Why the Saudi-backed golf tour isn't going away

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The U.S. Open, beginning Thursday morning at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., is the third men's major of the year and the first since the controversial LIV Golf Invitational Series officially launched as a deep-pocketed challenger to the PGA Tour.

Reviews of the Saudi-backed league's inaugural event last weekend in London were not good. Despite being headlined by big-name PGA Tour defectors Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, the 48-man field was diluted by a lot of journeymen, and 2011 Masters champion Charl Schwartzel's one-shot victory failed to move the needle. The much-hyped team competition didn't really work either. More troubling for the fledgling tour, most of the media coverage was focused not on the course but on the press tent, where players gave awkward, canned answers when grilled about the moral implications of accepting huge piles of cash from the problematic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Having said all that, it's pretty clear that LIV Golf is not going away. The Saudis' so-called Public Investment Fund contains assets worth an estimated $600 billion US, and they're said to be prepared to spend a couple billion of that over the next couple of years on their golf startup. The key point to remember here, as expressed by ESPN golf writer Kevin Van Valkenburg, is that LIV Golf is less an independent sports league than a public- and investor-relations tool for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. With the goal of diversifying the unimaginable fortune the kingdom has earned from selling oil, the fund has purchased a large slice of an American company that makes luxury