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LIV, Laugh, Launder: The Morality of Sportswashing

photograph of pristine pond among palm trees at golf course

Colombo, Sri Lanka, July 9: Amid food shortages and a fuel crisis, protesters occupied the Presidential Palace to demand the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Meanwhile, 70 miles away in Galle, in the shadow of a picturesque colonial fort, the Sri Lankan cricket team was on their way to a hard-fought and memorable victory over Australia. Pat Cummins, the Australian captain, told reporters that he recognized the significance of the protests, but hoped that sport might provide a moment of escapism and relief for beleaguered Sri Lankan citizens.

The line between sport, morality, and politics has always been a hazy one.

The Berlin Olympics of 1936 were staged to launder the international image of Nazi Germany and spread the myth of racial superiority. The Mexico City Olympics of 1968 are remembered not for any particular feats of sporting prowess, but for the ‘Black Power’ salute performed by Tommie Smith and John Carlos in protest against racial discrimination in the U.S. Although now recognized as a powerful gesture of morality and equality, the protest was hugely polarizing and both Smith and Carlos were suspended from the Olympic team for “politicizing” the event.

More recently, Colin Kaepernick was ostracized from the NFL for kneeling during the anthem in an attempt to raise awareness of police brutality and racial justice. On the other side of the coin, the Indian cricket team was widely criticized (in Western media, at least) for wearing camouflaged, military style caps in a game against Australia in 2019. The gesture was designed to show support for Indian soldiers, 40 of whom had been killed the previous month in the disputed border region of Kashmir. The players certainly took a stand on a moral issue – but it was the exact sort of nationalist stand visionary author George Orwell warned us about over 70 years ago.

This issue of morality in sport is especially pertinent in 2022, as the golf world is slowly being torn apart by the Saudi-backed LIV tour.

The upstart event has offered massive sums of money to entice top players away from the traditional PGA circuit, but critics accuse it of being a vehicle for sportswashing – a practice used by states to launder their reputation and distract from less savory activities and human rights violations.

Greg Norman, former Australian sporting hero and the CEO of the LIV tour, excused Saudi Arabia’s human rights record by noting that “we’ve all made mistakes.”

The problem is not confined to golf. Last year, English premier league club Newcastle United was acquired by the very same group that runs the LIV tour, while defending champions Manchester City are almost entirely owned by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, part of another state with a questionable record on human rights. Meanwhile, preparations rumble on for this year’s Qatar World Cup, where the best footballers in the world will compete in stadiums built by slaves. Yet despite widespread disquiet about sportswashing and human rights violations, few players have spoken up and none have withdrawn from the event.

Patrick Rishe presents the argument that the personal rights of the players involved in the LIV tour – the right to play where they wish, and the right to make money doing so – trump concerns about human rights violations in Saudi Arabia. And this isn’t the only trumping going on: former president Donald, who is not-so-coincidentally hosting two LIV events, suggests the players ought to “take the money” on offer.

Rishe is certainly correct to say that the choice to play in the new tour, or for questionable bosses, is up to the players themselves.

But an appeal to freedom of choice can’t absolve us from our moral responsibilities. Indeed, it is only the fact that players do have a choice that makes this such a tough moral question.

If they weren’t able to play – if they sliced every tee shot like I do – or were forced to play, we wouldn’t find their actions morally praise- or blame-worthy. So, considering that the players do have the option to play, the moral question is simple: should they?

Like Pat Cummins in Sri Lanka, Henrik Stenson – one of the most recent and highest profile defectors to the new LIV tour – leant on the potential of golf as a way to improve peoples’ lives as a justification for taking the $50 million on offer. If golf can enrich fans’ lives (as well as players’ bank balances), then playing in a new tournament with a greater reach might be morally defensible. And it’s not like Stenson himself will be taking part in any atrocities – it’s unlikely his caddy will carry a bone saw with his 9 iron.

But by taking money to be the positive faces of an oppressive regime, Stenson and his colleagues become complicit in the moral wrongdoings of that regime. The goal of sportswashing is to reduce scrutiny applied to negative actions by essentially using sport as a distraction.

If the players’ actions allow their employers to – literally – get away with murder, then they are, at the very least, preventing justice from being served. At worst, their actions are making murder more likely by reducing the likelihood of punishment.

If we’re being charitable, we might say that LIV players ought not be held complicit for wrongdoings which occurred before they signed on for the tour. Maybe they are genuine believers in the benevolence of Mohamed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. And maybe they do genuinely believe in the transformative power of a perfectly struck 3 wood. But by signing up to the sportswashing project, they surely are complicit in any future wrongdoings. And considering Saudi Arabia’s continuing involvement in the war in Yemen, one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, it’s unlikely that those wrongdoings are a thing of the past.

