The PGA Is Reaping What It Has Sown But They And Golf Deserve Better Than The Blood Money Sellouts
The Suspension of Chokelson, Fowler and Johnson et al Are CYA Actions That Seek To Preserve The Monopoly The PGA Has On Fleecing Golfers
“For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul? Or what exchange shall a man give for his soul?” - THE Incarnate Wisdom
When I was a child I LOVED professional sports. I LOVED their collegiate, “minor league” proving grounds. I LOVED the community based “little leagues” and “Pop Warners” that made up the real grass roots of them. Their foundation. Their heart. Their very soul. Up until 2007 or so, I could still be counted on as a useful idfiot for this romanticism of ‘Murican sports but then something changed, or perhaps I changed and had a dumpster sized load of romantic scales fall from my eyes: pro sports were just that, professional, nay, industrial, distant devolved cousins from their glorious ancestors.
Pro sports were just another multi-billion dollar. grift designed to inflame the passions of the Middle Class to the point where the sports replaced Sunday Mass and actual Christian devotion. Saint Roch was replaced by The Rock. The warrior-angelic magnificence of Saint Michael was erased for the “Air” talents of a faux angelic, gliding, Michael Jordan. The Catholic “Golden Bear” that was the humble Jack Niklaus was replaced by the philandering, billion dollar baby, fist pumping “GOAT”, Tiger Woods. The duty and honor bound Catholic “Middie”, Roger “The Dodger” Staubach was replaced by “Johnny Fooseball” and the “I am Superman” Cam Newton.
In sum, humble, honorable, sports “legends” became also ran footnotes to be compared, unfavorably, to today’s “GOAT’s” around whom multi-billion dollar, middle class fleecing i.e grifting schemes have been built, are still operating and as expected, “booming”. In summary:
With few, notable exceptions, today’s sports stars are epic failures in every measure of a Real Man.
But, in professional golf, this contagion of dollar based evil seemed not to have made such a massive infiltration. Honor, integrity, gentlemanly rules of dress and manners seemed to have survived the zeitgeist. Nay. I had my bias blinders on because I’m a life-long duffer and fan. Pro golf may have become the biggest fleecer of all.
Why?
Not many NFL fans can actually play some facsimile of the game and try and imitate their on field heroes. Ditto that for all the major “Pro” sports, save for one. You guessed it: golf. From balls and tees to “super hi-tech jet fighter” alloyed clubs and shafts, the PGA tour and “Pro golf” turned a “gentleman’s sport” into a bazillion dollar never ending “seeking perfection through technology” cash cow. Golf equipment sales took a drubbing during the CoronaDoom™ and decreased to a mere $7,340,000,000 while “golf tourism”, pre-Doom™, cruised down usury lane…
Golf equipment market has witnessed growth owing to increase in golf tourism. According to the International Association of Golfing Tour Operators (IAGTO), the global golf tourism market was valued at more than $17 billion in 2018, out of which the U.S. is reported to be the largest market in terms of golf as a sport.
This explosion in “golf-tourism” is driven primarily by the PGA Tour’s televised tournaments at many of these venues and their copy-cat resorts; its “stars” endorsements and last but not least, its rapacious fees for entry, “luxury sky boxes” and $18 beers.
At least one PGA player, Justin Thomas, seems to have carried with him some of his conscience that not everything has a Jurassic Park “spared no expense”, “to infinity and beyond” price ceiling.
"I tossed and turned and lost a lot of sleep last week thinking about what could potentially happen, and I grew up my entire life wanting to play the PGA Tour, wanting to break records, make history, play Presidents Cups, play Ryder Cups.
"The fact that things like that could potentially get hurt because of some of the people that are leaving, and if more go, it's just sad. It's really no other way to say it. It just makes me sad, because like I said, I've grown up my entire life wanting to do that, and I don't want to do anything else.
"The people that have gone, like I said, they have the decision that they're entitled to make. Not necessarily that I agree with it one way or the other, but everything has got a price, I guess."
Thomas now yearns for a more dream-inspiring time. Sorry Justin, you use sticks to whack a little white ball around 10 football fields and somehow managed to reap a net worth of $55 billion doing so, there’s no going back to Francis Ouimet. Still, I sympathize with Thomas and the above is not a judgement but rather an explanation. If Thomas is worth $55 million imagine the “worth” of the entities that make that unimaginable pile of cash possible? Imagine the murderous, orthodox muslim Saudis and their bottomless wells of golf resources (read Dollars or soon, Rubles) thrown into this climate of unearned i.e. usurious profits and the future is all but written. As the NY Post’s Ian Connor explained.
Up front, everyone understands what Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and friends did. They left the PGA Tour and took the blood money from the new Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit because the pile of guaranteed cash was so big. They decided against making the brutal 2018 murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and other Saudi human-rights atrocities deal-breakers. [emphasis, mine]
In other words, now the major league grift that is “pro golf” comes with usurious guarantees with less expectation of heroic athletic achievements viz you super-grift by sheer virtue of your prior grifts. And should oil demand and prices crater while rare-earth metals & air-pollution soar, the ChiComs will be at the ready to offer the PGA’s Grift-TNG, even greater unearned guarantees than the LVI. Put simply, there will be no end to this for the PGA and it’s their own fault. Just as Mahomes fleecing the Chiefs for $530 million is the fault of Godella The Hun’s NFL is the fault of Roselle’s NFL is the fault of the Original Sport Sin: making the recreational, healthy, beauty that is sports, an industry, whose human element are mere “investments” who “play” in “virtual stadiums” meaning, nothing entertains nobodies.
