen Lenskyj)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.

00:00:02
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.

00:00:06
Speaker 1: In a fried egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Brian Egg, Frida Egg, Bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the Friday Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison. These are interesting times in the golf world. As you probably know, the government of Saudi Arabia is making major inroads in professional golf. Most significantly, it's funding the creation of a so called Super Golf League, which would pay players massive amounts of money and would pose a direct threat to PGA Tour. Now, this plan has taken a hit recently because of some comments from Phil Mickelson. Mickelson had been very involved in planning for the Super Golf League, but he couldn't help over explaining himself to reporters and he ended up saying some pretty shocking things and setting off a pr meltdown. Big names like Bryson, to Shambeau and Dustin Johnson have now backed away from the Saudi League, and they say they'll stay on the PGA Tour for the time being. But make no mistake, Saudi Arabia is not going anywhere. It still has effectively unlimited financial resources to spend on its golf strategy. It's still holding lucrative events like the Saudi International and the Saudi Ladies International, it still has a huge investment in the Asian Tour, and all the inside chatter I've heard indicates that the Super Golf League is still going to happen in some form, whether the top players participate initially or not. So it's incredibly relevant to understand what Saudi Arabia is doing here, what it really wants out of golf, and what it wants I believe is sportswa washing. Now we'll explain what the term sportswashing means towards the beginning of this episode, but I should mention upfront that it is a somewhat politically charged topic, and I want to clarify that I do have my own opinions about it, so to my guests, I'm not going to make any secret of that. But my main intention here is to lay out the issues in a clear way so that you can be as informed as possible. I have two guests today. There's Will Bardwell, a civil rights attorney who moonlights as an excellent golf writer, and there's Helen Lensky, who's done academic research on how the Olympics relate to global politics. First you'll hear briefly from Will, Then we'll jump over to my conversation with Helen, and then go back to Will to close things out. Hope you enjoy it all right, Bardwell, welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. We should have had you on before for something, I'm sure, but we've been internet friends for a while. It's good to finally have you on.

00:03:10
Speaker 1: Appreciate the invitation. I was thinking about it before I hopped on, and I think this is my first time on the Mothership pod. I've done the Shotgun start before, but this is first time on the proper pod. Thanks for having me.

00:03:21
Speaker 2: I know it's been too long and we're glad to have you. The immediate reason for your being on this podcast is that we're trying to do a bit of a summary podcast on what sportswashing is and how that ties into Saudi Arabia's involvement in golf. And you wrote a terrific article on your website, lying for dot com called blind Men and Blood. The subtitle to that was Deshambo, Mickelson and Others tilt from craven to complicit, so fantastic headline and subhead there. As an editor, I appreciate the craft that went into that. So basically, what prompted you to write this article?

00:04:03
Speaker 3: Now?

00:04:03
Speaker 1: One of the things that I find myself doing a lot of writing in response to at line four is there seem to bese big stories in golf that, for whatever reason, just don't get written. I have made no secret of the fact that I don't think much of the journalistic tenacity of sort of legacy golf media, that they're way too cozy with establishment golf institutions and players. I think that probably has something to do with the fact that a story like this hadn't been written yet, and so I was very interested in how this all fit into and by this I mean the uprising of the Saudi golf effort, how it fit into the history of sports washing and how it got started, and what it looks like in other contexts. That's what got me interested.

00:04:56
Speaker 2: Why don't you you know we're going to specifically talk about the golf element of this. There's another discussion to have about sportswa washing in general, but now it has come into golf in a big way with Saudi Arabia's various attempts to start this breakaway league. So maybe he could just give me some general background on First of all, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What are the basics of the human rights record here and why people might find it objectionable to be involved with them.

00:05:31
Speaker 1: Without going into the fine details of it, Saudi Arabia has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, which is saying a lot because there are a lot of nations out there with less than stellar records on human rights, but Saudi Arabia in particular has a sordid history of the way it treats women. Women under Saudi Arabia law are technically minors, and so there is very little that they are allowed to do without the permission and usually the physical presence of a man. They have treated political dissidents, gay people, religious minorities about throwing them into prison indefinitely. I mean, it is no exaggeration to say is one of the most repressive regimes in the world.

00:06:26
Speaker 2: All right, So two notes up front based on when we're recording this. So we're recording this on Monday. It's February twenty first, and I mentioned that because this podcast is probably going to come out on Friday, and a lot might happen between now and then, given how quickly things have been moving lately. Also, it's relevant that it's Monday because today is President's Day and both of us have kids home, and so if people hear interruptions on either end, that's why that's going on very well. May have a seven year old and a four year old burst into my room at some point, So keep that in mind as we're going through this extremely serious timeline on a very serious issue. So maybe you could tell me about the general decision that happened, whether it was in the mid two thousand tens or late twenty tens, for Saudi Arabia to become involved in a sport like golf in the first place. I mean, Saudi Arabia has become involved in Formula one as well as other sports. Why is it that Saudi is making this push to be involved in sports. What's going on there with their sort of you know, economic history that's motivating them to be involved in this way in the sports world.

