Pawns chasing Saudi blood money come to Doral as LIV Golf wraps up its inaugural season | Opinion

Welcome to Miami, men of LIV Golf.

May your weekend be filled with bogeys, sparse crowds and all of the guilt you so richly deserve for setting aside whatever sense of morality you once had to chase blood money.

Shame on you all. You are the most soulless, despicable athletes on Earth.

Fore!

So the LIV Golf Invitational Series concludes its inaugural eight-event season this Friday through Sunday on the venerable Blue Monster course at Doral, and it truly is a match made in hell:

A golf course owned by Donald Trump, who lost a presidential election but won’t admit it and continues to promulgate his blatant lie to his spectacularly gullible worshipers even as it damages our democracy, hosting a golf tour that is blatantly the sportswashing toy of the human rights-violating Saudi Arabian government.

Trump is set to play in a closed-to-the-public pro-am on Thursday. Bad lie, indeed.

Sixty-eight golfers have defected from the PGA Tour and become whores with pitching wedges chasing the easy money. Twelve four-man teams will be competing in Miami. The money-first traitors include Dustin Johnson, who has won the season title, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith and a bunch of players so anonymous they could be bagging your groceries at Publix.

LIV Golf has no media rights/TV partner. Events are streamed live on YouTube, where viewership has steadily fallen as the novelty has grown tired. Advertisers are staying away in droves. Amazon, AppleTV and others want nothing to do with this.

The Saudis don’t care. The government’s Public Investment Fund has spent an estimated $1.3 billion to launch LIV Golf in a public relations ploy to put a smiling face on all of ts sins.

The latest synopsis on Saudi Arabia by the group Human Rights Watch: “Saudi Arabia spends billions of dollars hosting major entertainment, cultural, and sporting events as a deliberate strategy to deflect from the country’s image as a pervasive human rights violator. Scores of human rights activists and dissidents remain in prison or on trial for their peaceful criticism. Authorities failed to hold high-level officials accountable for suspected involvement in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Through 2021, the Saudi-led coalition continued a military campaign against the Houthi rebel group in Yemen that has included scores of unlawful airstrikes that have killed and wounded thousands of civilians.”

[The U.S. believes the Saudi government is responsible for the death of Khashoggi, a Washington Post reporter].

The Saudi government is widely criticized for its human rights abuses, torture, arbitrary detention and executions. Women and those in the LGBTQ community are particularly vulnerable to abuse. The government is known to deter all forms of dissent.

This is who signs the checks for LIV Golf players.

The Saudis’ Public Investment Fund is a half-trillion-dollar pool of money owned by the Kingdom and controlled directly by the crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman.

I know: Sports is more complicated than it once was. It demands moral decisions of us all the time.

The World Cup is about to begin in Qatar, another country with an awful human-rights record. China and Russia have hosted the Olympic Games. China is a major business partner of the NBA.

We might shake our heads, but we watch. We cannot control what international governing bodies choose to do. We cannot blame athletes, like Lionel Messi headed to Qatar, for not turning down a once-every-four-years opportunity. We do not hold LeBron James liable for his league’s corporate ties.

LIV Golf is different. These athletes are individuals who made a personal choice to corrupt themselves and commit reputation suicide for money. To turn a blind eye to the atrocities of a foreign government buying them to use as tools, as pawns.

Shame on them all.