Tag: sports
Jim Brown

How Jim Brown Led American Sports From Jack Johnson To Brittney Griner

Jim Brown was a monster, not only as a wrecking-ball running back on the football field but also as a prime example of an ever more popular obsession with people (mostly men) whose admirable achievements are shaded by despicable behavior (mostly directed at women). He died last month at 87 and his obituaries, along with various appraisals of his life, tended to treat the bad stuff as an inevitable, if unfortunate, expression of the same fierce intensity that made him such a formidable football player and civil rights activist.

Often missed, however, was something no less important: what a significant figure he was in the progress of the Black athlete from exploited gladiator — enslaved men were the first pro athletes in America — to the sort of independent sports entrepreneur emerging today. Brown was a critical torchbearer and role model on the century-long path between the initial Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, who went to jail for his “unforgivable blackness,” and one of the greatest basketball players ever, LeBron James, who was the first Black athlete to successfully create his own narrative from high school on.

Jim Brown didn’t control his narrative until 1966. By then, he had already spent nine years in pro football, retiring at the peak of his sports career in what was then both condemned and acclaimed as manly Black defiance. In doing so, he presaged Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted during the Vietnam War and the Black-power salutes of protest offered by medal-winning runners Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the Star-Spangled Banner began to play at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968.

A Life Demanding Study

A year after retiring from football to concentrate on his movie roles, Brown organized “the Cleveland Summit” in which the leading Black athletes of that time, including basketball’s Kareem Abdul Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor), debated whether they should support Muhammad Ali’s refusal to join the Army. Their positive decision, based on Ali’s in-person defense of his antiwar moral beliefs, was important to so many Americans’ acceptance of his sincerity. It was also a glimmer — as yet to be fully realized — of the potential collective power of Black athletes. And it was all due to how much Brown was respected among his peers. His close friend Jabbar, an important voice in his own right, has written that “Jim’s lifelong pursuit of civil rights, regardless of the personal and professional costs… illuminated the country.“

And that’s probably more than you can say for Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, or Roman Polanski, among the dozens of male stars of one sort or another whose lives have been reevaluated in the wake of the #MeToo movement and a question it raises: “Can I love the art [sport] and hate the artist [athlete]?”

As Nation magazine sports editor and Brown biographer Dave Zirin has pointed out, “Brown’s life calls for more than genuflection or dismissal; it demands study.”

Indeed! Consider some of the countervailing pieces of evidence to his greatness. Although never convicted, Brown was accused of a number of acts of violence against women, which he, along with the male-dominated culture of his time, tended to dismiss as of no significance. In one notorious and oft-recounted incident, he was accused of throwing a woman off a second-floor balcony. He always denied it, claiming she fell while running away from him. Tellingly, when the victim declined to press charges, macho culture interpreted that as proof of his irresistible virility, an extension of his being, arguably, the all-time greatest football player ever (and he was thought to have been even better at lacrosse in college). His brutal style of play would later be reflected in his aggressive, independent style of business and everyday life.

That image gathered force when he was 30 and in London on the set of his second film, The Dirty Dozen. It was then that Cleveland Browns owner Art Modell threatened to fine him daily if he didn’t show up on time for pre-season football training, which was soon to begin. Brown, then one of the sport’s major stars, eventually responded by simply quitting football.

It was perceived as a battle of wills. Modell was usually characterized as a boss always operating in the best interests of his team or (though this was rarer in those days) a classically uncompromising, deeply entitled Big Whitey plantation owner. And Brown was either seen as a defiant Black man, ungrateful for his celebrity and money, or like Ali, as a warrior prince of Black manhood. As in the heavyweight champion’s case, the reality was, of course, far more complex.

On Raquel’s Team

At the time, Brown was conflicted about his choices. In May 1966, as a sportswriter for the New York Times, I happened to be in London covering an Ali fight and had been invited to the Dirty Dozen movie set. Brown confided to me that the film was far behind schedule and there was no way they’d finish shooting his part so he could make pre-season practice in a timely fashion. He had, in fact, hoped to play one more season, his tenth, but couldn’t imagine bailing on the production before the film was wrapped. There were just too many people dependent on him, he told me, and so the Browns would have to wait. After all, it wasn’t as if he were going to miss regular-season games.

