In their naked self-interest, LIV golfers are being refreshingly true to the sport’s roots

The centre cannot hold. All that is pure is gone. They’re shaving Aslan’s mane up there at the Centurion Club in Hemel Hempstead. And it has, of course, been genuinely shocking to see the grand old community game of professional golf, with its deep social ties, the beating heart of our post-industrial towns, reduced so easily to a row of shrugging men in leisure wear doing stuff on their own for money.

This is after all the people’s game, or at least the People Like Us game, still played on every cobbled street and in every playground, providing that playground is at least 300 yards wide and fenced from public access; a place where all you need is the ball, the green grass, hundreds of pounds of equipment and not to be in the inner city. Who could have guessed that professional golf would be so vulnerable to greed and self-interest?

Yes, it’s time to laugh at the golfers as they pretend, but also don’t pretend, to care about things. It was hard not to be gripped by the press conference exchanges before the first LIV Golf event this week. The new pop-up circuit is run by Saudi Arabia’s PIF as part of Vision 2030, the cultural project that is also a way of buying influence, outreach and soft power: art, music, sport, a football club.

Golf has duly coughed up its own platoon of freelancers and old stagers with a grudge. And it is already a more-ish spectacle. Here is a pin-headed frat boy wrestling with self-interest and social duty. Here is a row of sullen baseball caps looking not just baffled but outraged at being asked actual questions about actual things by that small group of British sports news journalists who are still willing to do this.

It may have been an essentially futile exercise, like asking a horse its