The PGA Tour has regularly attacked the LIV Golf series for being funded by Saudi Arabia. According to the Tour’s allied smear merchants, the checks earned by the likes of Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau are said to be “blood money.”
Commissioner Jay Monahan even refuses to call it LIV Golf, instead opting for ‘The Saudi Golf League’ as a way to foreignize/otherize the startup league.
Yet, if you look at the U.S. tour’s title sponsors, a majority have business relations with Saudi Arabia, and/or footprints inside the Kingdom.
In fact, the PGA Tour’s big-money postseason – the three-tournament series – is entirely title-sponsored by brands with a presence in the Kingdom.
For instance, the Tour’s biggest of all brands, FedEx – the title sponsor of the season-long FedEx Cup race and the postseason’s first tournament (FedEx St Jude Championship), has a “direct presence in Saudi Arabia,” according to tweet last year.
We have officially launched our direct presence in Saudi Arabia, offering easier access to our global network and solutions. We’re ready to bring the largest economy in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) even closer to the rest of the world!
Learn more: https://t.co/fuJc7wv2xJ pic.twitter.com/knHcPz4iPX— FedEx (@FedEx) October 6, 2021
Then you have this week’s BMW Championship, the second leg of the FedEx Cup playoffs. The German automaker also has a footprint in Saudi Arabia, including its own official Twitter account. Will the winner this week in Delaware earn “blood money?”
We would like to kindly announce the relocation of Our Used Car Showroom is now located at the Automall Branch in Jeddah effective as of 1st August 2022.#BMWSaudiArabia #MyNaghi pic.twitter.com/gBqfoMDrsL
— BMW Saudi Arabia (@BMWsaudiarabia) July 31, 2022
Next week is the Tour Championship Presented by Coca-Cola, which also has a super-sized footprint in the Saudi Kingdom.
خلّيك #مستعد لمباريات اليوم مع كوكاكولا باردة ?❄️https://t.co/CcShpr9NnM pic.twitter.com/fBiiHW9W38
— Coca-Cola Middle East (@COCACOLA_ME) June 25, 2018
To recap, the three events which comprise the PGA Tour’s season-ending flagship series are all title sponsored by Saudi Arabia-allied companies (FedEx, BMW and Coca-Cola).
You can’t make it up. And that’s just the start.
The Tour’s flagship tournament, The PLAYERS Championship, has three presenting sponsors which it calls “Proud Partners.” They are: Grant Thornton, Optum and Morgan Stanley. All three do big business with the Saudis.
The Tour then has what’s called the Invitational series, a three-tournament series with each event attached to one of its three icons: Genesis Invitational (Tiger Woods), The Arnold Palmer Invitational Presented by Mastercard (Arnold Palmer) and the Memorial Tournament Presented by Workday (Jack Nicklaus).
You guessed it: all three tournament sponsors are brands (Genesis, Mastercard, Workday) doing business in Saudi Arabia.
Finally, we have the WGC-Dell Match Play, the tour’s eighth and final (non-major) marquee event. Take a bow if you guessed that Dell Technologies can be found in Saudi Arabia!
LIV Golf CEO, Greg Norman, recently trolled the anti-LIV media with the following questions: “Why does the PGA Tour have 23 sponsors doing 40 plus billion dollars worth of business with Saudi Arabia? Why is it okay for the sponsors?
“Will Jay Monahan go to each and every one of those CEOs of the 23 companies that are investing into Saudi Arabia and suspend them and ban them?
“The hypocrisy in all this, it’s so loud. It’s deafening.”
It’s also mind blowing.