00:07:50
Speaker 1: It's interesting that you ask that after sort of going through an overview of Saudi Arabia's human rights record, because the you know, the reason Saudi Arabia has been able to get by with its human rights record without a ton of pushback from Western nations is that Saudi Arabia is sitting on the second largest petroleum reserves on the planet, and for decades, Western democracies even have been at the mercy of those oil reserves. But of course we find ourselves at a moment in history where developed nations are moving farther and farther away from being totally dependent on oil, and Saudi Arabia sees that as clearly as anyone, and understands that if it wants to endure as a political power and an economic power over the next, say, one hundred years, then it has to do something about its dependence on oil as an economic driver. And so in twenty sixteen, Saudi Arabia began an organized effort to begin trying to recruit non petroleum based investment in the country, foreign investment, which of course opens up the whole human rights issue. Again, it's one thing for say the United States government to turn the other cheek a blind eye to what's going on over there. It's quite another for say, a publicly held company with shareholders and a board of directors that has to face those shareholders at annual meetings to set up shop in Saudi Arabia. And so the Saudis have understood that if they're going to be able to attract the level of foreign investment that will be required to replace that income from oil, then they're going to have to put on a pretty good public relations effort. And that is where the Saudi's interest in sports has come from.

00:09:58
Speaker 2: All Right, so now is a good time to define the term sportswashing, which I'd imagine a lot of people have heard by now. It's kind of entered the lexicon recently in a big way. I think the term has been around for a while, but I personally only became aware of it recently. And so, could you give us a working definition of sportswashing.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, so anyone who's familiar with the term whitewashing will understand what sports washing is. It's just whitewashing through the use of elite, high level sports. It is a tactic that repressive regimes have used to try to put on a nice show for the rest of the world, dating back to the nineteen thirty six Olympics in Berlin, when Germany hosted the Summer Games and portrayed itself as a welcoming, tolerant, progressive member of Western Europe, and largely it were, and regimes have been sort of following that playbook for decades since. So it's not like Saudi Arabia invented this, you know, it's been going on. And the damnedest thing about it is that people buy a large understand when it's going on, what is happening, and yet it remains a wildly successful strategy for you know, cleaning up your international reputation, right.

00:11:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the idea is to continually push the bad headlines out and have sports related headlines come in and to have people think that, okay, sports and politics are not related sports. In fact, for a lot of people, they view it as a break from politics, as their escape from that world. And so it's very useful to have sports related stories coming out that are associated with your country if you don't want other kinds of news to be you know, associated with you totally.

00:12:03
Speaker 1: I mean think about sort of your average Joe on the street, who you know, probably doesn't watch the local news or probably doesn't watch the nightly news anymore. Sorry I almost said local news. Shout out Lou Turner. But you know, if you're only a moderate consumer of sort of you know, current events type news, but you are into sports enough that you catch those sorts of events at least every now and then, then over time the amount of news that you see coming out of that country is going to be more and more, you know, F one races, and you know the WWE pay per views and that sort of thing. And I think it's only natural for someone who really isn't spending a lot of time thinking about this sort of stuff that the less they're hearing about political dissidents been thrown in jail and more they're hearing about what Dustin Johnson did at the Saudi International, than you're going to begin to think that, well, things must not be that bad over there anymore.

00:13:17
Speaker 2: All right, So, doctor Helen Lensky, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

00:13:22
Speaker 3: Good? Thanks for inviting me.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: So, Helen, you are a professor Emerita at the University of Toronto, and you're the author of many books, including one called the Olympic Games A Critical Approach, which was published in twenty twenty. You've been studying the concept of sportswatching for decades, but it seems to me that it has become much more a part of the public discourse recently, at least in the golf world. So why do you think it is that people more people are paying attention to this idea?

00:13:54
Speaker 3: Now, the big sport mega event obviously is the Olympics, and it always attracts global attention. And then the world saw the IOC in two thousand and one choose Beijing to be the host of the Summer Olympics in two thousand and eight, and then a repeat of that with twenty twenty two being Beijing for twenty twenty two, and that just ended and in the middle Souchi, Russia being chosen for twenty fourteen Winter Games, and again an authoritarian regime, which actually suits the IOC quite well because they can pretty much be assured that the Games will be on time, on budget, run efficiently and effectively. They won't be irritating protests and that kind of thing because they're going to be suppressed. So those angles have attracted world attention. But of course sportswashing isn't limited to these authoritarian regimes. Western countries do very well at exploiting sport to improve their image and to cover up very basic social problems like poverty and homelessness, under housed people, the lack of social services for disadvantage populations, racism. I have a book on the Sydney Olympics where I discuss race relations between Aboriginal Australians and non Aboriginal Australians, a long history of oppression that the opening ceremony, in the closing ceremony in particular for the Sydney Olympics, did a brilliant job of sportswashing because they had incorporated a lot of what they called aboriginality in symbols and cultural aspects, and so it looked like everything was good in race relations in Australia, and that was so far from the truth.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: So yeah, sportswashing is not limited to dictatorships. This is something that modern democracies do as well. And I would imagine these are going to be issues perhaps in the Los Angeles Games which are coming up this decade. You spoke to how issues like homelessness can be sports washed. I would imagine that that could be potentially a goal of the LA Games.

