The BDN Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom, and does not set policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com.
Going low is usually a good thing in golf. But this week, the PGA Tour has gone low in a disappointing and deeply hypocritical way.
After more than a year of trading shots with the upstart LIV Golf, which is backed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, PGA leaders have quickly gone from criticizing LIV (and players who join it) to doing business with it. A merger of the two tours was announced this week. This was news even to PGA tour players, who had an understandably contentious meeting with tour commissioner Jay Monahan Tuesday evening.
“It was contentious,” player Johnson Wagner told the Golf Channel, as reported by ESPN. “There were many moments where certain players were calling for new leadership of the PGA Tour and even got a couple standing ovations.”
Monahan and PGA leaders are rightly being criticized as hypocrites, having previously been critical of the players who joined LIV while evoking the memory of 9/11 victims. The Saudi government has been accused of being connected to those attacks (which it has repeatedly denied), and also faced deserved criticism for its human rights record.
“I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not know that there are significant implications,” Monahan said last June when asked about 9/11 victims’ families being critical of players joining LIV. “As it relates to the families of 9/11, I have two families that are close to me that lost loved ones. So my heart goes out to them. And I would ask any player that has left or any player that would ever consider leaving, ‘Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?’”
Last year, Monahan was implying that being a part of LIV was something to apologize for. Now his organization is merging with LIV. So who needs to apologize now?
Basically, it seems the PGA was willing to make a moral stand until it was financially beneficial to do otherwise. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Money talks. That is unfortunately par for the course, in golf and in life. There was a similar disconnect between President Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric about treating Saudi Arabia as a “pariah” and his later trip to Saudi Arabia amid record gas prices. Clearly hypocrisy in government and business is nothing new when it comes to Saudi Arabia, its influence and its human rights record.
This doesn’t make the PGA’s abrupt change of course any less cynical. But it does make it less surprising.
One detail that did surprise us, and that might surprise others to hear, is that the PGA Tour is technically a nonprofit organization. And it reportedly plans to maintain that nonprofit status despite combining forces with the for-profit LIV tour. The new joint venture would be for-profit, but the PGA would keep its nonprofit status.
The idea that federal nonprofit, tax-exempt status can be stretched to apply to a sports league with huge revenues and executives who make millions of dollars is plainly ridiculous. It may be legal, but it is ludicrous. The PGA-LIV merger should draw further attention and support to federal efforts, years in the making, that would prevent professional sports leagues from claiming nonprofit status.
“Sports leagues like the NHL and the PGA Tour provide entertainment for millions of Americans, but that doesn’t mean these league-specific brands should be able to utilize Section 501(c)(6) of the tax code to be tax exempt,” Sen. Angus King said back in 2018 when he joined with Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa to introduce the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports (PRO Sports) Act. “This bill would help close loopholes that allow leagues to boost their profits at the expense of taxpayers – it’s just common sense.”
The PGA Tour made a business decision this week to partner with LIV Golf. That has not only chipped away at any moral high ground the PGA might have had, but has also driven home the point that they (and other sports leagues) should not have nonprofit status.
