Phil Gifford: The winner of the hypocrisy and greed in sport award is…..

OPINION:

So now we know. The winner of the Sepp Blatter Award for Hypocrisy and Greed in Sport in 2023 is PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan.

You may remember Jay from such statements as saying
just a year ago that anyone who was unaware of Saudi Arabia’s disgraceful human rights record “must be living under a rock.”

He’s now the man who has signed a deal for the PGA Tour to merge with the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund.

“Things have changed,” was Jay’s deep and meaningful explanation for the PGA Tour rolling over and letting the Saudis tickle its tummy with platinum bank cards.

As Bob Dylan has said, money doesn’t talk, it swears, and the new golfing partnership curses so loudly it makes Billy Connelly’s most potty mouthed monologue sound like a Sunday school lesson.

The money that, for example, Aussie Cam Smith earned on the PGA Tour would be staggering to most people. His 2022 British Open victory netted $NZ4 million, and his yearly winnings soared well over $NZ15 million.

But PGA prize money must have looked like chicken feed, if reports of Smith’s $NZ150 million fee for signing with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf were even vaguely accurate.

Oil money kept the LIV circuit alive. The Saudi’s LIV mouthpiece, Greg Norman, had bragged last year of a “kick-ass business model.” This year, in a filing for an American court case against the PGA Tour, lawyers for the Saudis admitted the first LIV season had returned “virtually zero” profit.

No wonder when the chance came to basically buy the PGA Tour, it was seized.

Sport at its best offers not only brilliant skills, and high drama, but also a chance to be uplifted by selflessness and joy.

As Nelson Mandela said in 2000: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.”

Unfortunately sportwashing, using sport to present a prettier picture of a corrupt regime to the world, is not a recent invention.

The 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin were used as a propaganda vehicle for Hitler’s Nazi government. Hitler had been Germany’s dictator for three years by then, and film of the crowds and Hitler at the ‘36 Games have a scary resemblance to Nazi Nuremburg rallies.

There was no official unease when Hitler greeted German winners with the Nazi raised arm salute. By contrast, at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City I saw the double standards of the International Olympic Committee at first hand, as I nervously stood near the back of an IOC press conference.

The black power salutes Americans Tommy Smith and John Carlos had given on the medal rostrum after the men’s 200 metres were, if the outraged reaction from the IOC was to be believed, a stiletto aimed at the heart of the Olympics. The American team sent them home.

New Zealand hasn’t been exempt from double standards either.

When the 1981 apartheid era Springboks toured here the government of Rob Muldoon, who correctly saw an election winner in allowing the tour, stood by the idea of keeping politics out of sport.

A year earlier the same National government, after the USSR had invaded Afghanistan, had put huge pressure on Kiwi athletes to stop them going to the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Civil servants were told they might not have jobs when they returned from the Games. Police visited athletes, warning them they could find themselves receiving letter bombs from outraged patriots if they went to Moscow.

In 2017 Brian Newth, who went to the Games anyway as a modern pentathlete, told the Herald’s Phil Taylor how Muldoon’s sports minister, Allan Highet, had approached the chief executive of General Foods, who Newth worked for, “asking whether it was in the interests of a major company to employ an individual who was defying the government.”

Golfers like Rory McIlroy, who have taken a stand against cosying up to the men with the Saudi money, are now in a bizarre no-man’s land, basically betrayed by their own sporting leaders.

The cynicism of the PGA Tour decision is boundless. But, in hindsight, should we have expected anything else? When the LIV tour began Greg Norman, quizzed about the murder and dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and mass executions of Saudi dissidents, offered this deeply caring reply. “We all make mistakes.”