Sport, as a competition between nations, can never truly be apolitical. But it can be a force for good. When apartheid South Africa was excluded from international sport, the alienation and widespread international condemnation helped hasten the end of the racist regime. And when players broke the boycott – as several cricket teams did – they were roundly criticized and faced repercussions at home. So if the LIV players think that refusing complicity would make no difference, history suggests otherwise. And, luckily for the LIV group, there is little chance that they will be ostracized if they choose to take a moral stance on the issue – although they will take a hit to the hip pocket.

Players, then, are left with three options: take the money and stay silent; take the money whilst remaining critical of its source, like 6-time major champion Phil Mickleson has done; or reject the money and the complicity that comes with it. The latter seems like the only truly moral option. But if someone offered me $50 million to teach ethics in Saudi Arabia… well, I probably wouldn’t show them this article.

Can We Heckle Unvaccinated Athletes?

photograph of Bryson DeChambeau at event with crowd in background

A lot of the pleasure I take in watching sports comes not only from seeing the teams and people I like succeed, but also from seeing those I dislike fail. For instance, I will gladly watch the Blue Jays players hit an impressive string of dingers, but will equally enjoy seeing Ben Roethlisberger get sacked. Being a sports fan means feeling both pride and schadenfreude, and it comes with the territory of being a professional athlete that some people are going to love you, and some just aren’t.

While there are a lot of reasons one might have for disliking an athlete, the pandemic has brought about a new one: being unvaccinated. There have been a number of professional athletes who have come out as having not yet been vaccinated, for whatever reason. In particular, Bryson DeChambeau, an American professional golfer, stirred up controversy recently when he was unable to participate in the 2021 Olympics due to testing positive for COVID-19, and then did not get vaccinated when he returned. He raised the ire of many golf fans even more when he said that he did not regret failing to get vaccinated, stating that he thought that since he was “young and healthy” that he didn’t need it, and that he was waiting for the vaccine to become “really mainstream.”

The result was a serious increase in heckling during his most recent tour, which resulted in an altercation with a fan during which DeChambeau sought the assistance of the police (despite the incident only involving name-calling). Some reporting on the issue have referred to the incident and others like it as “bullying.”

Others, however, have taken the opposite stance. For instance, sports commentator Drew Magary has called for increased booing of unvaccinated athletes, and singles out additional players like NFL stars Sam Darnold, Adam Thielen, and MLB star Jason Heyward, among others. “Has coddling them worked?” asks Magary. “No. And do you know why? Because these athletes SUCK. They don’t want more information. They have it. Everyone does.”

So, what’s the right thing to do in this situation? As we saw above, certainly some amount of heckling of your least favorite athlete is okay: while I would never openly insult someone on the street, the context of being a fan is such that if I got the chance to attend a Pittsburgh Steelers game I would without hesitation tell Ben Roethlisberger that he’s the worst and not feel bad about it in the least. Clearly there is a limit to sports fandom: you can’t throw stuff or kick your least favorite player as they walk past you, and it would probably be too much to shout a string of obscenities in the vicinity of young and impressionable fans. So where’s the line? And has it moved at all when it comes to heckling on the basis of being unvaccinated?

On the one hand, there is a concern that heckling players for failing to be vaccinated goes too far, in that it attacks someone’s personal convictions. For instance, ESPN notes how some of DeChambeau’s fellow golfers have been sympathetic, feeling that it’s unfair for fans to heckle someone based off a personal choice. It does seem that it might be violating some norm of sports fandom to attack someone’s personal beliefs: yelling at someone that they’re washed up is within the realm of sports, but maybe it shouldn’t extend outside of that realm. If the heckling is not only personal but also incessant, then we can see how someone might interpret it as a kind of bullying.

On the other hand, one might think that unvaccinated professional athletes deserve some degree of derision, not only because they are putting their teammates and opponents – with whom, in the case of NFL players, they are very much in close personal contact – at risk, but also because as professional athletes they are, to some extent, role models, and thus face additional obligations to set a good example for their fans. They also do not seem to have any kind of excuse: on the assumption that they do not have legitimate medical reason not to get vaccinated, they have access to information about the safety of the vaccine, as well as ready access to the vaccine itself. Perhaps, then, heckling could help encourage them to change their mind.

But wait, isn’t it just mean to heckle someone excessively, regardless of the reason? If it makes someone feel bad, isn’t that sufficient reason not to do it?

