Golf and Things That Matter

Golf and Things That Matter

By Joel Levin

We should take it as a mark of reasonable judgment not to consider the moderately problematic the same as the extremely problematic, to be unsurprised when anticipated action comport with expected results, and not to shift standards in similar situations without extremely good reasons. For example, posturing outrage when people make a selfish rather than an altruistic decision – dining out rather than donating $100 to medical research or homeless children – may deserve a small murmuring comment of “tsk tsk,” but it is business as usual for all of us (perhaps a few saints aside, although upon scrutiny, even they generally fail the test of always getting it right). We should be spare when invoking a blast of moral outrage. Showing that outrage in the face of universal weakness of the moral will, and then elevating punishment, isn’t just hypocrisy: it calls into question the ability to make mature judgments that might yield better results.

Yet, we fail this test early and often, consistently, and publicly, and now with increasing regularity. Micro aggressions are treated as macro aggressions. Comedic irony by those otherwise clearly concerned about injustice is treated as the height of injustice itself. Old examples of misbehavior are trotted out regularly as indications of reasons to severely condemn differently behaving individuals later, and standards that we hardly apply to ourselves we apply with great glee to others. We see this particularly with those knocked off some mighty perch: Hillary Clinton deleting what has never been shown to be other than innocuous emails either inadvertently, or simply to hide embarrassment; Ricky Gervais or Dave Chapelle for engaging in the usual humor that basically attacks all of humanity but now also includes that part of humanity gay or trans. Consider Alexi McCammond for her anti-Asian tweets, which caused her being fired a decade later; or the use of some label or description by a prominent person that may well have been delivered without any intended insult—whether referring to race or religion or gender—but is taken to intend the highest insult.

One would have thought that the world has so many momentous and consequential misdeeds that there would hardly be time to catch a few people doing lesser ones. To begin, the environment is facing a catastrophic future, religious and ethnic minorities throughout the world are being persecuted with regularity, and women are being deprived in an alarming number of places of their rights and often forced into trafficking. Meanwhile, economic inequality is growing alarmingly. Autocracy is multiplying, democratic values are weakening, and genocidal war has broken out from Columbia to Chad to Ukraine. Yet, one might look to cable television or social media or ordinary conversations and think that those are not the major problems. Rather, got-you mistakes, inadequate charity, intemperate language, and a bit of insult and hypocrisy are what really matters.

The present example of trivial (and immature) outrage is an arena most people find far more interesting than the environment, genocide, war, or inequality: professional sports. The Saudi Arabian government, or at least its Public Investment Fund, has sponsored something called LIV Golf. It is a series of eight invitational events that offers some of the best golfers in the world a ridiculously large amount of prize money to compete. (To give some perspective, the average payout in the first LIV tournament is $521,000; the average in the PGA Championship is $192,000). The selected few will make more money than on the PGA Tour and will do so for simply living their lives as they always lived them, namely, on a golf course, competing under pressure, and otherwise living in luxurious circumstances. For doing so, they have been suspended by the PGA tour, have been roundly criticized far and wide by those who say they are in league with evil, and otherwise found to embody pernicious human conduct.

A few comments and questions from this week’s press conference might paint the picture here. One of the golfers, Phil Mickelson, six- time Grand Slam winner and PGA icon, was asked whether he was a “Saudi stooge.” Two others, Lee Westwood, and Ian Polter, were asked whether they would play for Putin’s Russia or would have played for Apartheid South Africa. Perhaps more to the point, an AP reporter made an accusation dressed up as a question: “And to the guys, particularly Graeme [McDowell], you are now effectively working as an extension of Saudi PR. . . .  How is that journey helping women oppressed in Saudi Arabia; the migrant groups, their rights violated; the LGBT individuals who are criminalized; the families of the 81 men who were executed March and those being bombed in Yemen?”

The accurate response, of course, is that these golfers are helping none of those groups. They are contributing nothing morally to solving any of those questions. They are offering no political or social benefit to those working to right Saudi wrongs. They are simply golfing. If they were saints, they would do more and would say no, perhaps a great deal more, but at least that. Is their wrong worthy of much comment other than they are doing not very much wrong, behaving in an ordinary way, but not candidates for sainthood? More importantly, they are doing a lot less wrong than those with the ability to do something right.

