D'Arcy Waldegrave: LIV Golf is on its knees

Listen. Really carefully. Stretch your eardrums as taut as they can be.    Can you hear the tears falling? Can you hear the plaintive wails of loss? The bass string twang of heart strings snapping?    No, no you can’t. No one cares. No pity, no deep sense of bereavement.   LIV Golf is on its knees. Head bowed, waiting for the rush of blade driven air as the scimitar flashes through the fleshy neck of the rebel golf league.   It looks like Gordon Gekko was a little off the mark – greed doesn’t necessarily work.   The Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund has walked from one of their sport washing escapades after sinking a reported US$5 billion into their version of the sport over the last five years.   This dalliance has made some players an extraordinary sum of money walking around on grass for 54 holes. Fourteen times a year. On a cost per wear basis, it made financial sense, but the exercise’s cost was never about money, it was about the price of someone's soul.    Plainly, morals can become a tradable commodity and I’m sure the players who collapsed at the altar of blood money can sleep well at night, betwixt their hand stitched 10,000 count Egyptian long-staple cotton sheets on mattresses stuffed with riyal.    Whether this collapse is a harbinger of further sport washing decay is yet to be determined, surely their seemingly bottomless pit of filthy lucre isn’t starting to show signs of a floor?   They still have boxing and football, F1, sailing, and cricket I suppose. And rugby? Not yet.   Good luck to them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.