Maybe not. For instance, consider Magary’s justification for increasing heckling:

“So boo them. Call them names. Get personal from the bleachers. Hold up a giant copy of your vaccination card to taunt them with. Let them understand that there are earned consequences for being so negligent. For endangering everyone around you and then having the naked gall to act like it’s some sacred private decision you just made.”

While Magary thus conceives of additional heckling as a kind of deserved punishment, perhaps we could think about it in a slightly different way: heckling unvaccinated athletes is not a mere expression of disliking someone because they play for a rival team, but as a kind of protest. As we saw above, there do seem to be legitimate reasons to be displeased with both the unvaccinated athletes themselves as well as the professional leagues that allow them to continue to play – i.e., that they are endangering their teammates and setting a bad example. Given that there’s more at stake than just the outcome of a golf tournament (or a football or baseball game) it may very well be warranted to make your opposition to them known.

Power, Pollution, and Golf

Photograph of a golf course showing a pond in the foreground, a distant person with a bag of clubs, and trees in the background

Despite the closure of over 800 golf courses in the last decade and the fact that young people have virtually no interest in the sport, golf may be the emblematic pastime of the 21st century. So many of the key issues our society must grapple with in the next hundred years or so, from environmental change to the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of an elite few, are borne witness to on the vast stretches of meticulously maintained green. Given the ethical ramifications of those issues, it’s pertinent to ask whether or not the continuation of the sport of golf itself is ethical, and what the prevalence of this sport might say about our future.

The first and most pressing objection to golf is its environmental impact. Apart from impact of pesticides, environmental scholars note that “Golf course maintenance can also deplete fresh water resources [… and] require an enormous amount of water every day,” which can lead to water scarcity. A golf course can take up nearly 150 acres of land and can displace the area’s native flora and fauna in favor of an artificial and homogenized landscape. Furthermore, the impact of a golf course can be felt beyond the land it physically occupies. From 2017 to 2019, a teenage diver found over 50,000 golf balls underwater off the coast of California, the byproduct of five nearby golf courses. This is especially concerning to environmentalists, because, as the NPR reporter who covered the story noted, “golf balls are coated with a thin polyurethane shell that degrades over time. They also contain zinc compounds that are toxic.” They eventually break down into microplastics, an especially insidious form of pollution.

However, some argue that golf courses enclose and protect rather than damage fragile ecosystems. One such often-referenced paper, “The Role of Golf Courses in Biodiversity Conservation and Ecosystem Management,” was written by Johan Colding and Carl Folke and published in 2009. After examining the effect of golf courses on local insect and bird populations, Colding and Folke concluded that “golf courses had higher ecological value relative to other green-area habitats,” and “play essential role in biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management.” They argue that golf courses can be a refuge for wildlife that’s been pushed out from other areas, and that golf courses can foster biodiversity by working hand-in-hand with conservationists. However, this paper was published by Springer Science+Business Media, a global publishing company of peer-reviewed scientific literature that had to retract 64 scientific papers in 2015 after it was discovered that the articles hadn’t actually been peer reviewed at all. Seen in that light, this research (and the conclusion it draws) becomes questionable. Another study, “Do Ponds on Golf Courses Provide Suitable Habitat for Wetland-Dependent Animals in Suburban Areas? An Assessment of Turtle Abundances, published in The Journal of Herpetology in 2013, examined the potential for golf courses to contain turtle habitats with mixed results. The researchers noted that turtle habitats within golf courses did have the potential to foster wildlife, but were negatively impacted by residential development projects, which many golf courses today contain. To summarize, there is no clear consensus on this issue, though researchers uniformly note the very act of building a golf course in the first place does disrupt wildlife, whether or not conservation efforts are made after the fact.

Golf may have an ultimately negative impact on the environment, but its continuance has ethical implications for our social and political landscape as well. Golf has long been considered an elite pastime, and President Trump’s fondness for the sport is often used to demonstrate his insufficiencies as a leader. Rick Reilly, a contributing writer for ESPN’s SportsCenter and ABC Sports, released a book in early April of this year entitled Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump. In an article for The Atlantic explaining how Trump has sullied the reputation of golf through his propensity to cheat and tasteless displays of wealth, Reilly laments,

“[The situation] stinks because we were finally getting somewhere with golf. It used to be an elitist game, until the 1960s, when a public-school hunk named Arnold Palmer brought it to the mailmen and the manicurists. Then an Army vet’s kid named Tiger Woods brought it to people of color all over the world. We had ultracool golfers like Woods, Rickie Fowler, and Rory McIlroy, and pants that don’t look like somebody shot your couch, and we’d gotten the average round of golf down to $35, according to the National Golf Foundation.”

