PGA decides Saudis deserve a mulligan on atrocities

It stands to reason that most of the people who might boycott golf over the unconscionable LIV-PGA merger don’t watch it in the first place. The likes of Thurston Howell III, by contrast, are unlikely to be bothered by Saudi atrocities that don’t directly affect them — which gives the PGA license to act with impunity.

The outrage factories in America have gone to DEFCON 1 over the revelation that all the while the PGA was reacting with supposed horror to LIV’s moral turpitude, it was in fact dealing with the rogue tour to assure that it, too, could dive headlong into an Olympic-size pool of Saudi blood money.

OK, fine, but this is — golf. The PGA was never Doctors Without Borders. This is the sport that only allowed Jews when their wealth became too great to ignore; that didn’t permit women who weren’t serving gimlets into the Masters’ boys club until 2012; that abhorred any person of color except those with too much talent to ignore.

So don’t anybody act as if the PGA was the last line of defense between us and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. The PGA and the Saudis are more peas in a pod than warring factions.

LIV and the Saudis stand accused of using sports to expunge their record on human rights, from underwriting 9/11 to treating women like shop rags to murdering and dismembering its critics. LIV threw millions at big name golfers to participate in a tour created out of thin air and filled with gimmick-golf that supposedly would make the sport less painful to watch.

A handful of washed-up and/or otherwise unstable or morally bereft pros accepted the cash, but otherwise the world of organized golf reacted much in the way a horrified Judge Smails reacted to Rodney Dangerfield’s proffer for the golf course in “Caddyshack.”

“Buy Bushwood? You?!”

Despite unlimited funding, LIV was no threat to the PGA, at least not from the outside. You can’t pay people to watch an inferior and goofy product, and no one did. Knowing that, the Saudis wormed their way into the PGA’s inner sanctum, checkbook in hand, and what do you know, all of a sudden the PGA brass decided that crashing jets into American skyscrapers and chopping a journalist to bits was something they could live with.

But then, it’s not much different from the way gambling interests took over more mainstream professional sports. The NFL might even rival the PGA for financial audacity, suspending players for gambling, even as every other ad during football games implores the public to fritter away the rent money in a game it can’t win. This classic “Hey, look over there!” diversion is supposed to distract us from the increasingly obvious truth that the NFL has a gambling problem far greater than any player’s, and it’s bound to get worse.

As recently as 2012, the same time that Augusta was getting around to grudgingly allow female members, the NFL was openly fretting that gambling would “negatively impact our long-term relationship with our fans (and) negatively impact the perception of our sport across the country.”

Ten years later, the league was helping facilitate $7.6 billion worth of bets on the Super Bowl alone. Two of its team owners, Robert Kraft and Jerry Jones, are investors in the DraftKings sportsbook. Some of the sport's greatest former stars, including the chronically affable Peyton Manning (a nice guy like that would never steer you wrong) have become the faces of football betting.

So to review: The NFL is worried that some poor sap on the Detroit Lions is at risk of destroying the league’s reputation with a $50 parlay on a golf tournament, but NFL administrators with millions of dollars on the line are beyond reproach. OK, got it.

This will not end well. About 4% of sports bettors are good enough to consistently win a paltry 55% of the time. Yet 100% believe they’re part of this 4% even though 96% are bound to fail, many catastrophically.

Social problems aren’t the NFL’s concern. But money, like water, finds the weak spot in the dam. It may be one year, it may be 20, but there is no way to crook-proof a system flush with so much cash, and we will assuredly at some point be treated to the sight of a commissioner at a news conference protesting there was no way that the NFL could have seen such an unholy scandal coming.

Whether that scene will be more painful than watching a grinning Saudi prince handing an oversize novelty check to the winner of the PGA Murder and Torture Open is difficult to say.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Misplaced outrage: PGA merges with LIV