00:16:23
Speaker 3: Absolutely, the people who were watching on the ground for the eighty four Olympics, so that happen in terms of getting rid of homeless people and so on, And those crackdowns are already happening many years before LA will actually host the Games. So yeah, this is a trend for sure.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: Why have the Olympics been such a prime target for sports washing? Do you think.

00:16:53
Speaker 3: A target in the sense of the bid city.

00:16:56
Speaker 2: Thinks yes, yeah, Why is it such an attractive method of sports watching? I guess the way to.

00:17:02
Speaker 3: Phrase sport isn't political. That's the theory.

00:17:05
Speaker 2: So and Olympic sports especially are thought to be far from political.

00:17:12
Speaker 3: It's about sport, it's not about anything else. If you believe the propaganda coming from the Olympic industry that it's simply a sporting event. We don't get into politics. We shouldn't get into politics, and politics should not be involved at all. Even though just the mere choice of a city like Beijing Osochi is a political issue and the ISOC members know that perfectly well. But their propaganda machinery puts out the message that they should there shouldn't be any political interventions or any political connections. Sport is not political, so the theory goes, I thought.

00:17:52
Speaker 2: Maybe you could take us through a brief history of sports washing. Is the nineteen thirty six Olympics hosted by Nazi Germany where that history starts.

00:18:04
Speaker 3: Probably the best documented would be that, and most people are aware of the way that anti Semitism was kind of put under wraps during the Olympics, and Avery Brandage had a chat with Hitler and sort of the.

00:18:21
Speaker 2: Every Brandage who was the head of the US Olympics.

00:18:23
Speaker 3: Exactly, yeah, and Americans were American sport administrators were kind of pressuring him to do something proactive for want of a better word, and he came back to the US saying that it was all under control, and for the duration of the game, some of the sort of overt symbols of antisemitism, like no Jews allowed on the streets or whatever, the street sign notices on streets, those were removed for the duration, So there was the sort of semblance, but definitely Hitler and the Nazi used then onely thirty six Olympics to promote area and superiority and for bad Jews from participating in many instances and so on. So yeah, that was an early example. But thinking back to the very beginnings with da Kubatan and company had an agenda that involved a colonializing project, particularly in relation to Africa, So not strictly sport washing, but using the appearance of sport or using sport as a vehicle to get to colonize in a sense, to make the Olympic model, the achievement model, faster, higher, stronger, to be beyond the game in town. So Africans and Asians were doing other kinds of sporting activities that had been they'd been doing for centuries. Dakubatan and the Europeans and the UK people came up with one narrow model, which is sport being fast, higher, stronger, and that was the end of any recognition or funding for alternative kinds of sport.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: So to go back for a minute to the Nazi Olympics, you mentioned the story of the head of the US Olympic Committee, Avery Brandage, negotiating essentially with Hitler to take down some of the most overt appearances of anti Semitism in Germany during the Olympic Games. And I suppose that this would be an example that some you know, that what Brundage perhaps thought he was doing was using the Olympics to have a good influence on Germany perhaps, But how did that turn out?

00:20:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, not well, as we all know. And the same with China. The IOC at the time early two thousands, choosing Beijing for the two thousand and eight Games said don't worry, we'll do all this soft diplomacy behind the scenes, sort of like the Ping Pong diplomacy and Nixon and so on. So that was what they said. There's ample evidence that since China hosted the Olympics, organizations like Amnesty International and Freedom House Human Rights Watch have documented how conditions have gone from bad to worse, that human rights violations have just escalated. The Olympics made no impact whatsoever, even though some sports sociologists like myself was not like myself in terms of their political approach, but sports sociologists were saying, oh, this will bring China in line, This will advance human rights causes in China by decades because the eyes of the world will be on China and they'll have to clean up their that did not happen. We see the situation with wigas, the human rights violations involving wigas people in Hong Kong, Tibetans, there's a long list, and dissidents in China who are Chinese nationals themselves have no chance of speaking out. They'll get put in prison or disappear.

00:22:21
Speaker 2: And much of that seems to have escalated after the two thousand.

00:22:25
Speaker 3: And eight games exactly.

00:22:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there might even be an argument that the Olympic Games kind of provides the smoke screen, and then afterwards even worse things can happen than were happening before.

