Michael Moynihan: Trying to make sense of golf's Tour of the Damned
US golfer Dustin Johnson (L) and Irish golfer Graeme McDowell attend a press conference before the LIV Golf Invitational Series maiden event. Picture: ADRIAN DENNIS / AFP) (Photo by ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images)
There’s only one place to start, isn’t there?
Friends of mine were in touch last week suggesting it was like Christmas Day come early for me, the hilarious implosion of the game of golf in easily digestible televised chunks.
They were referring, of course, to the LIV golf tour which was launched last week, the controversial tournament series which is backed by the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund.
And yes, there was something very Christmas-morning-look-a-train-set about watching middle-aged caubogues Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood and Graeme McDowell behave like sulky teenagers being grilled by a school principal at a press conference. I won’t deny that that was very enjoyable, particularly as it meant I didn’t have to watch any golf while they shredded their reputations in front of the world.
The true enjoyment, though, came from these clubhouse clodhoppers skewering themselves on their own logic.
In general I feel some sympathy for sportspeople when they’re referred to as role models: a star athlete’s fame derives from specific skills in a chosen sport, not from offering a moral example in thought and behaviour. There’s even a credible argument that sometimes what creates a sports superstar is not what you want in a well-rounded individual.
However, Graeme McDowell’s specific contribution to the debate last week was the equivalent of drawing a target on your own chest “The Khashoggi situation, we all agree that was reprehensible,” said McDowell.
“No-one’s going to argue that fact, but we’re golfers.
“I really feel golf is a force of good in the world and I love using the game of golf as something to help grow around the world and be role models to kids. We’re not politicians.”
If you can hold down your breakfast at the “but we’re golfers”, as though swinging clubs and braying 'fore' somehow absolved you of adult responsibilities, you can see that McDowell inadvertently forced participants in the Saudi Arabia-backed competition directly into the firing line.
By literally describing himself and his colleagues as
Then you can legitimately ask Ian Poulter and Lee Westwood if they’d play in a Vladimir Putin-sponsored tournament, or whether they would have broken the sanctions on apartheid-era South Africa, which is what duly happened last week.
And because those questions were asked, we were treated to the delicious spectacle of a couple of preening, complacent golfbots become vaguely uncomfortable on television, baffled by the grown-up trousers they were suddenly forced to wear, the adult questions facing them instead of the usual tongue bath they enjoy after losing their way out on the course.
Poulter and Westwood: pouting, not putting.
If you look closely you can see parallel arguments and debates going on in the background - about player unhappiness with the PGA, the longstanding governing body in the States, for instance.
I also listened last week to the Freakonomics podcast - always excellent - and it dealt with this topic, raising another interesting point: if the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund has invested in Starbucks, for instance, should we all view Starbucks the same way we see this breakaway golf tournament?
The difference, of course, is that the CEO of Starbucks doesn’t, to paraphrase McDowell, really feels coffee is a force of good in the world and that he loves using the game of golf as something to help grow around the world and to be a role model to kids.
The CEO of Starbucks presumably doesn’t try to insult the intelligence of his listeners (he’s too busy refusing to recognise workers at the office chain organising themselves into unions, in any case).
If you enjoy a game of golf it doesn’t mean you have an empty peanut-shaped hole where your conscience used to be. Of course not.
There’s a simple test in that regard you can run on yourself to ensure you’re a functioning human being and not a member of the Tour of the Damned.
Do you refer to a person being murdered and dismembered as a “situation”? If so, be careful because you may be entering what we are calling with heavy irony the LIV Zone.
Saturday afternoon, Austin Stack Park, but for hurling instead of Gaelic football. Wexford v Kerry in the All-Ireland qualifiers.
There were a couple of mentions at the ground of the press call the previous week for the remaining contenders for the Liam MacCarthy Cup, a press call which didn’t feature Kerry and Antrim even though both were involved in the competition.
As you can read elsewhere in the paper, Kerry boss Stephen Molumphy said he was unaware of the event and was understandably focused on Wexford in any case. It certainly seemed an oversight, but it also had your columnist thinking.
Kerry and Antrim got involved in the All-Ireland series at the preliminary quarter-final stage. Dublin and Tipperary, to take a couple of examples, have already departed the championship.
Bear with me: is it fanciful to imagine a situation where a county, tired of the bear pit of provincial competition, drops to the Joe McDonagh in order to access the All-Ireland series at the quarter-final stage rather than taking their chances in Leinster or Munster?
Now I have a new entry in the catalogue. The great Bayern Munich and Poland striker Robert Lewandowski has been at the top of his game for many years, and while his fitness plan — devised by his wife Anna, herself an internationally-renowned karate expert — gets much of the credit, his diet caught my eye.
Or rather, the order of his diet. Robert and Anna eat their meals backwards, starting with a sweet treat like a brownie, then a main course with fish and rice, for instance, before finishing with soup or a salad.
It’s hard to argue with the results — 76 international goals for Poland, record-breaking goalscorer in the Bundesliga, all those titles with Bayern.
To think it could have been me or you, but we just had to eat our meals in the old-fashioned order.
Markovits played professional basketball in Germany before becoming a novelist, and his new book combines his interests neatly. The Sidekick is about two men who bond as teenagers on a school basketball team, but one becomes a star and the other becomes a…sportswriter, so you can see the attraction.
One review describes the book as being “somewhere in a golden triangle between Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, and David Shields’ Black Planet.”
Which is a pretty good triangle to be in. Recommend.
michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
