| High-level defections! Tiger Woods and Jared Kushner! Lawsuits and blacklists! Is the new LIV league a way to reward players, or the vanity project of a despot, or something else?  Illustration by Miguel Porlan There’s a new golf league in town: LIV, funded by Saudi money and allied with Donald Trump. Its emergence has cleaved the world of professional golf into two feuding camps, Zach Helfand writes, in a gripping piece in this week’s issue. The super-league was launched with hopes to rival the P.G.A. Tour, and quietly began recruiting players with lucrative packages. “You’d hear numbers,” a longtime golf manager said. “You’d hear ‘a hundred million’ a lot.” While some supporters claim that LIV’s goal is to establish Saudi Arabia as a destination for golf, critics have called it a form of “sportwashing”—for the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to launder his reputation, and that of his country, in the face of years of human-rights abuses and the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Helfand joined players on the range this summer to get the gossip about what they really think of LIV—and how deep the league’s connections go. “I thought golf was supposed to be ‘We call infractions on each other, we have rules, we’re gentlemen,’ ” the manager said. “All of a sudden, they’ve turned into animals.” —Jessie Li, newsletter editor Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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