00:22:42
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, you see coverage now of the Beijing Winter Games that have just ended, and the coverage focuses on sport. It might mention COVID. At the beginning, a lot of us were getting a lot of inquiries from journalists about the wigas, and I co authored something with an Ontario Western University colleague, and that got a lot of media attention because it got a lot of reeds, and then journalists wanted to focus on the WIGA situation rather than the sports side, or talk about how each of them were connected. But sort of getting back to negotiate Olympic officials negotiating with dictators like Hitler. The IS members said they would have a chat to Putin when the homophobic legislation came into effect the year before the SOCI twenty fourteen Olympics. So they had a quiet chat and Putin said something like all the Russian government said something like, well, LGBTQ athletes and visitors coming from overseas will be perfectly safe. Don't worry. They can come, they won't be harassed or thrown in prison. That was not particularly reassuring for the and tens of thousands of LGBT people in Russia who'd already been subject to this legislation. So this kind of sportswashing covers up such a multitude of sins.

00:24:11
Speaker 2: Really, it seems like the IOC often claims for itself more political power than it ends up having.

00:24:19
Speaker 3: Yes, it has an observers seat in the UN, and it sort of exploits that to sort of say that it's on the one hand, it serves their purpose to say we have an observer seat. On the other hand, it says we're not political, we don't have any clout. These are the domestic politics and so on. We can't afford to do that. That's not our job with Our job is to put on a good sport event.

00:24:45
Speaker 2: So outside of the Olympics, which sports recently have gotten caught up in sports washing or in these kind of obvious attempts by nation states to exercise power, what sports have really been in that arena.

00:25:04
Speaker 3: Well, Katar's hosting the World Cup, and that has a horrendous record of human rights abuses, not just in the country, but the migrant workers coming from nearby countries who have died on the job, whose rights have been totally stripped of them. They have no recourse. They simply show up for work. I think their passports were taken. There's been a lot of investigations by human rights organizations into that situation, and very little impact on improving their conditions. So that's one of the examples. And I think in twenty twenty one Belarus hosted over one hundred sport mega events. And Belarus is not exactly a shining light of democracy, but the various international federations, major federations, not just something minor like the International Fencing or whatever. Not to put down fencing, but there were big sports and Belarus made the most of it to polish their image in the world stage.

00:26:14
Speaker 2: Do you see a path by which sports in general, or maybe just Olympic sports in particular, can separate themselves from these unappealing, harmful politics and move forward to have a good effect on the world. Or do you think this is just the way things are?

00:26:37
Speaker 3: Ah, I'd mainly say no. But then one example that I have used in some of my books is the or was the Day Games until they kind of fell apart because they were based on such democratic, community oriented there were no qualifying events. I swim recreationally. If I wanted to be in the Gay Games, I just pay my money and I swim, and I come last in my age group or whatever, and everyone cheers me because that's what it's about. And the opening act is a lot of gay men in syncrow swimming outfits, you know, doing a sort of send up of the syncro and you know, the atmosphere is just so not Olympic, even though they started off by wanting to call the Gay Games the Gay Olympics, and of course the ISOC stepped in and said you can't do that. So there was that inclusive principle. But then reality hit and they had to have corporate sponsors, so they ended up having you know, the running shoe sponsor and the bottlewater sponsor and the IT sponsor and so on. The same sort of as an as i'd with the Pride marches in the city of China where I live, that they have very very visible corporate sponsorship and those sponsors probably get better advertising than they pay for through the games. And the gay community doesn't necessarily oil. GBTQ community doesn't necessarily get the benefits that we would like. So that's how it you in the world of in a capitalist country, that's how things work, and it's not devizing. The Gay Games needed money. Every host city that hosted the Gay Games needed corporate sponsors, and they got them.

00:28:35
Speaker 2: Well, believe it or not. As odd as it may sound, these kinds of dynamics will sound very familiar to people who follow golf. So thank you so much for speaking with me today, Helen, and good luck with your continuing research.

00:28:50
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you for asking me.

00:28:55
Speaker 2: Before we switch back to the rest of my conversation with will Bardwell, I'd like to say a quick word about Frida Egg events. Over the next four weeks, we will open up a new event for registration every Monday at noon Eastern time. That's four event registrations four weeks. All registrations for fridagg events are now on golf Genius. I'll put a link to our Golf Genius page in the show notes, but you can also get there through the Friday dot com. So first up is the Cheese Steak, which will take place in August at Huntington Valley Country Club, a fantastic William Flynn course near Philadelphia. Registration for the Cheese Steak starts this coming Monday, February twenty eighth, noon eastern. Next is the second annual Stalemate at Meadowbrook Country Club near Detroit. That's a September event and registration is on Monday, March seventh. Then we have the Backyard at Boston Accent in late September at the Donald Ross designed Essex County Club Nearish to Boston, Massachusetts. Registration March fourteenth. And finally, the tw twenty two Scraper at Prairie Dunes Country Club in Hutchinson, Kansas. That will be in October and registration opens on Monday, March twenty first, again noon Eastern time. We're really looking forward to these events. Let us know if you have any questions, and we hope to see you out there. All right, back to sportswa washing and will Bardwell, okay, so now getting into the specific way that Saudi Arabia has gone about this sports washing process in the world of golf. So you know, mid two thousand tens, late twenty tens, Saudi Arabia starts to organize an effort to become involved in the golf world and to attract professional golf tournaments. Early twenty nineteen is the first edition of the Saudi International, which at this point is part of the European Tour. And the main thing I remember from that first Saudi International is Sergio Garcia's burst in a bunker where he just went bananas and and he got booted from the event. I believe if there.