Now we have over 450 million fans so we have to build the virtual stadium to put them all in, and understand what they are expecting from us so the club can benefit from what they want. - Microsoft partner CEO Satya Nadella
Welcome to post-Christianity and the sick, perverted world of industrialized, “pro sports” where some of it’s biggest grift-promoters acknowledge the tradition crushing impact pro sports are having on society.
Fans are now connected consumers, and for their passion, they expect even more personalization and relevance from the team than they do from leading brands. As relatively small enterprises, sport businesses need to become their own version of a mini-Amazon. The next generation of fans is harder to reach -- since they no longer follow in the footsteps of familial tradition of team fandom, because they're blazing a trail to their own preferences that are reflecting their personal brand, thanks to online stars and unlimited global choices. - Paul Greenberg, The 556 Group LLC
Imagine if The Catholic Faith had 450 million “fans” with “passion”! Well I can, there’d be no need for this article and instead you’d be reading the bio of St Anthony of Padua today on his feast. All of this isn’t to lay the diabolical cast of society today at the foot of the PGA or the LVI or Greenberg’s “customer-facing strategic services” but to attempt to put it into historical and moral context.
To start with, what happened to the use of the adage “winning isn’t everything, its how you play the game, little Johnny!”? Well if “winning” isn’t everything then why is “winning” the most amount of grifted $$$ in 1 year, seemingly, “everything”? Because the separation between digits, dollars and those men who have the most pious Christian virtue are at their largest since the Pics butchered the Romans pre Hadrian’s Wall. Deal Hudson recounted this scene at the 1995 Masters, declaring golf as the sole survivor of “industrialized” sports race to the bottom.
The scene at the final hole at the Masters Golf Tournament—Ben Crenshaw weeping for joy, bent over, head in hands, while his caddy Carl Jackson comforts him.
In that image many of us noticed something almost lost, nearly extinct, in American manners—the gratitude of a pious man who loves his game. Among professional sports, golf is the last outpost for such a sensibility. Tennis had it, but lost it after condoning a generation of rude and spoiled behavior. Hockey players, who nowadays are so busy getting stitched up, probably never had it. Baseball players surely felt nostalgic when they watched Crenshaw win. Their ten months of shamelessness insures it will be a long time before they can recapture the honor of their game, if ever. Football and basketball players lost it years ago, drowned by their PR, along with the rock music that blaringly interprets their sport to the fans.
In that moment on the 18th green at Augusta National, we saw a man overcome by the joy of winning, a man paying honor to his sport, not a man consumed by his paycheck or his celebrity stature. Crenshaw didn’t walk off the green to record a TV spot for Disneyworld or Nike shoes. Instead he talked about his golfing mentor Harvey Penick, of Little Red Book fame.
Now Phil Chokeslon and the golf robber barons have finalized the well underway effort to make pro golf just another excuse to divvy up the spoils of the debt anchored, i.e. usurious, “monetization of existence”. As author Michael Hoffman put it in his book The Mortal Sin That Was And Now Is Not.
Western civilization was profoundly disfigured by the ecclesiastic exculpation of the charging of interest on debt... [and] a host of abominations that continue to plague us today. The result has been a pursuit of usurious profit unconstrained by the Word of God, the dogma of His true Church, and the consensus patrum of fifteen centuries.
To help make my point and close out this essay, witness the cowardice of the USGA (not directly the PGA but incestuous lovers), acknowledging that precious “television ratings” may be lost if Chokelson et al were, judiciously, barred from playing this week’s U.S. Open at Brookline:
So to be a “professional golfer” today now means to have or have the ability to make the most amount of money for your stakeholders, scratch that, slave owners. These are the same entities that allowed the CoronaDoom™ police to scratch Jon Rahm’s nearly certain victory at the Memorial Tournament just 1 year ago last week.
Compare the “sentence” given Chokelson et al to the true heroic conviction of sportsman of the century’s Muhammad Ali who was stripped of his Heavyweight World Title and banned from pro boxing for 3 years for refusing to enter the Unconstitutional and morally unjust U.S. Army draft for the Vietnam War. Ali accepted his fate and history will continue to show him correct for his morally courageous act. This type of courage is nowhere to be found in professional sports any longer and certainly not in the PGA or LIV. Here’s Chokelson and Dustin Johnson settling up with the PGA (language warning).
The PGA and LIV are two birds from the same corrupted egg.
Alongside the Pride infested NHL, (yes, pro hockey!), NFL and MLB, they are corrupt pits of vagabond vipers sniping and griping over multiples of millions of dollars that none of them can truly say they “earned”.
Turn them all off.
If your kid aspires to a sporting life, help him take up jousting and sword play.
Another great article! I hope Rick read it. Maybe a topic for crosstalk tomorrow at crusadechannel.com Rick disagrees and got lit up on Friday