Golf's Latest Embarrassing Association With Saudi Arabia...
/The European Tour’s awful association with the Crown Prince and ensuing cash grab seemed like the worst possible partnership in modern professional sports. Particularly after other sports backed away from events in Saudi Arabia, or if you read about last week’s Saudi government led series of beheadings, including 16 and 17-year-old boys, yet another violation of international law and similar to recent atrocities green lit by the tour’s partner.
Continuing golf’s tone-deaf ways, struggling Ladies European Tour professional Carly Booth briefly launched an endorsement campaign for Saudi Arabia’s “different” place, to which she said she was honored (the posts have since been taken down after a brutal reaction).
Golfweek’s Eamon Lynch scolds Booth but highlights the even greater concern: what kind of representative would subject their player to this kind of endorsement and feel it’s the right move to make?
One can mount a defense for Booth, but it’s unflattering: devotion to her craft leaves little time to study geopolitics and human rights; women golfers, and particularly those in Europe, subsist on vapors so deals aren’t easily rejected, no matter how morally questionable the source.
But no exculpatory defense exists for the fatuous pillocks on her management team, who devised the deal, who displayed a mesmerizing disregard for the risk to her reputation, who presumably helped author the social posts, who thoroughly failed at their most basic function: they left their client looking like both a fool and a jerk.
Too often players are put in odd positions by those taking 10%, but this one takes the cake for bad advice topped off by terrible timing.