Dustin Johnson lines up a putt on the tenth green during the second round of the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla., on May 20.Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Before anyone judges him, let’s try to imagine what it’s like to be Dustin Johnson.
You’re 37. You’ve won all sorts of things, including the Masters. All told, you’ve pulled in north of nine figures in your career.
Wonderful fortune, but there is a sort of sameness to it all.
Then someone shows up at your house. They haven’t just brought a dumptruck full of money. They’ve brought a convoy of them. You’re already “buying things” rich. This could make you “building things” rich.
Just as important, they give you the tech pitch. This is you getting in on the ground floor of something. Not an employee – a co-founder.
This is where those new best buddies, politics and pro sports, start to separate. It’s the point at which the money starts to tell a story.
How many bridges would you burn to make it happen? How many little fibs would you tell? Apparently, if you’re Johnson, as many as it takes. On Tuesday, it was announced he will headline a group of golf stars playing in the breakaway Saudi golf tour.
In sports, you’re only a traitor if your turncoating doesn’t work out. So it’s too soon to say exactly what we should call Johnson. But I’m sure the PGA Tour has a few suggestions.
A month ago, the story of the Saudi tour was a cautionary tale. A few loose words about it had cost Phil Mickelson his personal brand. Everyone on the Internet had decided it was bad mojo to go into business with the regime that financially backs the tour, and acted as though the case was closed.
They thought that because this is how it works in every North American culture sector. If you don’t like someone and a critical mass of you scream at them for long enough, they stop doing whatever it was that bothered you.
This is a relatively recent power, supplied by the internet. Like all new toys, it is growing dull from overuse.
Some days, it seems like the entirety of the news cycle is some person or some entity being yelled at to apologize, someone else apologizing and someone else still coming back after a period of seclusion following their apology.
The same framework was applied to the Saudi tour. Sportswashing. Jamal Khashoggi. Mickelson’s comment that the Saudis were “scary.” It combined to form another paint-by-numbers social-media storm.
The pattern held at the beginning. People yelled at Mickelson to apologize. His sponsors freaked out and dumped him. He freaked out and apologized. That went poorly, as it always does. The world changes, but the Kate Moss code will always hold – never complain, never explain.
Mickelson tried apologizing better. That didn’t work either. So he went off and hid.
The yellers seemed pretty pleased with themselves. Another potentially historic wrong righted.
But their stakes were high fives on the internet. The Saudis’s stakes were geopolitics backed by unlimited dollars.
After Mickelson melted down, the PGA Tour pressed its top stars to release public loyalty oaths. It wanted its guys on the record that they were never going to break up.
Johnson’s name had been floated in the media as a possible defector.
“I feel it is now the time to put such speculation to rest. I am fully committed to the PGA Tour,” Johnson said in a statement at the time.
If you apply the grammatical microscope, this might not be a lie. Maybe he was committed at the precise moment he used the word. It’s the “fully” that’s hard to reconcile.
Late on Tuesday night – good time for a news dump – the LIV Golf Invitational Series announced the lineup for its first event next week near London.
Johnson’s in there. So’s Sergio Garcia, Louis Oosthuizen, Ian Poulter, Charl Schwartzel and Lee Westwood.
What do most of them have in common? They’re all on the downslope of the career hill. They’re European or South African, and so less exposed to skirmishes in the U.S. culture wars. Most of them haven’t much to lose and a few bucks to gain. Johnson’s the outlier – an American whose business is based in America. That he’s doing this suggests the Mickelson stench wasn’t much more than a stink bomb.
Had the yellers not jumped with two feet on Mickelson, this might not be that big a deal. So a few of the PGA Tour’s veteran guys want to do some overtime with another outfit on the weekends? So what? They’re always coming back to the PGA for the glamour gigs. That means the Tour is still in control.
But because the PGA put its arms in the air and cheered while Mickelson took a beating, it has to react as though this is a DEFCON1 situation. There’s no talking this conflict out now.
The only injured party so far is the Canadian Open. Johnson is ditching us for the Saudis.
RBC is the title sponsor of that tournament, as well as the name most prominently displayed on Johnson’s shirt when he plays. On Wednesday, RBC terminated its sponsorship deal with both Johnson and Graeme McDowell, who will also be playing in London next week.
It’s early days, so it’s hard to guess who wins this fight. Historically, breakaway leagues don’t have much success. The players are already rich, so what do they care? If the worst thing that happens to them is that they can’t play the Waste Management Phoenix Open, I’m guessing they can live with that.
The only winner – and it has been winning this whole time – is the Saudi regime.
If the point of this was getting its name out of the headlines unless the context is human rights, the yellers have failed. The more we talk about this, the more we think of the Saudi regime in a sporting context. “You may know us for our gallows, but did you know we also have a race track?”
That’s the point of investing in sports. It doesn’t have to be good publicity, just as long as it’s different publicity.
All that we’ve proved here is that when enough money’s involved, moral philosophy is the real sport. That’s the game we in the audience play to amuse ourselves. The actual players are up on stage negotiating a figure.