However, it’s difficult to stand by Reilly’s assertion that golf has entirely outgrown its elitist roots. In an interview with Golf Digest, Trump remarked,

“First of all, golf should be an aspirational game. And I think that bringing golf down to the lowest common denominator by trying to make courses ugly because they want to save water, in a state that has more water […]

I would make golf aspirational, instead of trying to bring everybody into golf, people that are never gonna be able to be there anyway. You know, they’re working so hard to make golf, as they say, a game of the people. And I think golf should be a game that the people want to aspire to through success.”

Replace the word “golf” with “power,” and you’ve got an almost eerily succinct and transparent summary of capitalist conservative dogma (in which the playing field is never intended to be even, the environment is devalued in favor of aesthetics, and the American dream is only illusory for the masses). But furthermore, Trump’s comment encapsulates many of the elitist attitudes and expectations that still attend golf today, regardless of the price for a single round at a public course. The resorts and country clubs frequented by Trump and his ilk are beautifully manicured arenas of power, places where politicians and businessmen can solidify ties and network over club sodas. When he was attacked for misogynistic remarks about women, Trump’s defense was that he’d heard Bill Clinton say worse things about women on the golf course, going so far as to call Mar-a-Lago, the resort attached to a golf course owned and frequented by Trump, the “The Southern White House.” The words “golf course” have become shorthand for private spaces of leisure for powerful men, a place for unethical behavior sheltered from the public eye and more traditional structures of power by miles of dense greenery.

Unlike sports that are not as white or monolithic, like basketball and football, contemporary golf is not fertile ground for political or cultural resistance. Golfers are notably non-vocal about politics. As golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan points out, many famous pro-golfers are pressured to play golf with the president, and show almost uniform deference to him out of fear of losing corporate sponsorships. This deferential attitude is taken up by most elites who play golf. Donegan says,

“The acquiescence of golf’s leading figures and governing bodies [to the Trump administration] is amplified […] down the sport’s hierarchy, especially in the (sometimes literally) gilded country clubs of states such as Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas, which depend on a narrow, and narrow-minded, membership of wealthy, white couples who pay their subscriptions as much for the social cachet as for the sport. Within the confines of the club, they are free to rail against minorities, free to declare Trump the greatest president since Lincoln, free to act like the genteel segregationists they prefer to be.”

The fact is that golfers tend to be wealthy, and that the golf course is a place where hierarchy and prestige are not only respected but built into the very foundation of the culture.

Many agree that golf is both a waste of resources and a symbol for the mechanisms of capitalism, but these two issues have become intertwined in recent years. Golf, some have argued, has been yoked in the service of capitalism and corporate “greenwashing.” Rob Millington explores this idea in his paper “Ecological Modernization and the Olympics: The Case of Golf and Rio’s ‘Green’ Games,” published in the Sociology of Sport Journal in 2018. He defines ecological modernization as “the idea that capitalist-driven scientific and technological advancements can not only attend to the world’s pending environmental crises, but even lead to ecological improvement, thus allowing sustainability and consumption to continue in concert.” This idea is promoted by corporations who want to greenwash themselves, or to appear green to consumers without changing their essential business models. It is very similar to the conclusion drawn by Colding and Folke, who argue that environmental destruction in the name of leisure and consumerism can take place alongside conservationist efforts without contradiction.

Millington notes that “In response to the growing tide of environmental opposition since the 1960s, the golf industry took up an ecological modernist approach to promote golf as a natural, green, and environmentally friendly sport that allows people to connect with nature.” According to Millington, this is precisely what happened in 2016 Olympic games at Rio De Janeiro, for which a golf course was built on environmentally protected land in the spirit of ecological modernization. The design of the course was presented as enhancing rather than fighting the natural landscape, despite the fact that any incursion into a natural space can disrupt the ecosystem. In this sense, the continuing relevance of golf can be employed for neoliberal ends, under the guise of environmentalism or unity between nations.

In “Is Golf Unethical?”, a 2009 article published in The New York Times, writer Randy Cohen covers the basic environmental impact and bourgeois ethos of golf. On the question of whether or not the sport itself is ethical, he concludes that “perhaps the only moments of grace and beauty and virtue in any game occur during actual play, and we should not look too closely at its broader culture and implicit ethics without expecting to be dismayed.” This is just one defense of the sport, that the skill that goes into mastering it outweighs any moral scruples we should have. Another thing often said in defense of golf is that it, like any sport, builds bridges and creates a sense of fellowship across the world, that it gives us a common language in which to communicate our values and abilities across international lines. But does it actually build bridges between nations or just import elite bourgeois culture and sources of pollution to other parts of the world? The act of swinging a golf club has no objective moral value attached to it, but the trappings of golf, the privilege and waste and unnecessary consumption of resources, certainly do.