But Modell’s insistence that he return immediately (echoed by the media) eventually pushed him into a corner. And Hollywood simply seemed like the better choice — a potentially longer career, more money, and less physical damage. Indeed, Brown would go on to succeed as the first Black action hero in mainstream movies. His on-screen interracial sex scene with Welch in the 1969 film 100 Rifles would also be considered a Hollywood first.

His football retirement, which began as expedience, would only enhance his macho aura, which, for better or worse, was all too real. That same year, in Toronto (also to cover an Ali fight), I found myself having dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Brown, Carl Stokes, soon to be the first Black mayor of Cleveland, and comedian and activist Dick Gregory, whose autobiography I had written.

It was a lively, friendly meal until the check arrived. The waiter, an elderly Chinese man, set it in front of me. Stokes and Gregory burst out laughing and began bantering about the racism implicit in the poorest of the four of us getting the bill. But Brown suddenly leaped up, yelling at the waiter and grabbing for him. The other two managed to push him back into his chair, where he then sat, muttering to himself. Eventually, he did manage to see the humor in the situation, but initially he had been deeply offended, and that simmering rage of his (always a potential prelude to violence) seemed ever ready to boil over.

He was in his eighties the last time I saw him, moving slowly on a cane, and yet he still seemed like one of the two scariest athletes I had ever covered, men whose baleful glares rose so much more quickly than their smiles. (The other was former heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston.)

It should be no surprise that Brown’s contributions to advancing Black equality were of a piece with his complex life. After all, he often derided civil rights marches as nothing more than “parades” and his best efforts were directed toward lending a hand to the economic advancement of Black small businesses and marginalized former gang members.

What always seemed like a paradoxical conservative streak in him was, in fact, essential Brown, the mood of a man who believed that Black progress would never come from protests or demonstrations — they always seemed like a form of begging to him — but from the power of money, of muscling your way into the marketplace and buying into the system. He believed, in other words, in economic power above all else and, for what must have seemed to him like short-term pragmatic reasons, would end up allying briefly with two otherwise unlikely presidential figures — that football ultra-fan Richard Nixon and then former football franchise owner Donald Trump. Brown even went so far as to defend Trump when iconic civil-rights activist Congressman John Lewis called him an illegitimate president.

Forebears and Descendants

Brown’s unyielding rage evoked the earliest celebrity Black athlete who rattled white folks: Jack Johnson. Although that boxer’s style was different from Brown’s — living in the Jim Crow era, he flamboyantly derided his opponents and flaunted white girlfriends and wives — Johnson also offered a version of intimidating masculinity that led all too many white men to call for a “great white hope” to defeat him. It took the self-effacing, self-destructive Joe Louis, who carefully concealed his affairs with white movie stars, to calm their insecurities and become an acceptable hero for whites.

In recent years, the only athlete who’s come close to Brown’s steadfast individualism in the face of racism was Colin Kaepernick, whose insistence on kneeling during the pledge of allegiance before National Football League games got a distinctly mixed response from Brown. He liked the young quarterback, he said, but as an American couldn’t abide the desecration of the flag (another instance of Brown’s late-in-life cluelessness).

As Zirin aptly put it in his biography Jim Brown: Last Man Standing, his seeming paradoxes were those of a “flawed” figure who was “heroic but not a hero.”

LeBron and Brittany

LeBron James, Brown’s current successor as the model of a modern Black athlete, has proven a far more consistent figure. Already marked as the future of basketball in high school, he’s orchestrated his career in a remarkable fashion, moving to better teams and dictating his own terms in the process. Along the way, he’s also built up his business interests — always with a core of hometown friends — and expressed his opinions openly. While at the Miami Heat, he led his teammates in a protest against the shooting of an unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin.

Not since the days of Muhammad Ali had such a big star been so willing to take such a controversial stand. The basketball superstar with whom LeBron is most often compared as a player, Michael Jordan, was known for avoiding anything that might harm the sale of his sneaker brand. LeBron on the other hand even called President Trump a “bum.”