Below are the 27 PGA Tour events with title or presenting sponsors that do business with Saudi Arabia:
- 3M Open (3M)
- Arnold Palmer Invitational (Mastercard)
- AT&T Pebble Beach (AT&T)
- AT&T Byron Nelson (AT&T)
- Barbasol Championship (Barbasol)
- Barracuda Championship (Barracuda)
- BMW Championship (BMW)
- Charles Schwab Challenge (Charles Schwab)
- FedEx St Jude Championship (FedEx)
- Fortinet Championship (Fortinet)
- Genesis Invitational (Genesis)
- Genesis Scottish Open (Genesis)
- Hero World Challenge (Hero)
- John Deere Classic (John Deere)
- RBC Canadian Open (RBC)
- RBC Heritage (RBC)
- Sony Open of Hawaii (Sony)
- The American Express (American Express)
- The Honda Classic (Honda)
- the Memorial Tournament (Workday)
- The PLAYERS Championship (Grant Thornton, Morgan Stanley, Optum)
- The RSM Classic (RSM)
- The TOUR Championship (Coca-Cola)
- Valero Texas Open (Valero)
- Valspar Championship (Valspar)
- WGC-Dell Match Play (Dell Technologies)
- Wyndham Championship (Wyndham)
The four major championships do not have title sponsors but do use presenting type sponsorships, similar to the PLAYERS’ ‘Proud Partners.’ Almost every single “partner” of the four majors does business in the Kingdom.
- The Masters (AT&T, IBM, Mercedes-Benz)
- PGA Championship (AIG, Chase, Club Car, KitchenAid, KPMG, Pepsi, Rolex)
- U.S. Open (American Express, Cisco, Deloitte, Lexus, Rolex)
- The Open (HSBC, Hugo Boss, Mastercard, Mercedes-Benz, NTT Data, Nikon, Rolex)
Just so we’re clear. Phil has no morals and is taking blood money. But the pga tour’s purses are clean as fresh snow despite coming from sponsors that make billions in Saudi Arabia?
??
Yet the PGA wants to squash completion thereby becoming LIKE Saudi Arabia!
Meh, shaving cream… and communication networks (AT&T), shipping and logistics (Fedex), automobiles (Honda, Genesis, BMW), credit card (Amex, Mastercard), investment services (Morgan Stanley, Schwab)…
-JS
It’s as if defenders of a monopoly who spew this marketing BS don’t have the brain cells to understand shareholders. Staggering idiocy from the PGA defenders.
As I pointed out over a month ago, the entire LET (Ladies European Tour) and a sizable chunk of the DP World Tour are DIRECTLY sponsored by Aramco, Saudi Arabia Investment Funds, etc. The PGA Tour just allied itself bigtime with both.
Even the LPGA this week is totally funded by Saudi’s, but alas, no TV coverage….golf channel in bed with Tour (for obvious reasons)…
Please do perhaps minimal research?
wells fargo has 24 entries in the lawsuits/fines/controversies section of their wiki,,, are they not using the pgatour to sportswash themselves? and the lead sponsor of lpga’s biggest event is AIG…recipients of 180 billion in bailout (and then paying out 1.2 billion in bonuses).
so yeah, sportwashing is a thing and seems like the thing pga tour invented.
Said NO ONE EVER.
The entire argument of ‘sportswashing’, in this case is a JOKE. I can’t think of ANY way the Saudis could have drawn more attention to their HR record..?
Logical Larry types always cry when their duplicitous fraudulent narratives get blown to smithereens.
And without fail, they always cry, “whataboutism,” when in fact whataboutism is exactly the most logical reply.
If the monopoly’s bootlickers’ main argument is Saudi “blood money,” then the most logical retort is to point out the hypocrisy.
They then always try to explain that their crime or infraction is not the same. In this twisted scenario, for instance, apparently FedEx is being virtuous for serving the poor citizens of Saudi Arabia, and not doing it to make money by working with the authoritarian state.
Further, Apple and Twitter, among many others, have received billions in investment from Saudi PIF. Why haven’t they turned down the investments? Where’s the outrage from the cancel mob? Meanwhile, these same frauds criticize Bryson, DJ, and Phil using Twitter and their iphones.
https://progolfweekly.com/saudi-backed-fund-owns-stake-in-fanatic-pga-tour-fan-shop/
https://progolfweekly.com/espns-stephen-a-smith-calls-out-pga-tour-for-unamerican-tactics/
-Jeff
I also guess PGA now will stop posting on Facebook, Isntagram and Twitter. Not look at any movies or series from Disney and so on
Kind of fun to see that Jay Monahan earned around 14.2 million dollars in 2020, ONLY beaten in the PGA organisation by Dustin Johnson who had around 20 million dollars in earnings in 2020