At least Phil Mickelson got himself a nine-figure check to cape up for LIV Golf.
From the looks of it, Colin Cowherd was willing to provide his seal of approval for nothing more than a hot take and getting in the good graces of those people who’ve gotten criticized for their involvement with the Saudi-backed tour.
“There has been way, way too much pearl-clutching on this,” Cowherd said on Friday as he discussed Charles Barkley’s potential involvement as an announcer.
He’s right that there has been an awful lot of moralizing over the players who’ve signed on with the Saudi-backed circuit. But if Cowherd is any indication, the plan that’s behind LIV Golf is working to absolute perfection.
“I understand it,” Cowherd said, “any time something is new and different AND disrupts tradition. People love tradition. People freak out. Not everybody, but a lot of people freak out.”
Now, Cowherd very well might be right about this to some extent. Some people are upset because of the threat this poses to the PGA Tour. I am not one of them, though. I don’t care about the PGA Tour. At all. Not as a business entity. Not as a television property. I’m a casual golf fan, who’s aware of and watches the majors, and from a business sense, I totally understand why pro golfers would resent the tour, its business structure and its payouts. I do not think Jay Monahan and his country-club compadres are the victims in all of this, but that doesn’t make LIV Golf any better.
“Now eventually people kind of get in line,” Cowherd said, “as people join this new disruptive trend and it gets normalized.”
Well, this is 100 percent the goal of LIV Golf, which is bankrolled by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. They’re not paying these golfers hundreds of millions of dollars apiece so the world will stay skeptical about doing business with Saudi Arabia. This tour is about more than just a golf circuit. It’s part of a plan to make the world more comfortable working with and investing in Saudi Arabia. This is not a secret. There’s a whole web site explaining it, and to describe LIV Golf as a start-up business that is disrupting an established industry is to ignore the primary goal of the entire endeavor.
“But Colin, the Saudis,” Cowherd continued. “Colin, the Saudis. All right. Hello. You guys hear about China? Their human rights. NBA has been doing business with China for over a decade. A lot of shoes worn by NBA stars from China. By the way, play TikTok? My wife does. Yeah, that’s from China. We are in an economic relationship with China and so is sports.”
So let me get this straight, the existence of ANY business relationships with other repressive regimes justifies ALL business relationships with repressive regimes? How incredibly convenient for anyone hoping to do business with a repressive regime! It is important, while doing this, NOT to mention the specific human-rights abuses that have occurred up to and including the murder and subsequent dismemberment of dissident journalist James Khashoggi. A Washington Post columnist, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Turkey where it’s believed he was killed.
“There’s golf tournaments in Saudi Arabia, have been for years,” Cowherd said. “They own EPL teams. It’s all been normalized.”
Well, that’s certainly Saudi Arabia’s goal in purchasing Newcastle United and funding this golf circuit. But there are enough people still squeamish over business partnerships with Saudi Arabia that a few years ago, Endeavor had to give back a $400 million investment in the UFC. It’s remarkable really. Imagine how sketchy something has to be to generate so much pushback that a company gives back $400 million. LIV Golf is part of an overall plan by Saudi Arabia to make sure companies and people become MORE comfortable with investments like that.
“I don’t know what everybody does at every company I’ve worked at,” Cowherd said. “I go to the store. I like eggs. Bread. The products I buy, I don’t know who is on the board. I don’t know their every move. I’ve got six kids. I’ve got a life. Do you have to be a Washington Post journalist for every company you use?”
This rhetorical trick is my absolute favorite part of Cowherd’s argument. No one is asking for nor expecting that level of consumer behavior, but by taking the premise to its illogical extreme, he’s essentially saying that any action at all is pointless. Imagine a child using this approach when caught lying about having completed his homework:
Mom: Jimmy, you said you did your homework.
Child: Look Mom, we all say things every day that we don’t truly mean. Like when Dad asked you last night, ‘Does this shirt look good?’
Mom: His shirt? We’re talking about the math assignment you lied about having completed and I found blank in your backpack.
Child: Well, did you tell the truth? Because I remember you saying it looked fine instead of telling him, ‘Well, it looks exactly like every other shirt you’ve ever bought in the 20 years we’ve been together except for the ketchup stain and the fact that your belly’s now pushing out against it.’
Mom: And this relates to the blank sheet of homework how exactly?
Child: We spend all of our days saying things we wish were true instead of what is actually true, and I don’t think it’s fair that we put a microscope over this one statement I made regarding a single math assignment if we’re not going to be as rigorous about everything else we say.
It’s a moral relativism that Homer Simpson would certainly appreciate. If you can’t do everything, why try to do anything? It’s also a complete and total cop-out. It is OK to decide to do something because you believe it’s good or choose not to do something because you believe it’s bad. You don’t have to preen about it, but you also don’t have to prove that you are politically pure and without fault.
I can say that I oppose LIV Golf while still having an iPhone in my pocket, and while this may make me a hypocrite at some level, the alternative is to throw up your hands and say, “It’s all blood money so get what you can,” or as I like to call it, the Cowherd plan.
“You like, what you like,” Cowherd said. “If you like Tesla or you like a Snickers bar, do you have to go to the board and figure out all of their political, their family history.”
No, you don’t. But if you read a story about the way employees are treated at that company or the business practices it uses, you’re also free to decide the enjoyment or experience you get from that product is outweighed by the harm it causes.
It’s pretty simple to me: The human-rights abuses documented in Saudi Arabia have made people around the world leery of doing business with the ruling regime. Instead of addressing these accusations and demonstrating some level of accountability, Saudi Arabia is aggressively investing in an effort to make people across the world more comfortable entering into those business arrangements because of the vast sums of money that can be made. And judging by Cowherd’s segment, it is absolutely working and I don’t even think they had to pay him.
Danny O’Neil is a sports media columnist for BSM. He has previously hosted morning and afternoon drive for 710 ESPN Seattle, and served as a reporter for the Seattle Times. He can be reached on Twitter @DannyOneil or by email at Danny@DannyOneil.com.
