Curtis Thompson is back on the Korn Ferry Tour this year, hoping to spend 2020 locking up his profession’s biggest job for 2021.
Curtis Thompson, who co-medaled at 2019 Korn Ferry Tour Q-School to earn full status on the Tour in 2020, posted a photo in January of his new staff bag’s belly plate — which includes a Trump Golf logo.
One of his sponsors hopes for the same thing.
Thompson’s return to tour golf this season is apparently sponsored in part by Trump Golf, whose garish logo is emblazoned on Thompson’s staff bag. He’s not the only one: Jim Herman, famously a former assistant pro at Trump Bedminster in New Jersey, bears that course’s crest on his bag and shirt. “He inspires me, I guess,” Herman said of his benefactor in July 2019 after winning the Barbasol Championship.
And on March 1, PGA Tour member Scott Piercy likewise felt inspired to publish a homophobic Instagram post targeting former Democratic presidential candidate and would-be Trump challenger Pete Buttigieg — the country’s first openly gay presidential candidate.
Three years into the Trump presidency, whatever illusions that once existed of Trump using his station to elevate golf can be put to bed. To the contrary, Trump’s worst political tendencies — exclusion, racism, and callousness, to name a few — coincide so neatly with golf’s worst proclivities that some Tour players have not only felt their own prejudices affirmed, but have been emboldened to parrot Trump’s sentiments.
Perhaps neither Thompson nor Herman can be blamed for turning blind eyes to Trump’s indecencies and taking a sponsorship wherever they can get it. Both players are career journeymen, and especially in Thompson’s case, stringing together enough sponsor’s checks to keep a career afloat is no small feat; perhaps a degree of moral scrutiny is too much to ask.
A homophobic meme posted to Scott Piercy’s Instagram Story on March 1, 2020, the day that Democrat Pete Buttigieg — the first openly gay presidential candidate in American history — left the race.
But Thompson and Herman should make that calculation with this understanding: that history will have little sympathy for those of the Trump era who grinned and bore his disgraces for the sake of expediency. And that goes for more than just politicians.
It goes most of all for the PGA Tour — which, unlike Thompson and Herman, certainly does have the financial security to keep Trump’s name and views out of its events. To the Tour’s credit, it has some history of doing just that: Trump’s demagoguery during the 2016 campaign led to a World Golf Championships event leaving his Trump Doral resort in Florida and moving to Mexico City.
Of course, to hear the Tour tell the story, the WGC move had less to do with a principled rejection of racism and more to do with its inability to find a title sponsor willing to sully its corporate goodwill at one of Trump’s courses. So perhaps the Tour deserves no credit after all.
In any event, even that semblance of virtue far outpaces the Tour’s current willingness to tolerate Trump’s imprint. If the Tour has an official policy concerning impermissible sponsorships, then I’m unaware of it. But it’s effectively banned sponsorships from UPS, for God’s sake; surely the Tour would not allow a player to use a bag carrying logos from the Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan.
Who could have guessed that someone holding such neanderthal view of multiculturalism would find a place among Trump Golf’s sponsorships?
It is impossible to ignore that this amorality occurs in an era when the PGA Tour has demonstrated greater regard for silencing criticism of cheaters than for disciplining cheaters. Perversely, the PGA Tour has calculated that its future depends on defending its players from reprisal — even when those same players heap obscenity on the game and on the Tour itself.
Allow the mark of an avowed racist to permeate your sport while simultaneously demonstrating that unbecoming behavior will be protected, and the result is the sort of publicity that Piercy has brought on the Tour’s head.
Is the most powerful tour of this purportedly honorable game so singularly focused on protecting its brand that it won’t protect the sport’s and the league’s integrity?
To be sure, the sugar rush of the Trump era will not last forever; whether in January 2021 or later, his departure from the presidency will leave an embarrassing number of people groping to justify their complacence — or worse, their complicity — in one of America’s most shameful times. When Trump leaves the White House, America will begin the difficult task of erasing Trumps imprimatur and reestablishing norms of basic dignity.
The PGA Tour might consider doing the same thing sooner rather than later.
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