Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson can’t escape politics after playing LIV round with Donald Trump

An hour and a half northeast of Philadelphia, across the Delaware River and through an arboreal patchwork of country estates and smallholder farms, the man who taught the world to never apologize lurched his considerable weight forward and jerked a golf club around his body. The contact was clean and straight, and after catching his balance, he stood in his garish red hat and admired the ball as it cleared the trees and cut the corner of the left-leaning dog leg.

“Never been a president who can hit him like that,” Donald Trump said as he lumbered back to the cart parked on the back end of the tee box.

“Only one,” his playing partner said.

Trump gave Dustin Johnson a nod that said he was damn right, and then he launched into a story about the time Gary Player told him that he was by far the best of the seven presidents with whom he’d played a round.

It was a surreal day, even by the lofty standards of the surreal-est little corner of the golf world as Trump and his son Eric teamed up with Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau in a pro-am tournament that kicked off LIV Golf’s weekend invitational at Trump’s vaunted Bedminster course. The event, like the breakaway tour itself, often left you in search of the “there.” It certainly looked like it was trying to be something, with electronic scoreboards flashing updates amidst gaudy signage and pop music bumping from speakers the size of grain silos. Yet it was not televised, and closed to the public, and played with all the liberties of a practice round. The gaggle of onlookers that followed the Trump foursome numbered in the low-to-mid double digits and consisted mostly of secret service agents, tour personnel, and course maintenance workers.

In short, it felt like much of what we’ve seen thus far from LIV, an extended photo opportunity staged as much for its branding potential as anything else. While that does not make it entirely unlike the practice rounds and pro-ams on the PGA Tour, the inclusion of Trump World and its traveling cast of hucksters and sycophants only seemed to exacerbate the gilded-toilet garishness that LIV has projected since its inception. The list of (ostensible) celebrity participants was so laughably on-brand that it read like a casting call for a C-list reality show on a channel named Ozone or FrankTV or something: Caitlyn Jenner, Clay Travis, Charles Barkley, Brian Urlacher. Presumably, Aubrey Huff had other weekend plans, like trying to open a can of soup.

» READ MORE: LIV traitors come to Trump Bedminster after scaring the golf establishment at the British Open

But the real hoot came whenever you looked out at this crowd of fundamentally unserious people and spotted a serious golfer milling amongst them. In these moments, it was impossible not to wonder whether any of these players truly understood what it is they’d signed up for. Take DeChambeau, for instance. After his round, the 28-year-old slugger emerged from a lunch with Trump and insisted that the afternoon had been just another step in a sincere effort to revolutionize the world of golf.

“We’re doing our best to showcase a great entertainment product,” said DeChambeau, who reportedly agreed to a contract with LIV that will guarantee him more than $100 million over four-and-a-half years. “We’re still playing in a competitive environment. Just because we’ve got guaranteed money over here doesn’t mean we aren’t going to work as hard as we can. Just because Tom Brady gets these huge guaranteed contracts doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to win a Super Bowl. We’re playing for something. That’s what I believe and that’s what all of us out here believe. That’s why we’re doing this.”

It’s a fair point, even when you acknowledge the fact that the money flowing into these golfers’ pockets is flowing out of the Saudi Arabian oil fields and bypassing the pockets of common Saudi citizens who live under a regime that utilizes some extreme forms of oppression in order to maintain control over said money. The cynics are correct when they point to the double standard that says LIV and its beneficiaries are somehow more ethically dubious than all of the other enterprises that accept investments from the Saudi wealth fund, not to mention all of the other oppressive regimes with whom American businesses and consumers share a mutually beneficial relationship. The LIV tour is attempting to exploit a very real market inefficiency by building a golf league that thumbs its nose at golf’s conventions. If it ever lands itself a television contract, it might actually attract an audience.

» READ MORE: Charles Barkley calls LIV, 9/11 outrage ‘fake’ at Trump tourney just minutes from Ground Zero

Yet any true cynic must also acknowledge the possibility that the Saudis are not in this for the good of the sport, or even the potential return on investment. There is a very good chance that the LIV tour ends up as nothing more than a loss leader for a regime that has plenty to gain by normalizing itself to a western audience. DeChambeau might think he is being paid to be a golf pioneer. But if the Saudis think he is being paid to serve as a de facto celebrity endorser of their regime, that’s all that really matters. Listen to the words that Paul Casey spoke on Thursday when the three-time PGA Tour winner was asked about the well-known human rights issues in Saudi Arabia, which criminalizes same-sex relationships and subjects women’s to various forms of oppression.

“I’ve been to the kingdom a couple of times, and I’ve seen change happening in the kingdom,” Casey said, “so I can confidently say that change is happening and that what we do is having a positive effect.”

That is PR gold, whether Casey meant it that way or not. And the same was true when DeChambeau and Johnson teed off alongside Trump and then spent 18 holes mugging for pictures and cracking jokes with a man who is currently the subject of a congressional hearing for his role in a riot that led to several deaths. The point isn’t that DeChambeau and Johnson are supporting the wrong politics – it’s that they are fooling themselves if they cannot see that they are political pawns. Never was that as evident as late Thursday afternoon, when DeChambeau stood outside the Bedminster clubhouse and reiterated that his round with Trump was about golf and not politics. Twenty feet away sat Eric Trump’s golf cart, on the back of it a bag of clubs emblazoned with two simple words:

Trump 2024