Golfing for Dollars: The PGA Tour’s Saudi Deal Leaves 9/11 Families Out in the Cold

Not so long ago, a meeting between Saudi Arabia and a top American sports organization — on the eve of September 11! In New York! — would have drawn outrage: A news cycle full of quotes from bereaved 9/11 families, crestfallen admirers of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi or human rights activists shaking their heads at the way Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sportswashing campaign was co-opting another American institution.

This year, it was mostly crickets, something that leaves the leader of a prominent victims’ organization feeling betrayed.

Yes, Brett Eagleson of the 9/11 Justice organization put out statements slamming the investment negotiations between Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and the PGA Tour, which he once counted as a fellow critic of the autocratic kingdom. But no, they didn’t get much attention.

“Welcome to our world,” said Eagleson, whose father died in the attacks and whose organization has sued the Saudi government and is seeking additional information about help it allegedly gave the hijackers. “It seems like everything we do gets such little attention now.”

What changed? Eagleson noted the distraction of a presidential election and the march of time that relegates the 2001 terrorist attack and the 2018 journalist murder ever farther into the past.

Yet there’s another thing that may have even more to do with it: The PGA Tour, the same organization whose ill-timed meeting Eagleson spent last week criticizing, has gone from ferocious business competitor of the rival Saudi-owned LIV Golf startup to would-be partner. They’re currently hard at work negotiating terms.

On the face of it, you wouldn’t think that a market-share conflict over golf would have anything to do with whether or not Americans pay attention to campaigns waged by terrorist victims and human rights advocates.

The recent history of Saudi-outrage news cycles suggests otherwise. I first encountered Eagleson while doing a pair of columns about the public relations blowback from the kingdom’s foray into world-class golf. I’d been turned on to the same way as most Washington reporters who covered it: Via tips from the army of Beltway flacks, lobbyists and operatives retained by both sides in the battle.

Critics said the Saudis were out to launder their reputation by associating with a gentle sporting pastime. Yet every time the golf war made news, the stories were full of references to 9/11, Khashoggi and assorted other blemishes on the kingdom’s image. This was no accident. The PGA Tour, like any business locked in an existential battle with a competitor, was spending a mint on PR, and there was a lot of upside to reminding people why they might not like Saudi Arabia.

In this case, the spending helped folks like Eagleson, whose budget often means he has to be his own publicist. “I literally Googled them,” he said. “I introduced myself and I said who I was.”

“For us, it was the perfect alignment,” Eagleson told me this week. He says his group gave the tour background briefings on their legal efforts against the kingdom, huddling with communications operatives crafting the tour’s campaign against LIV, which involved describing it as a stalking horse for an unsavory government. “PGA was brothers in arms with us. We gave them everything we had. I worked with their PR people, gave them all the evidence. And they bought in. They were donating money to us.”

9/11 Justice also wound up hiring Clout, the politically connected public affairs firm that the tour had been working with during the battle. “We didn’t pay anything” except for some incidentals, Eagleson said.

The fracas also helped his cause in other ways. As top golfers went to war with one another over which tour to join, the coverage of the stars who stayed loyal to the PGA Tour often included some of the criticism of Saudi Arabia that activists like Eagleson had been working to publicize.

Then, last summer, it was over — not with a bang, but with a merger.

The tour and the Saudi startup decided to bury the hatchet via a deal that called for the head of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund to chair a new operation. “They completely ghosted us,” said Eagleson. The carnival had moved on. And with it, a deep-pocketed force for whipping up public criticism of Saudi Arabia was gone.

The PGA Tour declined to comment. Following congressional hearings last year, one of its board members did meet with the families’ organization. (One unexpected positive for Eagleson was that after the Saudi deal was announced, Clout decided to break ties with the golf tour and stick to doing PR for the 9/11 Justice group.)

The Saudi government has long denied any involvement in the attacks. This week, as he tried to drum up attention around reports of a new video that he says represents new evidence against the kingdom, Eagleson sounded bitter about the whole golf experience. He speculated that the tour’s friendliness toward activists like himself may have just been about getting itself a better price for the inevitable sell-out.

In fact, it was an example of some truths that aren’t so much evil as eternal: Politics makes strange bedfellows, and the enemy of your enemy is your friend. For a while, at least.

That’s certainly the case in Washington, where the noble activists behind high-minded causes often get unplanned help from folks who have more earthly reasons to fan the flames.

“Of course people have their own reasons for raising whatever the issues may be,” said Casey Michel, a POLITICO contributor and author of Foreign Agents, a recent book about the ways autocratic governments deploy the American influence industry for their own ends. He noted that in the case of Saudi Arabia, one force driving criticism in the U.S. media was the kingdom’s regional rivals — themselves autocratic, naturally. The operative-vs-operative game in Washington goes both ways.

In recent years, the dynamic of parties pushing stories for their own reasons has leant Saudi critics, in particular, an amount of muscle they might not otherwise afford.

It’s not always evil or greedy. Consider the case of Khashoggi, the activist and Washington Post contributor who was killed and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The media kept the focus on the gruesome crime because it was an outrage, but also because the victim was a colleague whose death underlined the perils of journalism. It’s hard to imagine the same drumbeat of criticism if the victim hadn’t had ties to a top American media organization.

That storyline, too, has faded, and not necessarily because anyone is less horrified about the murder. Particularly in the year since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, the potential of Saudi Arabia to be part of a peace deal has become a much bigger factor for the kingdom’s critics in and out of government — which leaves fewer people with an immediate incentive for surfacing memories of a 2018 crime.

“I think October 7th changed everything with regard to anybody working on human rights issues with Saudi, the Emirates, the Qataris,” said Juleanna Glover, a Washington communications pro who has previously worked with the Justice for Jamal efforts. “An administration that was trying to focus on great human rights questions is now solely focused on trying to prevent a greater war in the mideast. There’s been a fundamental pullback.”

For her part, Glover thinks that an end to the Israel-Hamas war could put the Saudi regime’s human rights record back in the Washington conversation again.

Or maybe more venal reasons will surface again. After all, the talks between the PGA Tour and the Saudi fund are reportedly going slowly. If they fell apart, and the tour once again benefited from public disdain for the kingdom, would an array of Beltway PR types be back in the business of publicizing the complaints of Eagleson and others? Stranger things have happened.

And you never know when another deep-pocketed entity will see an upside in boosting the kingdom’s American critics — at least until a deal gets done.

“At the end of the day, what those PGA flacks were doing was the right thing,” said Michel. “The issues they were raising were the right issues. And the criticism of the Saudis was the right criticism. … It certainly seems that the lesson on the Saudis’ end is that they just have to target whoever is opposing them, whatever the organization is. Just find that price and be willing to meet it.”

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