Pablo Torre

In retrospect, you know, the whole bone sawing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the whole thing, for instance, about how President Donald Trump was hosting a tournament at his course in New Jersey.

over the protests of the families of 9-11 victims who physically showed up.

My sense was, if you're going to spend $5 billion to normalize the kingdom, you probably could have just spent your money backing an incumbent American sports organization instead of trying to build an unsustainable rebel league in order to antagonize one.

But while talking to Alan Shipnuck, something jarring did occur to me as...

continued the postmortem of this mission.

Because what if you consider the fact that the PGA Tour already surrendered its supposed moral high ground in this battle?

And what if Saudi Arabia also already got almost everything that it wanted?

The other thing I'm looking at, this portfolio, the Saudi Public Investment Fund, they're looking elsewhere, right?

And so soft power, I mean, this is the reminder.

You know, golf was one avenue, but it seems like the other one that they decided to go and back was, oh, right, Paramount.

They're spending $110 billion to go take over Warner Brothers.

And I'll just quote this line from The Hollywood Reporter.

"'The filing by Paramount Skydance "'with the Securities and Exchange Commission "'did not outline how much the funds planned to contribute, "'but sources familiar with the investment "'said the total amount was around $24 billion, "'with Saudi Arabia's PIF contributing about $12 billion.'"

and sovereign wealth funds for Abu Dhabi and Qatar, putting up around $6 billion each.

This is part of a broader push by the country to curry favor with Trump by influencing Washington and also keep young Saudi eyes and minds on the screens, not on questions of human rights.

And so from the perspective inside of golf, what is the attitude that,

from the PGA side of things.

How much of the sports washing stuff is part of the golf conversation?

How much of it is actually you guys tried to kill us and look who's bleeding now?

Donald Trump doesn't seem to have any hesitation about playing both sides here.