Home The Saudis are buying golfers with their blood money: Why it doesn’t matter
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The Saudis are buying golfers with their blood money: Why it doesn’t matter

Chris Graham
golf
(© Kevin Carden – stock.adobe.com)

I don’t write a lot about golf, because I don’t care much for golf, golf being an old rich white guy sport, though recent personal events have me edging closer to being an old rich white guy.

Ahem.

I’m turning 50 tomorrow. The old part, anyway, I’m getting down.

I’ve been asked recently why I haven’t written anything on the break between the PGA Tour and its golfers who are taking ungodly sums from the Saudis to play on their new LIV Golf sportswashing thingamajig.

The reason I’m not writing on this is, I don’t know if I have much original to add.

The Saudis are using their hard-earned oil money to buy already rich white doofs to play a dumb game to try to draw attention away from them killing Washington Post reporters.

The Russians have been doing the same thing for years, using their hard-earned oil money to buy our best women’s basketball players to draw attention away from them invading Ukraine.

OK, that’s not exactly the same thing.

They can have the rich white golfers.

It’s embarrassing that we don’t pay our women’s basketball players enough that they have to risk their freedom taking blood money from oligarchs to get their fair market value.

Shame on you, NBA.

As for the PGA, meh.

I read today that LIV Golf had taken the world’s 20th-ranked golfer, a guy named Abraham Ancer.

I was not aware until reading the news that there was a guy on the planet named Abraham Ancer, much less that this fellow was a golfer, and apparently a good one.

Makes me wonder what the Saudis are actually buying, and I think I have the answer.

They’re buying the loyalty of other rich guys, and overpaying for it at that.

Seriously, rich guys stick together as it is.

This is a group of people, in Saudi leadership, I’m referring to here, that funded 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, and what did we do to respond? We went after poor people in Afghanistan and then stole Saddam Hussein’s oil.

It’s like when the NCAA responds to allegations of impropriety with a blue blood by throwing the book at Central Arkansas State.

The Saudis already have our undying love, because they quench our undying thirst for oil.

As do the Russians, who have us so upset with their invasion of Ukraine that we’re sending weapons to other countries to sneak across the Ukraine border that we hope they don’t use to defend themselves.

So a bunch of has-been golf athletes are bringing home amazing sums of money to play their dumb game on YouTube.

Doesn’t get my panties in a bunch, is what I’m saying.




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Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, TikTok, BlueSky, or subscribe to Substack or his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].

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