Oh golf, you’ve really done it this time.
We should have known this was coming, the day when this game of so-called honor and dignity threw it all away for Saudi blood money. Generations of elitism, racism, sexism and misogyny always have been our clues that someday, the sport’s long path of societal ignorance and neglect would end in the ethical abyss. That day arrived Tuesday, when the PGA Tour announced it was going into business with the renegade and despicable LIV Golf.
While it certainly was shocking (and disgusting) to see PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan go back on literally everything he has said about LIV Golf and the atrocities of 9/11, we really should have seen it coming.
When has men’s golf taken a stand on anything important, ever? No need to spend much time thinking on that one. I’ll give you the answer. It’s never.
If golf has ever done anything to move the cultural needle in the direction of inclusion, diversity and equality, it was dragged kicking and screaming into it.
Run by rich white men (and recently, the occasional rich white woman), the game of golf allowed and even encouraged discrimination against Blacks and women for decades. There are still golf courses in America that will kick a woman off the property immediately if she sets foot on the grounds. In 2023, golf still bans women.
National discrimination controversies had to descend on Augusta National Golf Club like a darkening spring storm before the most famous golf course in the country brought in its first Black member in 1990, then its first two women members in 2012.
You cannot name a golf leader who ever did the right thing for society on his own, because it has never happened. They all had to be forced into it. Even Augusta National’s decision to start a women’s amateur tournament, a truly fine development, came because the sport was panicking that decades of banning women from membership, or even weekend-morning tee times, meant that women who should be playing golf are playing every other sport but golf.
Augusta National’s hope was that starting a women’s amateur tournament might stem the tide and send the message that women are really allowed to play golf. But it’s probably too late. Millions and millions of Title IX women are already invested in marathons, soccer leagues, volleyball leagues, workout classes and dozens of other sports. They don’t have time for golf.
Remarkably, the greatest capitalists among us, the men who belong to the elite and exclusive golf clubs of America, chose sexism over capitalism for decades. Only recently have they realized that they neglected a huge, mostly untapped market, the 51 percent of the U.S. population known as women.
If golf’s leaders really were leaders, they would have banned LIV golfers from the four men’s majors last year and again this year. Had they done that, they would have slowly but surely killed LIV Golf. Great players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson would have bolted LIV’s nonsensical, exhibition-style, no-cut events as soon as possible to play real golf in the majors.
But golf’s powers that be did not do that. Instead, these spineless men offered mealy-mouthed excuses about tradition and being open to all, ensuring that LIV Golf would be given the platform of its dreams four times a year.
By not playing hardball with LIV, they opened the door to being swallowed whole by its awfulness. Now the PGA Tour is LIV, and LIV is the PGA Tour. How dreadful.
And how fitting. Golf has always been terrible at even trying to fake having a moral compass. If we needed a reminder, I give you the disastrous day in golf history known as Tuesday, June 6, 2023.