He was indeed courageous, but of course, he could do that. Global capitalism had his back. It’s even more courageous to take a stand when true risk is involved. So, perhaps a hopeful harbinger of future athletic heroes — regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation — were the members of the predominantly Black Atlanta Dream team in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) who, in 2020, wore T-shirts endorsing Raphael Warnock, the Black Democratic opponent of Georgia Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler. It was a gutsy move, since Loeffler, a white woman who had disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement, just happened to be the Dream’s co-owner.

It was, in fact, particularly gutsy because WNBA players are among the most vulnerable in big league sports, playing in a relatively small league that pays relatively low salaries — the average is $147,745 while eight players in the National Basketball Association make $40 million or more annually. That’s why so many of those women play internationally during their off-season. It’s why WNBA star Brittney Griner was en route to a Russian team when she was arrested and detained for 10 months after vaporizer cartridges with less than a gram of hash oil were found in her luggage. (She was finally released in a prisoner exchange last December.)

Although widely admired as warm and friendly, before her incarceration in Russia, Griner seemed to have something of Jim Brown in her personality. She was active with her Phoenix Mercury teammates in protests against the police murders of unarmed Black people and insisted that the national anthem should not be played before sporting events. Since returning from Russia, she’s been active in campaigns to release others who have been wrongfully detained. A lesbian, Griner and her partner were arrested in 2015 for assault and disorderly conduct in a domestic violence case. They subsequently married and divorced.

She may well be LeBron’s successor in the evolution of the Black athlete. At the least, her mission statement, as described in a 2019 interview with People magazine, is both humble and complete. She said: “People tell me I’m going to break the barrier and trailblaze. I just kind of look at it like, I’m just trying to help out, I’m just trying to make it not as tough for the next generation.”

These days, that’s heroic.

Robert Lipsyte
is a TomDispatch regular and a former sports and city columnist for the New York Times. He is the author, among other works, of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.

Sean Hannity

How Fox Presents The Network's Tainted 'Talent' To Media Buyers

Fox Corp. gave their upfront presentation yesterday in midtown Manhattan. Outside the event, several protests gathered, including striking writers from the Writers’ Guild of America as well as anti-Fox protesters calling for advertisers to defund Fox News.

Inside the event, Fox reportedly deprived their guests of chairs as Gordon Ramsay dropped f-bombs and former NFL tight end Rob Gronkowski botched an ad pitch from Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews.

Fox News personalities were also featured in the presentation, including some of the network’s most extreme personalities such as Jesse Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jeanine Pirro, among others. As Fox attempts to clean up the wreckage of a historic defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Systems, they are simultaneously attempting to downplay the network’s extremism by promoting digital properties like Tubi, Fox Nation, and Fox Weather while also injecting right-wing propagandists on Fox News to signal that the company does not intend to deviate from its tried and true business model of sacrificing democracy for cable news ratings.

Fox is having an identity crisis across its various platforms. Last quarter the company posted a loss as a result of their $787 million defamation settlement. They’re currently also facing: an ongoing writers’ strike, a “soft advertising market” and the never ending cord cutting trend that only continues to get worse, and fallout from the unceremonious firing of their star Tucker Carlson that has tanked Fox News’ primetime ratings.

Despite all this, Lachlan Murdoch told investors last week that Carlson’s departure will not change “programming strategy at Fox News,” an indication that advertisers and cable providers should expect more of the same on the network.

And, indeed, Fox’s presentation to media buyers on Monday afternoon in New York City featured an appearance from a Fox News personality who bore significant responsibility for the lies that led to that defamation settlement.

Here’s some of just the recent commentary from Fox News personalities featured in the upfronts pitch.

The Five

The Five is Fox News’ top-rated show. It features a roundtable discussion among the most unhinged hosts at the network, including Greg Gutfeld, Jesse Watters, and Jeanine Pirro. All three hosts, in addition to Jessica Tarlov, who is a rotating liberal host on the show, were featured via a live feed during the upfronts presentation. In addition to his role on The Five, Jesse Watters hosts the 7 PM hour solo, and Gutfeld is host of the 11 PM hour on Fox, a program that is the network’s stab at a late-night talk show.

Jeanine Pirro was a key figure in Fox’s peddling of election conspiracy theories after the 2020 election. Emails disclosed via Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News review that Pirro's executive producer Jerry Andrews called her “just as nuts” as Sidney Powell, then-Trump's lawyer that was behind some of the most ludicrous lies told by his campaign. At the time, Pirro had recently hosted Powell on her show, during which she and her guest pushed lies about Dominion. Pirro pushed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election even after Fox's own “Brain Room” had debunked them.

