Scrub-a-dub-dub

"LIV, Laugh, Launder: The Morality of Sportswashing" is one of a proliferating number of articles about the idea that the merger of LIV Golf, and the Professional Golfer's Association Tour, and how this is intended to burnish the image of Saudi Arabia.

Fair enough. I just have one question: How is this intended to work, exactly? According to Sports Illustrated, sportswashing is "the use of sports to present a sanitized, friendlier version of a political regime or operation." In "LIV, Laugh, Launder," the author defines it as "a practice used by states to launder their reputation and distract from less savory activities and human rights violations." Okay, but does that actually ever happen?

Who, precisely, forgot that Saudi Arabia has been accused of unsavory activities, including the out-and-out killing of a critic of the government, simply because they wanted to watch some golf on television? China hosting the Olympics didn't seem to make a dent in anti-China sentiment (deserved or not) here in the United States. Sure, there have been some statements from golfers that seemed to downplay Saudi Arabia's myriad failures to live up to what one might loosely call international standards, but I don't know anyone who takes their cues on human rights from golfers. Or Olympic athletes. Or professional sports leagues.

As I understand it, the problem with sportswashing seems to be that it gives people other things to talk about than what human rights and good government activists want talked about.

The goal of sportswashing is to reduce scrutiny applied to negative actions by essentially using sport as a distraction.

But this makes an assumption that I'm not sure is true; that absent this or that sporting event, the people who would have been watching or paying attention would have been examining the negative actions of the nation or organization that put on the event. It's true that when I'm watching, say, a rugby game (a sport that I immensely enjoy when I happen to catch it, even though I have no idea of what's happening on the field), I'm not looking deeply into the human rights records of whatever nation or nations the teams playing hail from. But I'm not looking into those concerns even when there isn't a rugby game on to watch. A rugby game is much more likely to come between me and housekeeping than it is to come between me and human rights activism. Mainly because human rights activism very, very, far down my current list of priorities.

And the people I know who are motivated to be activists for human rights or good government? They're so on the lookout for anything that may "distract" me (or others) from their cause that the only thing they have time for, when it comes to many sporting events, is, well, making accusations of sportswashing. So I'm not sure that sportswashing has enough real-world effectiveness to actually be a thing. It may be more likely that some people just like the idea of owning a golf tour.