Dennis Young: Phil Mickelson’s pathetic apology rings hollow because he already told the truth
Phil Mickelson has made a career out being brazen.
Brazen enough to make ridiculous shots on the course, brazen enough to take anyone’s money who was offering. That money was on offer at least in part because fans wanted to see themselves as brazen as Phil. It all added up to nearly a billion dollars, although Mickelson was also brazen enough to lose millions of those dollars gambling with increasingly shady characters.
Plenty of golf journalists have suggested that his biggest gamble with his shadiest partner yet was, in part, to pay off all the bets he lost before, even after selling his $40 million private jet.
He lost that bet too, misplaying his hand in spectacular fashion. In one of the frankest admissions in modern sports history, he told Alan Shipnuck that his proposed Saudi-financed breakaway golf league was mere “sportswashing” for the myriad human rights abuses of the Saudi regime, which he described vividly and accurately, if not comprehensively. In response, his longtime sponsors and potential partners dropped him and fled the tour, killing it on arrival.
Phil Mickelson is not Colin Kaepernick or even Enes Kanter Freedom here. In fact, he’s a monster for sizing up the Saudi regime properly and then deciding that “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates” was worth doing business with it anyway.
He tried to strongarm the Tour and took a hilarious defeat in the process, although it is worth noting that when his power play was still behind the scenes, it extracted over $100 million from the PGA to entice players to stay. It’s also worth noting who he apologized to, and what he’s in trouble for here. He isn’t apologizing for being flippant about the Saudis’ high crimes, or for saying that doing business with Mohamed bin Salman was worth it to get the reforms he wanted in American golf. He apologized to the Saudis for denigrating them.
“My experience with LIV Golf Investments has been very positive,” he said of the Saudi-backed fund that was the money behind the Super Golf League. “The specific people I have worked with are visionaries and have only been supportive. More importantly they love golf and share my drive to make the game better.”
Though Mickelson may have been the first person ever to use the word “sportswashing” in the first person, he also used it incorrectly. For it to be sportswashing, the sports have to be publicly clean of the blood on the hands of people like Mohammed bin Salman. The billions in Saudi money currently sloshing around sports are lubricated by the silence of people like Mickelson, who are paid for the exact purpose of playing sports and putting a beloved face on the Saudi money.
What Mickelson said about the Saudi royal family was obviously true. They do “execute people for being gay” and they did kill the writer Jamal Khashoggi; that was all on the record before Mickelson said it. And the Saudis have spent billions on sportswashing, investing heavily in everything from boxing to Formula One to soccer. Every recipient of that money made the same calculation that Phil did. Mickelson, in the world of his sponsors and partners, just made two huge mistakes. He described the arrangement in unusually frank terms; even the journalist who broke the story thought the Mickelson-Saudi power play was “obvious” and that his biggest crime was that he said “the quiet parts out loud.” His second shank, though, is what put him in unplayable territory. He didn’t wait for the check to clear.
