LIV Won. It's still a PR disaster for Saudi Arabia.

Maybe in a decade, we’ll all think of Saudi Arabia as a pleasant land of caddies and duffers, a desert golf oasis — like Scottsdale, Ariz, but with hundreds of ultra-rich royal princes.

For the time being, though, the kingdom has a rather different reputation — one that the wild latest twist of its foray into big-time golf has done nothing to allay. The stories about Tuesday’s out-of-the-blue merger between the PGA Tour and its Saudi-backed upstart rival LIV Golf were all full of words you’d rather banish if your goal is rebranding a problematic monarchy: “September 11,” “hijackers,” “Jamal Khashoggi,” “human rights abuses,” “dismemberment” and other tourist-unfriendly terms.

Weirdly, it could have been a good news cycle for the kingdom: The U.S. Secretary of State was literally in Riyadh to chat up a government that Washington once promised to shun. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had just won plaudits for bringing Ukraine’s heroic president to an OPEC meeting. In a country that hadn’t gotten a lot of media love, it was a rare bounce.

And then they had to go and buy the PGA.

Amid a torrent of headlines, the dynamics of the world’s worst sportswashing campaign asserted themselves anew: LIV may have pulled off an upset victory, but the news was all full of things the kingdom would rather not discuss. And now the long-dominant American golf organization was getting slimed, too.

This raises the question: Is this the dumbest PR campaign in the history of the Beltway’s influence industry?

LIV, of course, has always denied that its goal had anything to do with Saudi Arabia’s international reputation: It was always about a business opportunity, not “sportswashing,” the effort to soften a country’s reputation via association with a pleasant, apolitical pastime. Either way, as the two sides spent big on D.C. communications pros and legal stars, the conversation inevitably morphed from golf into refrains about terrorism, national sovereignty and foreign meddling.

Which has been consistently bad news for the Saudis, whatever their goal may have been.

The immediate aftermath of the merger, in fact, made the spotlight worse. Atop the references to 9/11 and the murder of a journalist, this week’s stories also include a new theme: betrayal. An endlessly wealthy foreign entity enticed an American institution to abruptly reverse itself, letting down the golfers who had nobly refused the Saudi money while making a liar of the commissioner who begged them to stick with PGA in the name of all that is decent and true.

Is it short-term thinking to assume it’ll always be thus — that, now that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund has taken a huge stake in PGA, all golf stories, not just stories about LIV, will contain references to the most troubling parts of the Saudi reputation? Probably. Memories are short and, who knows, perhaps the ruling Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman will turn out like one of those American robber barons who buys the local football team, wins a Super Bowl and turns himself into a man of the people.

But before that, it’s worth noting that the golf contretemps was also a huge Washington story — one that shows both the promise and the pitfalls of using a real-life commercial battle in order to push non-financial things like human rights, transparency and national pride.

Ever since LIV’s launch, the face-off with PGA has felt a bit like an economic-stimulus program for Washington’s power influencers. The muscle engaged on LIV’s behalf has included the PR giant Edelman, former GOP Rep. Benjamin Quayle’s lobbying firm, Bush-era White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and McKenna & Associates, the consulting firm that previously worked with the National Rifle Association. A New York Times report from December","link":{"target":"NEW","attributes":[],"url":"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/sports/golf/liv-saudi-pga.html","_id":"00000188-9fa2-dcf6-af8f-bfa309200009","_type":"33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df"},"_id":"00000188-9fa2-dcf6-af8f-bfa30920000a","_type":"02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266"}">New York Times report from December said that McKinsey & Co., which had worked on the Vision 2030 plan to diversify the Saudi economy, did a lengthy study on the golf scheme, too. According to a 2021 FARA filing, the consulting firm Teneo also contracted that year with the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund for early work on Project Wedge.

Last week, the communications firm Gitcho Goodwin registered as foreign agents for their work representing LIV, something that contradicted the league’s claim that they weren’t part of an overseas government. The firm’s relationship with the league ended soon after.

The PGA spent big, too. It bumped up its lobbying outlays, via the firm DLA Piper, by 50 percent. It also brought in Jeff Miller, the Republican power broker and close associate of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The ironic upshot: For critics of Saudi Arabia, the golf war of the last 18 months was like a surfer catching the perfect wave. All of a sudden, there was an entire industry propelling the sorts of stories they’d long struggled to highlight.

The handiwork of the various pros and activists involved was impressive. When LIV golfers made the rounds on Capitol Hill, they were trailed by 9/11 families. A member of Congress demanded a federal investigation of whether the new league was in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act. As the legal battle became more convoluted, the PGA side made a habit of referencing Saudi Arabia’s autocratic regime and human-rights record in their filings.

