DeChambeau, Mickelson,
and Others Tilt from
Craven to Complicit
By 1938, international eagerness to confront Germany’s Nazi regime had mostly dissipated. The Nazis’ ambition, though, had not.
That spring, Germany’s tanks rolled unabated across its southeastern border, annexing Austria in what became the first step in Hitler’s march across Europe. In one fell stroke, the invasion added more than a million able-bodied men to Hitler’s fold, surrounded neighboring Czechoslovakia on three sides, and gave Germany an indomitable position for the war that began the following year.
For the opening move in an unprecedented threat to world security, the international community’s response was remarkably muted.
The isolationism that pervaded the Twentieth Century’s first half is partly to blame. But so are the 1936 Olympics.
Two years before annexing Austria, Germany had played host to the crown jewel of international sport: the Summer Olympics. Americans remember the Games chiefly for the triumphs of Jesse Owens in Hitler’s plain sight. But history also records the 1936 Olympics for another, more cynical reason: they marked the first, wildly successful effort at sportswashing. The Games offered Hitler a platform from which to portray Germany as a stable, tolerant, reliable member of the international community.
Two years later came the Anschluss. The next year, open war.
“One must govern well,” Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ chief propagandist, said in 1933, “and good government needs good propaganda.” The 1936 Games offered Berlin that chance.
Over the past nine decades, authoritarian regimes around the world have taken Goebbels’ lesson and run with it. China, Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — among many others — have perfected the art of sportswashing: the intentional use of high-level sports to paint host nations as unoppressive, progressive nations, when they frequently are anything but.
The incentives for autocratic regimes to paint themselves favorably are obvious. Sadly, so too now are the incentives of sports leagues and pro athletes who go along with the charade.
. . .
Professional golf is not a sport for idealists. The PGA Tour is a nonprofit organization of doubtful legitimacy that champions charitable donations, but not at the expense of showering top stars with millions. For a circuit that confronts every challenge by throwing money at it, it is ironic that the Tour now faces an existential threat that cannot be outspent: the Super Golf League. The SGL is being formed under the umbrella of a company called LIV Golf Investments, which is backed principally by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — a massive, government-owned funding pool valued at $500 billion. By comparison, the PGA Tour’s total revenue in 2019 totaled $1.5 billion. And for more than a year, the SGL’s first order of business has been poaching the PGA Tour’s top talent.
The Fund’s chief purpose is to expand Saudi Arabia’s economic opportunities outside the petroleum industry. That’s where sportswashing comes in — and the Super Golf League with it. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s wealthiest nations, but it owes that fortune to oil, and the world grows less dependent on oil each day. With that shift, Saudi Arabia becomes more dependent on foreign investment. But that investment has come slower than the Kingdom imagined. It is no longer enough for Saudi Arabia merely to be sitting on the planet’s second-highest oil reserves. If Saudi Arabia hopes to endure past the age of oil, then it must portray itself as having embraced a new age — one with which Western investors are comfortable, and one that paints over its history of oppression against women, religious minorities, and dissidents.
“Economic relations are ever evolving, and you sort of have to stay on top of it to remain in good steed with different countries and organizations,” said Prof. Jules Boykoff, who chairs Pacific University’s Politics and Government Department and has written extensively about sportswashing. “Saudi Arabia has been catching flak for its human rights problems for a long time. It has been able to stay ahead of it, first of all, by having oil. That helps — but also by getting countries like the United States to shine over that reality to keep relations with them.”
The Super Golf League is not Saudi Arabia’s first foray into sportswashing, of course. Modern-day sportswashers have perfected Germany’s 1936 model by expanding sportswashing into years-long, continuous efforts rather than one-off megaevents. In China, for instance, the 2022 Winter Games are Beijing’s second Olympics in less than two decades; the country has hosted more than two dozen NBA preseason games; and in 2009, the PGA Tour and European Tour began co-sanctioning an annual World Golf Championships event there. Similarly, Saudi Arabia has played host to Formula 1 racing, WWE pay-per-views, and the world’s most lucrative horse race — all at the cost of some $1.5 billion to the Saudis.
All these sports organizers have faced questions about sportswashing. But in professional golfers, Saudi Arabia has found a particularly willing lot.
“I think it’s amazing what Saudi Arabia and the European Tour are doing,” Bryson DeChambeau said in 2019 during the European Tour’s Saudi International golf tournament. (Two months prior, journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been murdered on the orders of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince.) DeChambeau has since been offered a reputed $135 million to join the Saudi golf effort; he has denied that report in conspicuously nonspecific terms, but since that time, he reportedly has said he will no longer play PGA Tour events.
“I’m not a politician, I’m a pro golfer,” Justin Rose said in 2019 before the Saudi International. The Super Golf League has since offered Rose $100 million to join them.
“I understand those who are upset or disappointed. You’ll be OK,” Phil Mickelson tweeted in December 2019 in response to criticism for playing the Saudi International tournament. Mickelson, like Rose, reportedly has been offered $100 million to join the SGL.
Their willful blindness echoes that of LIV Golf’s CEO, former world No. 1 golfer Greg Norman. “Unless you actually go [to Saudi Arabia] and see and understand exactly what’s happening there you [can’t] sit back and make judgmental calls,” Norman told Golf Digest in 2021. “Women’s right issues — the women there now, I’ve been so impressed. You walk into a restaurant, and there are women. They’re not wearing burkas. They’re out playing golf.” (“Saudi authorities in 2021 carried out arbitrary arrests, trials, and convictions of peaceful dissidents,” Human Rights Watch wrote in its World Report 2022. “Dozens of human rights defenders and activists continued to serve long prison sentences for criticizing authorities or advocating political and rights reforms.”)