According to Variety, Greg Gutfeld’s attempt at humor regarding the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike fell flat among the crowd.

Here are some recent eyebrow-raising clips from these personalities.

  • On May 15, Gutfeld said that Democrats are lying about the threat of white supremacy to “keep Blacks angry.”
  • In April, Gutfeld said climate change “improves people's lives.”
  • In March, Gutfeld suggested that “white leftists do worse things to Blacks than the Aryan Nations ever could.”
  • Gutfeld said in January it’s time to tell the homeless, “You don’t get to live with us.”
  • Gutfeld suggested that President Joe Biden is hiding “Barack Obama’s real birth certificate” and using it for blackmail against “Black males.”
  • On May 15, Jesse Watters said on The Five that Black Americans should be more concerned with “absent fathers, education issues” than with white supremacist mass shooters.
  • Watters said that “women are in their prime in their late teens” while mocking former CNN host Don Lemon.
  • During Black History Month, Watters said the “people who financed it” deserve credit for American infrastructure built by slaves.
  • Watters suggested burning squatters alive.
  • Watters accused teachers of “poisoning” and “trying to destroy” children because “the teachers have daddy issues.”
  • In January, Jeanine Pirro proclaimed that George Soros is “behind the destruction of law and order in America.”
  • Pirro argued that Nazism and white supremacy should be allowed on social media platforms.
  • In November, Pirro argued that “Holocaust deniers,” “hate speech,” and Sandy Hook truthers should be allowed on Twitter.
  • Pirro said that “we are living in a fascist state” because the media won’t cover Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer

Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer were featured as “straight news” personalities during the upfronts presentation. They are co-anchors of America’s Newsroom, where they both frequently push tepid right-wing talking points, blurring the line between news and opinion. Perino is also a co-host of The Five.

  • During a March edition of The Five, Perino struggled to define the word woke: “It could be a feeling, it could be a sense.”
  • Perino and her co-hosts on The Five attacked unhoused people for washing their clothes.
  • In September 2022, Perino said we should “involuntarily commit” the homeless.
  • In June 2022, Perino said she is “concerned” Americans won’t be “allowed to celebrate” the Fourth of July soon.
  • Perino suggested that the January 6 committee hearings were meant to “distract from other issues.”
  • Bill Hemmer attacked Disney for opposing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, asserting that there was “leaked video now of Disney execs unveil efforts to push the company's woke agenda.”
  • In July, Hemmer suggested that federal gun legislation would not have helped stop a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.
  • In November 2021, Hemmer helped spread a baseless anti-vaccine rumor while on air.
  • In February 2021, Hemmer allowed former President Donald Trump to push lies about the 2020 election.
  • Following the 2020 election, Hemmer continuously supported Trump’s election challenges.

Sean Hannity

Reporting indicates that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham were featured in the Fox News “sizzle reel” presented to advertisers and media buyers during the upfront presentation, “though primetime was decidedly not a focus of the presentation, with the 2024 election instead taking center stage.” Hannity and Ingraham have a long track record at Fox and elsewhere in right-wing media of extreme commentary.

Sean Hannity has been the poster boy for right-wing conspiracy theories and bigotry since Fox News Channel launched in 1996. He was a major booster of Trump’s election conspiracy theories and a singularly important driver of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory. Here are some of his most extreme recent comments.

  • Hannity called for the arrest of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
  • On his radio show, he said Trump should have pardoned himself and his family before leaving office.
  • He blamed Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse on “an obsessive company-wide focus on race, gender, sexual orientation.”
  • In February, Hannity endorsed Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) call for banning “people who move from blue states to red states from voting for five years.”
  • He said in January that “vaccines and boosters do not work as they have told us.”
  • Hannity compared vaping Juul pods to giving children the COVID-19 vaccine.
  • To stop mass shootings, Hannity argued for “tax breaks” for armed military and police officers who work for free patrolling schools.