Of course, what they are doing is doing business with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is hardly a country undeserving of condemnation. The reporters who engaged in self-righteous cross-examinations at the coming-out press conference (the second one, but the first with real journalistic examination) of these LIV golfers generally focused on the murder of fellow journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a murder almost universally seen as being ordered by the Saudi government. Sometimes the treatment of Saudi women and foreign workers were also raised, also matters for which the Saudis should be condemned. Should we take this set of accusations and the shame-faced muttering responses from the golfers as an important moral lesson in the way we look at their lives and our own? That lesson would be that engaging with evil entities deserves the highest condemnation, here ostracism from their sport and humiliation in front of the world at press conferences. Following these press conferences and following the very clear willingness of these golfers to play in this non-PGA tour, the PGA itself—suddenly reaching for the moral high ground it has not been known for in the many years it racially segregated its Association and continuing even longer playing events at elite country clubs guilty of discrimination of various sorts—suspended the offending golfers from membership. (One might wonder who provides the PGA anti-trust counsel. Being a monopoly and excluding individuals from participating in their monopolistic events raises all sorts of anti-competitive flags, flags that at least arguably warn of a restriction of the freedom of competition. Perhaps this is a lesser freedom than the freedom to join a golf tour run by the Saudis, but it is a freedom nevertheless).

We can think all of that—the outrage and the ostracism—as a serious and weighty matter only if we engage in the most morally infantile judgment. Certainly, these golfers are golfing for the reason they always do, to make money. They are doing so in tournaments sponsored by a government worthy of condemnation. In that way, they are taking money and sponsorship from a country in just the same way as do soccer players who go to tournaments in such countries, tennis players who play matches in such countries, basketball and baseball players who enjoy endorsement contracts through the auspices of such countries, all without much comment, let alone condemnation. However, the real issue is one of perspective. The golfers are engaging in a routine business arrangement with a government that is an ally of the United States and Western Europe, a buffer against what we take to be the more pernicious aggression of Iran. In fact, while admittedly coming from far back in the pack, the Saudis have made modest improvements in their relations with Israel, the rights of women, the opening of their society, and the promise of Vision 2030. We might ask whether the tourists that visit to Saudi Arabia should be similarly condemned, or the universities that are happy to enroll their full paying student, or AP (whose reporter castigated the golfers at the press conference), which benefits from three separate offices in Saudi Arabia (Riyadh, Al Mubarraz, and Alaidabi).

In considering two of the most significant moral arenas that face the world today – the environment and genocide—Saudi Arabia is found wanting. If burning of hydrocarbons, beginning with oil, poses the gravest threat to the environment, and the largest contributor to that threat is Saudi Arabia who produces and exports more oil than anyone else in the world, then that ought to be where condemnation and reforming activity start. Do we condemn the countries that buy that Saudi oil, namely virtually every non-oil producing country in the world, and even a few that produce oil but not enough? We do not. That list includes, just to begin, Japan, China, the US, South Korea, India, Singapore, South Africa, France, Spain, Italy, Indonesia, Italy, Brazil, Pakistan, and Jordan, all of whom buy over $1 billion worth of Saudi oil each year. Certainly, they should be interrogated more closely than a few golfers. They are not.

What about genocide? The civil war in Yemen has been continuous since 2014, ongoing as essentially a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have been more than willing to supply forces, drop bombs, conduct air raids, contribute money to combatants, and supply weapons in a Sunni-Shia war that is genocidal in its indifference to lives on the other side. It has led, according to the UN, to the direct death of 150,000 people from the war and over 227,000 people from the related famine and destruction of healthcare facilities. Five million more face starvation. Do the western powers, or anyone other than Iran and its allies, condemn Saudi involvement? Not much, not often, and not adamantly.