00:31:12
Speaker 1: Were any player on tours or in our lifetimes that you would pick to spend the rest of his life in a Saudi prison, I think betting on Sergia would have been money well spent.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was. There was some concern that that he had made the wrong people mad with that particular abuse of the of royal greens. That the course there in Saudi So in any case, Dustin Johnson wins this Saudi International. Sergio Garcia dominates the headlines with this tantrum that he threw, But in the meantime, a very interesting thing starts to happen, and that's the players proved themselves quite willing to carry water for Saudi Arabia, specifically Bryson to Shambo, saying, I think it's amazing what Saudi Ara is doing and what the European Tour is doing, and that sort of sets the tone for how golfers are going to talk when they're at this event. And I think it's something that makes golf a little bit different because it's such an individual sport because the players are their own, so to speak, brands that they're independent contractors. They are choosing to go there, and in a sense they're asked to justify that, and so things like this come out of their mouths. Whereas a Formula one driver like Lewis Hamilton feels a little more free to be critical of Saudi Arabia when Formula one is there because he is not necessarily choosing to be there. That's just where one of the races is and that's where all of the drivers. All of the drivers participate in all the races, and so golfers almost feel this impulse to defend.

00:32:53
Speaker 1: That's a really good point. The Saudi International is certainly not the first golf turn where golfers have been put in the position of defending organizers of a tournament who have a less than stellar record on human rights. I'm thinking particularly of Augusta National. But I'll tell you the part of the moment in the life of the Saudi International that kind of started to worry me. You know, twenty nineteen when Bryson said what he said. I mean, I have a certain opinion of Bryson to Shambeau that something like that fits pretty well. I think a lot of other people probably think the same thing of him. But in twenty nineteen, the first year that the tournament was held, Paul Casey spoke of it in terms that I thought we were really admirable. He seemed to understand what was going on, and that by the next year his tune had changed completely. He said this was something he wanted to go check out and see what it was all about. Clearly he understood what was going on, understood that it was important for him not to be part of it and give it legitimacy, and yet a year later, for reasons that I can only assume had to do with the appearance fee that were being offered, had done a complete one eighty on it.

00:34:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is kind of how normalization works too, where I think that not only was Paul Casey persuaded by the appearance fee, but also by the fact that this was the second year of the Saudi International and it had just started to become part of the professional golf landscape and it wasn't as big of a deal to be involved that second year, which is one reason.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: And I know I'm not the first person to articulate this, but I find it hard to believe that this whole super Golf League is going to just go away now that Dustin Johnson and bryceon de Shambeau have stepped away from it. There is an awful lot of money behind this thing, and even if they get it off the ground without as many stars as they would like, they have the money to be patient. And the longer it goes on, like you said, the more it gets normalized and the less dangerous it is from a public relations standpoint. To take that plunge.