Laura Ingraham

Laura Ingraham is an anti-immigrant extremist and a propagator of hate, lies, and misinformation. She’s used her platform on the network to attack school shooting survivors and murder victims. Here are recent examples of extremism on her Fox show, The Ingraham Angle:

  • On May 11, Ingraham said an “untold” number of Americans “will lose their lives” because of immigration.”
  • She said the Biden administration is encouraging border crossings “to fundamentally change America.”
  • Ingraham told her audience that coverage of the Allen, Texas, shooting was a “bloody electoral strategy” by the Democrats.
  • She recently said Democrats want to put conservatives “in a camp.”
  • Ingraham defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after reports that he received lavish gifts from a major Republican donor.
  • She compared Trump’s indictment in New York to “Stalin’s purges.”
  • Ingraham claimed that Trump’s indictment was a distraction from the school shooting in Nashville.
  • She called January 6 rioters “old ladies walking through the halls of Congress taking selfies.”
  • Ingraham and her guest Sen. Josh Hawley attempted to connect gender-affirming care to the Nashville shooting.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

J.T. Realmuto

How This Season's New Baseball Rules Brought Back Our Greatest Game

One day in 1951, during Willie Mays’ rookie season, my father took me to the Polo Grounds in Manhattan to see him play. What I recall most vividly is emerging from a shadowy corridor under the stands into the astonishing sunlit green of the outfield grass. The sheer expanse of a major league playing field is something you’re not prepared for as a child.

Is there any sight more beautiful?

Otherwise, I don’t recall who the New York Giants played that day or who won, only watching Mays shag balls in the outfield maybe 100 yards from our seats in the bleachers, looking about the size of my thumb from that distance but nevertheless incarnate — a 20-year-old demigod in the flesh.

It wasn’t my first big league game. I’d been taken to see the Brooklyn Dodgers as a toddler. There are home movies of me imitating the home run trot of Dodgers first-baseman Howie Schultz.

Later that year, however, I have an even stronger memory of racing upstairs and bursting into the bathroom — where the Old Man was standing at the mirror with Barbasol all over his face — and yelling about Bobby Thomson’s “Shot heard around the world,” as sportswriters called it, the dramatic ninth-inning walk-off home run that settled the National League pennant. At first, he thought I’d imagined it.

Oh, and this too: Only 15 years later, in October 1966, I got a phone call from this sweet little Arkansas girl I was dating at the University of Virginia. She’d been offered World Series tickets by her childhood friend Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore Orioles third baseman. Was there any chance I’d consider driving us to Baltimore for the games?

She was very shy and hesitant about it — partly, I suppose, because the journey involved a sleepover and she didn’t want to seem bold. But the thing was that she really, really wanted to go to the World Series. It occurred to me that I’d better marry her before she got away.

I took her to Baltimore and never looked back.

When Brooks was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1983, he credited my wife Diane’s father, George Haynie, his American Legion coach, with teaching him to play ball. The family kept two of his Gold Gloves on display at their home.

So anyway, those are my credentials for pronouncing Major League Baseball’s 2023 rule changes an enormous success. Partly because it’s shortened their workday by a half-hour or more, the change receiving the most attention from baseball writers and broadcasters is the pitch clock.

No More Fiddling Around: Play Ball!

Pitchers have 15 seconds after receiving the ball from the catcher to deliver another pitch (20 seconds with runners on base). Batters have 8 seconds to position themselves to hit. No more pitchers fiddling, fussing and stalking around the mound like moody soap opera characters. Play ball!

No more batters stretching and grimacing, and stepping in and out of the batter’s box. You get just one timeout per at-bat. Use it carefully. No more guys going through entire yoga routines between pitches. Former Red Sox designated hitter J.D. Martinez had this elaborate ritual — unfastening and refastening his batting gloves, doing deep-breathing routines — that turned each at-bat into a veritable miniseries. You couldn’t watch without hitting the 30-second advance button at least twice.

Guys like Martinez are why I started recording my daily Red Sox game to begin with. And I liked him a lot. (He’s now with the Dodgers.) Addicted as I am to what George Will calls “baseball’s glorious everydayness” — I follow my team the way some people follow TV soap operas — I do have my limits.

What’s really great about this year’s MLB rule changes to a lifelong fan has been the elimination of the shift. It’s now against the rules to position three infielders on one side of second base, which had the effect over the years of turning baseball into a home run derby.

