OLIVER HOLT: Golf needs Rory McIlroy to win the Masters and lead the slaying of the Saudi stooges

The use of sports rivalry as a proxy for the battles between light and dark is nothing new. In their own way, Coe vs. Ovett, Borg vs. McEnroe, Senna vs. Prost, and Lewis vs. Tyson were framed as just wars pitting the just man against the fallen angel.

At this week’s US Masters, the song will be the same. Except there won’t be just one fallen angel to root against. There will be 18 of them.

The beautiful and meticulously manicured hills and valleys of Augusta National will be transformed into a garden of good and evil in the days to come as the civil war engulfing golf prepares for another battle and the renegades of the LIV Golf tour prepare to try. to produce a winner from their ranks and score a mighty PR coup for a lavish but ailing project in desperate need of a revival.

On the other side of the divide, Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Scottie Scheffler, the defending champion, will strive to maintain the consensus that the PGA Tour represents not only the preeminent talent pool in golf, but also the soul of the sport.

They have successfully portrayed LIV as a subpar tour for mercenaries who allowed greed to darken their love of the game and withered away because of it.

If Scheffler places the arms of a LIV Golf player in a green jacket at the Butler Cabin on Sunday, it will be a blow to the game.

It would be like Newcastle United winning the Premier League. It would be a victory for the bloody, brutal and murderous Saudi autocracy that funds both companies and desperately needs high-profile sports laundering successes to justify its obscene and deeply cynical investments.

Let’s not forget that when the drama unfolds this week on this field, it is the most beautiful natural amphitheater in the sport.

Let’s not forget that when we talk about the awkwardness that will linger at the Dinner of Champions tonight as LIV golfers like Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, Sergio Garcia and Bubba Watson mingle with Tiger Woods, Scheffler and so many other greats of the game.

LIV players are not bad people, and many of them passionately believe that they are doing what is best for themselves and their families, but they are puppets.

They are being used, brazenly and shamelessly, by a repressive regime that murders journalists in cold blood, jails women’s rights activists, criminalizes same-sex relationships, has killed tens of thousands in an illegal war in Yemen and mass executions are regularly allowed.

Yes, there are nuances here too. The DP World Tour, in a previous incarnation, once held a sanctioned event in Saudi Arabia. So they weren’t too shy about accepting Saudi money. And there’s also the argument that the PGA Tour’s opposition to LIV Golf has less to do with moral concerns and much, much more to do with trying to crush a business rival under the guise of moral concerns.

That may be the case, but it doesn’t alter the fact that a victory for an LIV golfer in Augusta would be a victory for Saudi Arabia, a victory for its repression, and a victory for its burgeoning attempts to weaponize the sport. to divert attention from its policies towards its own citizens. That’s what will happen here in rainy Georgia for the next few days.

In that context, what golf needs most this week is for the 33-year-old McIlroy to win the Masters. McIlroy also needs McIlroy to win the Masters. He needs it to complete the career Grand Slam that his talent deserves.

He needs it to end the nine-year drought since his last Major win, he needs it to re-establish himself as the sport’s foremost talent, and he needs it to propel himself into what could be a golden phase of his career. But golf still needs it to earn it more.

Trying to join Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen on golf’s list of Grand Slam winners, McIlroy has been the PGA Tour leader in the battle against LIV raids.

The fact that he and Woods turned down the incredibly lucrative offers that LIV threw at them and chose to stay with the golf establishment was instrumental in preventing LIV from capturing the public’s imagination and leaving them reeling when it came to negotiating broadcast deals and creating a public footprint.

But like Greg Norman, LIV’s outspoken CEO is salivating at the prospect of one of his players winning the Masters, saying that if it happens, the 18 rogue players will celebrate victory together on the 18th green in front of the field. the big old Augusta clubhouse, so the golf establishment knows how powerful it would be if McIlroy slayed the dragon and won the tournament.

That is the dream scenario of the PGA Tour. It would be the most potent symbol of their superiority over a rival circuit that has been portrayed as a golden circus, based on a series of gimmicks, played on poor courses with poor courses, a retirement circuit for failed players who have lost their appetite. to compete at the top. A LIV player’s victory here in Augusta would make the perpetuation of that performance almost untenable.

“Recently there have been insults that LIV is not ‘real golf,’” Norman said over the weekend, “and I am really upset by that hypocrisy. Rory McIlroy implied that we were opening some kind of circus and that LIV is an “exhibition”. And yet, taking his and Tiger Woods’ advice, the PGA Tour goes ahead and does the same by running its limited-course events with more money. Where’s the consistency, right?

The stakes are high for McIlroy. Given the circumstances, it was perhaps only natural that he would look to a young tennis player for inspiration, 19-year-old US Open champion Carlos Alcaraz, who is trying to preserve his joy of playing amid all the pressures that come with professional sports. McIlroy has been reading transcripts of Alcaraz’s press conferences.

‘Carlos says his goal is always to play with “joy and instinct,” McIlroy told the Telegraph. That’s fantastic, isn’t it? Listen to that: “joy and instinct.” What a beautiful, beautiful and very simple ambition to have.

“It’s what every kid has when they first play a sport and what is invariably lost when the really good ones progress and become professionals. The joy is gone. The instinct is lost.

McIlroy will try to get that on track this week, he’ll try to trust his instincts and stay cheerful, but it won’t be easy. He is not only fighting for himself and for the long-awaited culmination of his career in the Grand Slam in Augusta.

He’s fighting for the PGA Tour, the game of golf and the beauty of the sport itself.

Why Pep may live to regret inciting the Reds

When Pep Guardiola was asked about the way he taunted Liverpool substitutes Kostas Tsimikas and Arthur Melo after Manchester City’s first goal during the match between the two teams on Saturday, some accused police of the celebration of interfering. again in the spontaneity of soccer.

I’m all for spontaneity, so I look forward to the moment when an opponent scores against City in a big game, runs right up to Guardiola, looks him in the face, tells him what a beautiful goal that was, and tries to shake his hand.

It’s just a hunch, but I guess Guardiola might not be as relaxed about spontaneity if he was the catcher.

Joshua missing his mojo

In a heavyweight division where boxers seem to spend more time dodging each other than fighting each other, it seemed fitting that the best action in Anthony Joshua’s fight with Jermaine Franklin at the O2 on Saturday night came after the final bell.

Joshua looks like a man missing his mojo, and in a sport as dangerous and unforgiving as boxing, that may be the worst loss of all.