Ironically, then, the Saudis’ bid to use golf as a new sportswashing mechanism began bearing fruit even before the Super Golf League raised its head. The goal of sportswashing is to normalize oppressive regimes by distracting from or downplaying their misdeeds. Mickelson, Rose, DeChambeau, Norman, and many others began doing just that on the Saudis’ behalves even before the SGL pegged a tee ball.
. . .
To the Phil Mickelsons and Bryson DeChambeaus of this cynical moment, there is little more downside to sportswashing than the occasional rough headline.
For victims of oppression whose governments are successful at sportswashing, though, the costs are unfathomable.
“I understand the politics behind it,” Tiger Woods said in December 2019, “but also the game of golf can help heal a lot of that, too.”
Woods — who is not a stupid person — is wrong. History underscores that regimes do not use sportswashing to introduce reforms. They use it to refuse them.
By the time Germany lit the flame at the 1936 Summer Olympics, Hitler’s anti-Jewish campaign had been underway for three years, and the bodies of the Holocaust’s first victims had long grown cold. In the weeks before the Games, the International Olympic Committee insisted that the Nazis remove antisemitic signage throughout Berlin; the signage came down — until the Games ended, when they went back up. There was no reform. There was a brief pause, and then death.
In China, the 2008 Games in Beijing followed years of assurances by the Chinese Communist Party that it would begin cleaning up pollution and introducing modern press freedoms. It did neither. Six years after the 2008 Olympics ended, China began a genocide against Uyghur Muslims that has included jailing more than a million people. A year into the genocide, the IOC awarded the 2022 Games to Beijing.
Saudi Arabia is no different. In late 2016, prince Mohammed bin Salman directed the country’s General Sports Authority to begin recruiting elite international sporting events. Less than two years later, the prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. And for all Norman’s astonishment that Saudi women now eat in restaurants and play golf, the country still legally considers women to be minors: they must live under a male guardian, who controls most aspects of their lives. Limited reforms have been won in recent years, but dissenters advocating for broader freedoms have been jailed indefinitely. “The world is being told that Saudi Arabia is modernising on women’s rights,” a Human Rights Watch researcher wrote in 2020. “But the reality is that with no organized women’s rights movement or environment in which women can safely and openly demand their rights, there is little room for further advances.”
But sportswashing crowds that news out of the media landscape. For Westerners who follow sports and consume current events news only moderately, sports news may represent most of the news they see about Saudi Arabia. And when the only current events news that Westerners hear is vague notions of reform (to be clear, a notion propagated by the Saudis), the “amazement” of Bryson DeChambeau only amplifies the suggestion that an authoritarian regime oppressing women and imprisoning dissenters isn’t actually so bad.
“Viewers, strangely, suspend their critical faculties and say, ‘Well it’s sport, it’s different; let’s keep politics out of it, that will ruin it,’” said Dr. Helen Lenskyj, a University of Toronto professor who wrote about sportwashing in The Olympic Games: A Critical Approach. “And that’s as if it were never political, which it always was. Social interaction and public money make it inherently political, even before you ever get to big geopolitical, global issues.”
Maybe, as Phil Mickelson tweeted, you’ll be OK. But the victims of Saudi oppression, like the Jews and Uyghurs before them, certainly are not.
. . .
By now, sportswashing is neither novel nor a secret. The IOC of 1936 knew what it was doing and what it was allowing to be done. Today’s sports leagues — like the European Tour, and like Norman’s LIV Golf — who participate in sportwashing are no less culpable for the strategy’s victims than the regimes who develop the strategy. And no less culpable are athletes who go in wide-eyed, aware of the atrocities that their participation makes possible but satisfied to look the other way in exchange for a payday.
But propaganda, as Goebbels knew, requires more than actors on a stage. It requires an audience that’s willing to play along.
To its credit, golf’s press corps — a famously nondisruptive bunch — have bristled uncharacteristically toward the Saudi effort. Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch has been thunderously critical of golfers mulling abdication to the Saudi effort, and even Golf Magazine — generally an embarrassingly uncritical publication — has spared some ink to push back against Mickelson’s hypocrisy. They have not been alone. Doubtlessly, golf media’s overly cozy relationship with the PGA Tour is partly responsible. But whatever the source of this flash of realism, it is criticism just the same — a rare tonic within golf coverage. Whether it remains rare, or worse, ultimately will spell the success or failure of the Super Golf League.
Goebbels’ strategy — and the Saudis’ — depends on golf’s press corps dropping its critical lens. The full weight of the Saudis’ effort depends on golf media pretending along with them that nothing is amiss — that golf happening in the Super Golf League is no different than golf in the United Kingdom, or in Australia, or in America. That is not to say that those nations have no human-rights records of which to be ashamed. But it is to say that none of those nations has sought to use golf as a smoke screen to hide their crimes against human rights. And if Saudi Arabia’s effort at using golf to hide those crimes it to succeed, then it depends on golf media — not just coverage, but normalized coverage. It depends on golf media doing what golf media usually do: to pretend that this is just another golf tournament in just another week in just another venue. It depends on golf media not seeing and reporting the obvious: that this whole God damned thing is a ruse, and that many of the game’s idols are going along just the same.
There is blood on their hands. That is obvious. And journalism, at a minimum, demands reporting the obvious.
Whether Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, and their ilk are willing to sell their souls for a few million dollars is beyond anyone’s control. What remains within control is golf journalists’ willingness to portray the Saudis’ project as anything other than what it is, which is a distraction from its efforts to preserve a culture of oppression.
There will be those who argue that golf media should not intermingle the sport with its host nation’s politics. But the Saudis already have done that, and intentionally so. If golf still has enough of them, it is up to journalists whether they will pretend otherwise. Goebbels predicted they will.
. . .
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