00:35:29
Speaker 2: All right, So you mentioned the Super Golf League. We should give some people some background on that. So first, the news broke in late January twenty twenty that the Premier Golf League was preparing to start a series of events that were extremely well funded that would try to attract the top players in the world and really take the fight directly to the PGA Tour. This was a major threat to the PGA Tour from the beginning because of the amount of money that was involved. These events would have purses far larger than those on the PGA Tour, and that is exactly what the PGA Tour had before that attracted the top players, was just bigger purses than rival tours like the European Tour. And so the Premier Golf League starts to bucketshead a bit in early twenty twenty, and quickly the news breaks that the PGL, the Premier Golf League, is backed by Saudi money, and people immediately start to criticize that the Premier Golf League has put on the defensive. Certain players like Rory McElroy criticize that aspect of it right away and say, I don't like where the money's coming from. I'm not sure I want to be involved in that. Most players are kind of biding their time at this point, just seeing how things play out and not saying anything definitive. All right, So that's early twenty twenty. Obviously we know what happened to everything that was starting to develop an early twenty ten twenty and it immediately got scuttled by COVID and the world got put on hold for a while, and so did the Premier Golf League. Now fast forward about a year later. This is, you know, early to mid twenty twenty one. News starts to leak out that potentially the Premier Golf League is coming back. Except it's a little bit confusing because there's the Premier Golf League and then there's this new thing called the Super Golf League. And people have some trouble at first trying to figure out what these are they whether it's a different league, whether you know, they're all part of the same thing, whether they're just different names for the same thing. Eventually it becomes clear that Saudi investors have broken away from the Premier Golf League, which is mostly run by European, British and European hedge fund types, you know, and the Saudis were providing them funding at first. Okay, now it becomes clear that the Saudis have broken away and are trying to start their own thing, which is now going by the name of the Super Golf League. All right, So that's early and mid twenty twenty one when that's beginning to develop, and in fact, at the PGA Championship in May at Kiowa, as Phil Mickelson is spectacularly and unexpectedly winning a major in his later years, that that very same time, there's a lot going on at the PGA Championship, discussions about this Saudi backed golf league, a lot of players talking to each other, and backers of the Saudi League talking to players, and just recruitment going on. That has gradually developed since then. Greg Norman has been announced as the head of Live Golf Investments, which is backed by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, and it appears that Live Golf Investments is going to be the kind of company that tries to drive Saudi Arabia's activities in golf. Late twenty twenty one, it becomes clear that Live Golf Investments has invested in the Asian Tour instead of the European Tour, which it was initially Saudi Arabia was initially involved with. Live Golf Investments is going to sponsor a ten events series on the Asian Tour, big purses. And also there is this developing Super Golf League. Greg Norman is at the head of it, doing this work on the Saudi government's behalf, and so that's essentially where we are right now. But meanwhile, the Saudi International Tournament is still happening. It's been played every year. There's a Saudi Ladies International on the Ladies' European Tour that is beginning to happen every year Lydia Co when at late last year it's going to be played again in March of this year. And so this stuff is continuing, and the Super Golf League is the thing that everybody talks about. But clearly Saudi Arabia is not going away just because, you know, as recently happened, Phil Mickelson opened his mouth to a few reporters and kind of blew things up and made it untenable from a public relations perspective for players like Dustin Johnson and Bryson to Shamba to be connected with the Super Golf League anymore, and so they've put out statements saying, all right, we're on the PGA Tour for now, right back off everybody, And that was a blow to the Super Golf League. But I think that where we are right now is that this isn't going away. It's just experienced a setback. Saudi Arabia is going to try to make this thing happen within golf for the purposes of sportswashing.

00:40:41
Speaker 1: I have suspected that part of their motivation has to have been, and this is not going away, that golf's audience sort of tends to lean toward the sort of audience that you would like to sports wash toward. Golf is followed just beroportly by sort of upper class, white, politically connected people. If you are Saudi Arabia and you're interested in sort of positioning yourself for the late twenty first century world economy, then it would be really nice to have a favorable image among wealthy business your CEO sort of class that probably is more likely to follow golf than say, WWE. The same thing for politically connected it would be nice to have a favorable image with the Jared Kushners of the world. So there's still a lot for them to gain by remaining in the golf space. And I doubt that this is going to be the thing that pushes them away from that idea, because those incentives remain.

00:41:57
Speaker 2: And one of the most underrated parts of this whole endeavor has to do with golf courses and the building of golf courses. You know, just because the Super Golf League has been you know, temporarily disabled or hindered by Phil Nicholson's big mouth, doesn't mean that they're going to stop building golf courses. In Saudi Arabia. There are big projects going on right now to build up the country's golf infrastructure, and architects like Jack Nicholas appear to be very involved. Obviously, Greg Norman has an architecture business that's that's likely going to build some courses. Gary Player has been said to be in meetings related to this, you know, et cetera.

00:42:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know, it's interesting because if you're the Saudi's and you're kind of looking to kill two birds with one stone here by hiring a guy like Nicholas, a you're gonna get to, you know, have a an attractive golf course for Western tourists to come in and play and go back, you know, post their pictures on Facebook or whatever, you know, whatever social media apt those folks use. And then but also Jack Nicholas is of course very closely tied to Golf Magazine and so you get the sorts of glowing reviews that that that publication has put out in connection with this before. So it's a it's a really easy way for them to get some good news and favorable attention out of it by just keeping their foot in the golf space. And you know, one of the interesting things about golf to me is as much money is going into it, as much media attention as it gets, golf world is still a pretty small world and it's fairly easy to penetrate if you have a leverage point, and god knows the Saudis do so yeah, why would you give up?

00:43:58
Speaker 2: Yeah? And the side is what the Sound has had is an enormous amount of money. In case we didn't make that clear, the amount of money that they have to spend on this without worrying about return on their investment is so much bigger than what the PGA tour has. That's just absurd, and that is the problem.

00:44:15
Speaker 1: The Public Investment Fund, which is the fund that the Saudis use to try to attract non petroleum based industry to their country, is valued at five hundred billion dollars. And you know, by comparison, the PGA tour brought in one point five billion dollars in revenue in twenty nineteen. So it's it's not a fair fight. If it comes down to a spending war, the Saudis are going to win.

00:44:45
Speaker 2: All right. So well, let me present to you a couple of pretty common counter arguments I've seen to the criticism of Saudi Arabia's activities in golf. Maybe we could just kind of go through them and talk about how you would respond to them. Now my own feeling about this, I am opposed to the Super Golf League, for sure, but I'm not interested in this podcast of necessarily persuading people to think exactly the way I do. I hear you, That's not how I come at this. What I want to do is to provide people a set of tools that they can use for negotiating this extremely complex issue.

