Don’t hate the players, they are pawns in this rebel league game

Cameron Smith copped a lot of heat when he joined LIV Golf.

The Australian had just won the British Open at St Andrews and was closing in on the No.1 world ranking to go with his first major. The mulleted 29-year-old had already pocketed $14 million in 2022 – enough to be a “very cashed-up bogan from Queensland”, according to his coach Grant Field.

Then, weeks later, the broadly loved working-class larrikin jumped ship from the PGA Tour and became instantly detested. For being a soulless sellout and taking Greg Norman’s $140 million. For accepting Saudi’s blood money and enabling sportswashing. For ensuring he would never reach his full potential. He was the first defector inside the top 10 (and his game hasn’t been the same since).

Smith was loathed by golf traditionalists and human rights organisations. He was not the first, having followed a small cohort – including Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka – across no-man’s land. He was also not alone, announcing his move alongside fellow Australian Marc Leishman. But he was still heckled at tournaments, still made an example of.

The involvement of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund inherently complicates this example, and Smith made his decision as an adult with agency. But it is worth pointing out that Saudi riches are now bankrolling everything from football to boxing and tennis, and it is becoming more and more difficult for an athlete to avoid the influence of a country whose tentacles are already heavily manipulating the global sporting landscape.

It is also tough to place even a “very cashed-up bogan” golfer’s yearning for more time to go fishing and see his family in the same category as Norman’s stubborn obsession to finally realise his and Rupert Murdoch’s failed 1994 World Golf Tour dreams and punish the PGA for crushing them in the first place. Then you consider the PGA which, a year down the line from all its condemnation and indefinite bans, merged with the very body it was fighting.

In life and in sport, responsibility often sits with upper management. So anybody outraged by the thought of Payne Haas defecting to Rugby 360 could probably direct their ire a little further up the chain. The players are but pawns in this rebel league game. Uber-wealthy pawns, yes, but they did not create the beast.

Negative reactions to rebel leagues are no newer than rebel leagues themselves. They are a tale as old as Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the 1970s, when Greg Chappell, Rod Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Tony Greig and Viv Richards, among others, felt which way the wind was blowing and broke from the establishment to join the “Packer Circus”. In the 1990s came rugby league’s Super League War and World Rugby Corporation and, of course, there are more.