In fact, U.S.-Saudi trade is enormous, in the range of $40 billion annually. Perhaps more concerning is the U.S. has been sending Saudi Arabia more than $2.5 billion in aircrafts, and $1.5 billion in arms and ammunition on an annual basis. Meanwhile, we take home over $10 billion of their oil annually. In 2017, President Trump entered into an agreement to sell an additional $110 billion in arms immediately to Saudi Arabia and $350 billion over the next 10 years. Given that, and with a world on the brink of environmental disaster and increasingly nationalist and religious conflict adrift from any concern about civilian casualties or refugees, the stance of the western nations in all-but encouraging environmental degradation and an arms race makes it more absurd to worry about a few golf balls and how well they were directed.

We might also take a moment to consider the 2022 Winter and Summer Olympics. Both hosted by China, both with full attendance past or planned, neither boycotted by the approximately 200 countries that are invited. How does China’s human rights record compare to Saudi Arabia’s? The better question would be how does it compare to any country? With the possible exceptions of North Korea, Iran, Cameroon, and Cuba, it is the worst. In fact, at the end of 2020, as plans for the Olympics were underway, UN Watch listed China as the single worst human rights abuser on the planet. The reasons are well known. Amnesty International summarized them briefly: “Harassment and intimidation; unfair trial; arbitrary, incommunicado, and lengthy detention; and torture and other ill-treatment for simply exercising their right to freedom of expression and other human rights. The government continued a campaign of political indoctrination, arbitrary mass detention, torture and forced cultural assimilation against Muslims living in Xinjiang. Thousands of Uyghur children were separated from their parents. The national security law for Hong Kong enabled human rights violations which were unprecedented.” There is more, but it would be enough, should we apply the same standards we do to these prodigal golfers wandering far from the PGA tour, to prevent thousands of athletes from flying to China. Of course, we did no such thing.

It is said that we make a mistake looking to celebrities—from sports or music or film or fortune—as moral guides. Of course, that is right, but perhaps not that interesting, as it is hard to be confident in locating moral guides in our politicians, universities, corporations, or the press. Some in each of those groups supply moral leadership, but many do not, and pedigree here, that is where they come from, is a rather imperfect guide to assuming moral wisdom. The hope of the Enlightenment was that education would, combined with a certain intelligence, yield that moral leadership. Here, again, disappointment is easy to find.

These golfers have not made an outstandingly courageous choice, but neither have they done much more than business as usual, that is, getting along in our dirty world, one full of bad players in power, and supporters and armies that back them. Their predecessors golfed in the British Open when England initially subjugated Ireland and was later complicit in the Irish troubles, controlled a vast colonial empire including India, and engaged in what can only be seen as reprehensible behavior first in India, then South Africa and later in Kenya in trying to stem colonial uprisings. For that matter, so did all American industry anxious to do business with Britain, and every American tourist who could find their way to the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. We see their successors in the now dozens of companies who suddenly discovered—after the previous eight years of vicious and unprovoked Russian attacks on Ukraine, preceded by Russian attacks on the peoples of Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea, Moldova, and Syria, all involving wanton slaughter and not a few crimes against humanity against these states, a practice in accord with those against dissenters in their own country—that Russia is an autocratic kleptocracy scornful of human rights. In any case, the real harms were not by the golfers who participated there or the tennis players at Wimbledon or the many foreign entertainers who lined their pockets on the London stage. The real problem was colonialism, the subjugation of countries deserving independence, and nasty tactics to prevent the freedom and autonomy of distant peoples.

Phil Mickelson doesn’t matter here and, as a moral model or ethical force, he never did. Musicians and sport stars regularly tour every kind of undemocratic, autocratic, warrior, rights-preventing, racist, sexist, and unpleasant country they safely and profitably can. They have in the past and will continue to do so. That doesn’t excuse their behavior or make it right, but proportionality and maturity – when to show outrage and to exert efforts to change matters – matter and expending one’s limited moral currency on the small things allows the larger ones to thrive. The real issue is how to change these countries, and their governments. In finding a solution, watching a golfer make a birdie is of no consequence, and thinking it is, is itself a grave moral failure. Let us speak a little more clearly on our priorities and our efforts, at least if we want to get something done rather than feigning outrage and saying, “tsk tsk.”