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Whereas the PGA Tour is competing towards LIV Golf, the Women Official Golf Association would no longer no longer as much as withhold in mind doing industry with the Saudi Arabia-backed league, LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan acknowledged Saturday.
“It is my responsibility to withhold in mind every different,” Marcoux Samaan informed Cathy Harris of the London Cases (h/t Beth Ann Nichols of Golfweek). “I’d prefer in a dialog if it would type our goal of promoting girls’s golf, however there wishes to be input from gamers and sponsors. There is a number of components to withhold in mind earlier than we make industry with LIV Golf.”
Marcoux Samaan’s feedback approach after LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman informed the Palm Sea streak Post (h/t Golfweek) that he changed into as soon as “100 p.c confident” about beginning a girls’s golf league.
“We now maintain mentioned it internally, the different is there,” Norman acknowledged. “Aramco is already the supreme sponsor of girls’s golf in the arena. Aramco, a Saudi company.”
Aramco, a Saudi oil company, sponsors six events on the Women European Tour with prize money totaling $6 million.
The Saudi government has been accused of various human rights abuses, including the assassination of Washington Post reporter Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Critics maintain furthermore accused the government of sportswashing, the use of the new league to enhance its repute around the arena.
So much of top gamers on the PGA Tour maintain already joined the LIV Golf Invitational Series. The breakaway circuit has equipped some gamers better than $100 million to pass on from the PGA Tour, and the league’s purse sizes, with the winner of every tournament receiving $4 million, maintain furthermore been enticing.
As for the ladies’s sport, 20-time LPGA Tour winner Cristie Kerr acknowledged closing month that “almost your total tour” would make the jump to LIV Golf if it had been in a equal speak to the males’s sport.