In ordinary times, absent a horrific story like the cold-blooded murder of a Washington Post contributor in a foreign consulate, it’s difficult for a human-rights campaigner to seed the U.S. media with stories about repression in a distant country. But when those stories advance the commercial interests of a multibillion-dollar sports behemoth, allies seem to come out of the woodwork, directing reporters and members of Congress and other troublemakers to just the right source or the deliciously newsy legal filing.

Anyone who’s covered the capital knows that stories about craven FARA violations or appalling foreign governments often come not from the plucky human-rights type or good-government activist quoted in the piece, but via the much more handsomely compensated comms person who made the connection or suggested someone look up the potentially incriminating legal brief.

The funding for that essential, off-camera work typically materializes when someone stands to make money off the news.

Until those funders’ calculations change and the backstage actors vanish.

This week, the perfect wave turned into a riptide — and Saudi Arabia’s critics saw the flip side of what happens when you advance a high-minded cause like human rights via a real-world business battle involving the profit motive. Instead of hyping attention to the kingdom’s flaws, the merged company that succeeds PGA will be chaired by the chair of the Saudi sovereign-wealth fund, Yasir al-Rumayyan. You can bet he won’t be paying for PR folks and lobbyists to slime Saudi Arabia in the media and Congress.

It turns out that a lot of that PR effort may have just been about helping the PGA to get a better price.

“So weird,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy tweeted. “PGA officials were in my office just months ago talking about how the Saudis' human rights record should disqualify them from having a stake in a major American sport. I guess maybe their concerns weren’t really about human rights?”

That was also the question on the mind of Brett Eagleson, who leads 9/11 Families United, which represents survivors of the September 11 terrorist attacks as well as family members of those who died. A year ago this week, when PGA and LIV were facing off, Eagleson reached out to the established golf tour.

“I wrote the initial outreach email and said we have a lot to talk about,” he told me this week. “We have some experience with your enemy. We have some information to share with you.” Eagleson said his email led to a phone call and a meeting. “They listened with a sympathetic ear,” he said. “But I think that everybody in the room knew that what was good for us was good for them.”

Among other things, he said, he looked up Clout, the Washington PR firm that represented the PGA, and hired them to represent 9/11 Families United, too. “We consciously injected ourselves into PGA and LIV,” he said.

For a year, an organization struggling to keep alive the legacy of a 2001 event suddenly had a bunch of allies who were focused on ongoing, right-now news. The LIV-PGA battle enabled Eagleson to get his group’s story out to folks who might otherwise not listen.

Now the biggest of those allies has gone to ground, having merged with the very folks they’d criticized alongside Eagleson.

In good Washington fashion, it’s not just the PGA side that has rubbished the talking points of its Beltway operatives. One of LIV’s notable arguments was a David-and-Goliath claim that the established golf tour was a monopoly trying to quash the new alternative. But the merger means the creation of a bigger behemoth than existed before. So much for antitrust.

“Was it all, for lack of a better term, BS?” Eagleson asked this week. “I don’t think they actually gave two shits about Khashoggi or the carpet bombing of Yemen or women or 9/11. As soon as they were offered a deal, they folded like a beach chair.” One bit of news that pleased him: Clout announced that they’re dropping PGA and keeping 9/11 United — a somewhat surprising move given the depth of the two parties’ respective pockets. But he’s not under any illusion that a lot of the PGA-aligned folks who so energetically excoriated the Saudis will keep it up.

Whoever his allies are, they’ll have their work cut out for them. The end of the LIV-PGA battle is like turning off a music box that everyone has been dancing to. With no big-money battle to be waged in the court of public opinion, there’s less reason to push or chase stories about LIV’s ownership situation, which in theory could mean less attention to things the Saudi government would rather not talk about.

That’s why Eagleson hopes Congress will investigate the merger and provide new opportunities to make a stink. Within a day, there was legislation to take away the PGA’s tax-exempt status. An effort to somehow block the merger could keep the story in the news longer still. Golf enthusiasts would be transfixed by the hearings — and, as a fringe benefit, Eagleson’s group would have a new opportunity to get their own story out.

It’s just going to be a lot harder when no one on his side stands to profit from muddying up the sportswashing.

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By: Michael Schaffer
Title: LIV Won. It’s Still a PR Disaster for Saudi Arabia.
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/liv-pga-saudi-arabia-image-00101020
Published Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2023 03:30:00 EST

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