00:45:25
Speaker 1: And I know very spark people whose perspectives I really respect, who have more nuanced views of this, especially the farther you move away from the Super Golf League. The SGL is a pretty easy example to make a moral judgment on, But the farther you move away from that on the sports washing spectrum of the more complicated the conversations get.

00:45:53
Speaker 2: I get it, yeah, SGL is sports watching one on one, But when you start talking about tournaments hosted by sponsored by large businesses in China, it might get a little more complicated because the connection between the company and the government is not necessarily as cut and dry as the connection between the SGL and the Saudi government, where the connection is completely direct.

00:46:21
Speaker 1: And you're speaking, of course, of the HSBC World Golf Championships event that has been held for a number of years in China, and I have seen that that distinction made too, that the HSBC is not directly funded by the Chinese Communist Party like it is by the Saudis at the Saudi International. At the end of the day, that distinction is not meaningful to me. In that country, nothing happens without the permission, whether tacit or explicit, of the Chinese Communist Party. For another point, whether the HSBC is funded by the government or by a bank for the Chinese Communist Party. The result is the same. You know, you still get the same favorable headlines in the United States and in other countries that follow golf seriously. And so if you know, if you're a Weigger Muslim languishing in prison in the northwest part of the country, I doubt you care that the tournament is sponsored by a bank instead of by the regime. The result is the same. And so I know a lot of smart people who come down on that distinction as being one that is meaningful, But to me, it does not, because the result is the same as it would be in Saudi Arabia.

00:47:50
Speaker 2: I'm glad that right there you've provided an answer to one of the most common counter arguments to anti golf Saudi rhetoric, and that response is what about China or what about country X? You know, why the selective outrage about Saudi And it seems like your answer is what about China? Yeah, that's bad too.

00:48:13
Speaker 1: Well, absolutely, I mean, say what you want about the Saudis, and god knows, we have over the course of the last several minutes, at least there's not an active genocide going on in Saudi Arabia there is in China, and so any event that gives momentum to that country's very intentional sports washing effort at a moment where again, there is literally a genocide occurring. To me, the fact that that part of the effort is being funded privately is not meaningful.

00:48:50
Speaker 2: I know that there's not a neat place to quote unquote draw the line with which countries you object to hosting sporting events. Obviously, it sounds like we remain okay with the United States hosting sporting events, because that's not what we're talking about. But as we all know, the US has skeletons in its closet as well, and this is something that people commonly point out. Every country has some stories to tell about what their governments have done, and so how do you work your way through making judgments about which country is to object to and which not to.

00:49:31
Speaker 1: As you say, everybody, every country in the world has moments and existing practices that no reasonable person should be proud of, and the United States is not beyond that. I mean, when I'm not blogging about golf at four o'clock in the morning, I am a civil rights lawyer, and so no one will be quicker to call out the United States for violations of individual dignities or human rights than me. Having said that, we do at least have a system of individual constitutional liberties that are protected by the rule of law. That is a pretty gigantic distinction between US and the Chinas and Saudi Arabia's and cutters of the world. We don't get it right nearly as often as we should, but we have a system of law set up in place where we are at least trying.

00:50:40
Speaker 2: Now we're talking about matters right now that are not in the professional golfer's strict job description. When you become a professional golfer, when it's your dream to do that, you're not necessarily studying up on geopolitics. And so one of the common counter arguments to the position that you have taken in this article you've written in this podcast is these are golfers, not politicians. And in fact, this has become maybe the most common defense from golfers themselves for participating in the Saudi International and down the road possibly being part of the Super Golf League. I am a golfer, not a politician. What would be your stock response to that claim?

00:51:26
Speaker 1: I think we would all like sports and politics to be separate. You know, it's we love to tell ourselves that sports isn't escape from the drudgery of everyday current events. And you know, I love turning on a golf tournament on Sundays and kind of unplugging my brain too. But the truth is that sports and politics are not separate, and efforts at sportswa washing like the one the Saudis are undergoing right now, are proof of that. The Saudis and the Chinese and every other country that goes through this exercise understand that good sports can make for favorable politics. That is the only reason that the Saudis are interested in is. I can assure you that Mohammed ben Salmon, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, could give two shits what Bryson Deshambeau's ball speed is. That is not why they are interested in golf. They are interested in it for their geopolitical gain. So they're you know, it would be great if we could separate those two. But sports washers like the Saudis are the ones who married those two, and we ignore that to our own ignorance.

00:52:41
Speaker 2: We also notice golfers doing politics when they go to the Saudi International whenever they say something about what Saudi Arabia is doing, the great things that are happening in this country. Greg Norman talking about seeing women in restaurants and out on the golf course, that is politics, Is it not?

