I wouldn't say that the NBA comes out of a close inspection clean, either, but if you can't grasp the differences between the NBA and LIV Golf and understand the implications of each organization's activities, then this might not be the conversation for you.
The NBA is an American basketball league that, because of its global appeal, has become marketable to China. China, as we know, is fraught with a record of human-rights violations. I think we all agree on this. But the NBA itself, as an organization, is not owned by, controlled by, nor intended to funnel money
directly into the accounts of people who literally run an oppressive governmental regime, as LIV Golf does. [
This piece did a good job underscoring just how complicated and hard-to-understand the NBA-China relationship is.] LIV Golf is owned by the very top people in Saudi Arabia, including Mohammed bin Salman, who are
directly responsible for murder on an individual level and for human-rights violations on a national scale --
directly responsible, not via a complicated, intricate, multi-tiered relationship with governments that participate in that sort of thing.
Also -- and this speaks to the individual choices made in consideration to the alternatives -- there is already a lucrative professional golf association from which Phil Mickelson has become impossibly right. There is not another professional basketball organization that offers top players to earn a living anywhere near comparable to the level the NBA does.
It's a slippery slope and when you begin to scrutinize every organization for criminal associations or relationships, no matter how adjacent they are to the organizations, nor how central to their very purpose that criminality is, you won't have any places left that stand up to examination. Everything of significance is tangled up in something else.
But when you have one that is so manifestly and directly corrupted by the closest possible, first-degree association with political murderers and top-tier human-rights violators, as we do with LIV Golf, it really stands out from the rest. And that's why Mickelson's decision to hop into bed with them reveals what an empty husk of a person he actually is.