It’s baseball as we played it, those of us who did. Batting averages are up. Situational hitting is back. There’s a premium again on guys who can put the ball in play, move base runners along, bunt, steal bases — all the skills than make the game so much more absorbing than watching guys who can barely field their position swinging for the fences and either striking out or hitting a 450-foot home run once a week.

That’s where MLB was headed before this year’s rule changes, as attendance steadily dropped. Now the complex, endlessly fascinating game has returned to its origins. Writing in the Washington Post, Will thinks that by “reconnecting with its past,” baseball “is poised to reclaim the title of national pastime.”

Maybe that’s a bit much. There are too many other diversions for baseball to reclaim the hold it once had over the public imagination.

But real baseball is back.


Pro Golfers Dirty Themselves With Saudi 'Sportswashing'

Pro Golfers Only Dirty Themselves With Saudi 'Sportswashing'

When a golfer hits an errant shot that might bonk an unsuspecting spectator on the head, the proper cry of warning is: "Fore!" But what do they shout when they hit a bad shot that boomerangs right back and bonks the golfer on the noggin?

In the polite world of golf — where there's a rule of etiquette to cover every contingency — this boomerang shot has rarely if ever occurred, so there's been no need for a clubhouse dictum to govern proper warning shout... until now. This spring, a small group of professional golfers — led by former Big Name superstars Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson — decided to turn the game that has made them fabulously rich into an unsporting game of SleazeBall.

They say they want to set up an independent series of global tournaments, called LIV Golf, to compete with the PGA, the Professional Golfers Association. Fine — at its best, pro sports should be about top-quality, honest competition. But there's the rub: The LIV series is not honest, not a sporting competition and not even about golf. It is entirely about money — more specifically about callous greed.

Indeed, LIV Golf is a scam that's entirely financed by the brutish family of petro-royals who ruthlessly rule Saudi Arabia. The family's grotesque abuse of the kingdom's own citizens has made the oil-rich regime a global pariah. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince who is the mastermind behind this multimillion-dollar golfing scheme, is the same fellow who ordered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered in 2018. But simply killing Khashoggi wasn't enough. The prince had him cut into small pieces, packed in suitcases and tossed away. Now, his golf gambit is a blatant case of "sportswashing" — he is spending obscene sums of his family's oil loot to buy the marquee names of a few dozen recognizable golfers to concoct a sports spectacle, in hopes of distracting attention from his government's depravity. Hitler tried this by staging the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, but it didn't wash.


Likewise, the Saudi golf association won't wash off the regime's indelible ugliness. But — Fore! — it will boomerang on the money-grubbing golfers selling their once-good names to it. If you sell out your personal integrity in a vain attempt to give a patina of integrity to some notorious scoundrels, what have you gained?

Depends on your sellout price, chortle the ethically stunted professional golfers who've peddled both their honor and honesty to the murderous, moneyed monarchs. The golfing elites madly rushed to grab money thrown at their feet by the royal kingdom in a crude PR ploy that's meant to buff up its public image by making them seem like generous benefactors bringing sports to the masses. Of course, a golf tournament needs golfers, but the Saudis had none of note, so they simply bought a batch. Right away, former stars Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman signed away their integrity to join, taking at least $200 million apiece. Then Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau took $150 million each from Team Saudi, and the likes of Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia and others quicky scrambled to get theirs.


Worse than the golfers' unsightly money grubbing, however, is their insufferable dishonesty, trying to whitewash their taking of what is literally blood money. Mickelson faked moral outrage at the Kingdom's rulers, gingerly calling them "less-than-savory individuals" and piously proclaiming that he did not condone "human rights violations." But he certainly has condoned (and cashed) the checks written to him by the violators.

But Greg Norman, the former pro who led recruitment of golfer talent for the Saudis, offered the most pathetic moral excuse for selling out to such a villainous kingdom. Asked how he could link arms with a potentate so barbarous as to have had a critic of the regime murdered and chopped into pieces, Norman said: "Look, we've all made mistakes."

There's a word that describes what these golfing multimillionaires are doing: "Disgusting." The good news is that most pros — including bigger-name stars like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas — have some values that they refuse to trade for dollars.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.