00:53:00
Speaker 1: What a preposterous thing to say that, you know, oh, I saw some women in a restaurant and so you know, so there must not be systemic human rights violations in that country. But you know, things like the you mentioned the women's golf tournament happening in Saudi Arabia. It's such an easy token gesture for that regime to make, and perhaps there's even more upside in that than there is with the Saudi International or even the SGL that that, you know, it's so convenient to be able to point to that tournament in particular and say, oh, they you see, they are making progress with women's rights, that women are taking on a more elevated role in their society, and wow, they're even hosting a women's golf tournament. Now, aren't they really? You know, aren't they moving forward from these policies that we used to talk about, when in fact nothing has changed the only thing that's changed is there's a professional women's golf tournament there once a year, but that's sportswashing.

00:54:05
Speaker 2: Now. Building off of that point that you're making that there is a kind of progressive image that might come along with hosting a women's golf tournament in particular, there are those who would say that engaging with Saudi Arabia through business through sports can provide a set of incentives for Saudi Arabia to clean up its act. I think this might be maybe the most nuanced position. I'm not saying it's correct, but this would be a particularly sophisticated argument for saying that this is okay to go with the Super Golf League and to go with the Saudi International. By doing these things, by not isolating Saudi Arabia, we can provide motivation for Saudi Arabia to start working on its human rights record. And if we I don't do that, then you know, nothing's going to change anyway, well.

00:55:04
Speaker 1: Except to the you know, once the golf tournament goes there, anyone interested in seeing that sort of change occur has lost all their leverage. It would have been one thing if the European Tour had said, okay, we'll be open to sanctioning an event there provided that you make X y z changes to the way that women live their lives there. But does bryceon to Shamba, think he's going to show up and, by the power of his example, inspire massive changes to the way that country treats individual liberties. I think that's a bit foolish. You don't have to hold a professional golf tournament in order to introduce societal reforms. You can do that without a golf tournament. And if they were interested in doing that, I'd submit to you that they would do it without a golf tournament because it would be less expensive. And even if you back away from the Saudi example, I mean, history is complete with examples of regimes that used sports washing along with the pretense that they were going to introduce reforms and then clearly did not that. The Chinese are a good example of that. Leading into the two thousand and eight Olympics, there were promises of cleaning up pollution and introducing press freedoms. None of those promises were followed through on. Even going back to the thirty six Olympics. Again, I don't think anybody would argue with a straight face that the thirty six Olympics were a precursor to a more tolerant Germany. In fact, some of the worst human rights abuses of the past several hundred years occurred within a few years of the thirty six Olympics. So I think, oh, there's my badly behaved dog who would also agree that sports washing. Sports washing is not a precursor to reforms. Sports washing is insulation against those reforms. That's why Saudi Arabia is interested in this. It's because it might allow them to draw in investment from foreign investors while not making any real reforms.

00:57:10
Speaker 2: All right, So finally, well, what do you think is going to be necessary for professional golf to resist this effort by Saudi Arabia? And are you optimistic that that resistance is going to be long lasting?

00:57:27
Speaker 1: It's interesting I think that you know, you mentioned at the top of the of the pod how long this is all taken to play out, and then just over span a very you know, just a few days, everything kind of fell apart. The reason that things fell apart wasn't because the Saudis ran out of money or anything like that. It was because the public relations blowback that Michelson took after his comments Doallenship Nutt came out. It was just so massive and unprecedented in coverage of professional golf that even someone like Bryson de Shamba, who is I would describe Bryson as mildly self interested with an offer of one hundred and thirty five million dollars on the table, that even he could not stand by that offer. It is going to require golf, media, golf fans, all the stakeholders in the game to continue to scrutinize this. You know this, The Saudi's interest is not going away. The sadly, it's record of human rights violations doesn't seem to be going away. And so the farther we move away from this moment, the moral implications of it are are not going to change. And it's up to media fans UH to continue to hold these people's feet to the fire and make them understand and make their sponsors understand that that we will, you know, for all the things we have turned a blind eye to in golf, that we will not turn a blind eye to this.

00:59:15
Speaker 2: All right, thank you so much well for talking to me on on President's Day.

00:59:20
Speaker 1: My dog Molly also thanks you, dog.

00:59:23
Speaker 2: I appreciate the dog as well. I appreciate your your family for giving you this time to talk to me, and thank you so much. Everybody. Check out lying for dot com. Lots of terrific writing on there, and very little of it in the grand scheme of things has to do with sportswatching. So if you're just looking for some really well written profiles on courses in the American South, then this this is the blog for you.

00:59:48
Speaker 1: A lot of discussion of obscure golf courses in southwest Mississippi. If that sounds like fun to you or sportswa washing, you check it out.

00:59:58
Speaker 2: You can choose, you can choose your own adventure there. All right, thank you so much, will my pleasure man. This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast was edited by me and Meg Atkins. Many thanks to Helen Lensky and Will Bardwell. One more reminder, the next four weeks are a great time to register for a Frida Egg event. Click on the link in the show notes. Check out our golf Genius page and see if there's anything that piques your interest. Thanks for listening.