Andy Murray shows true class as he turns down Saudi millions

How a sense of entitlement oozed from the Australian player, Nick Kyrgios, when he welcomed the opportunity for yet more barrowloads of money from the Saudis with the tweet (sic): “FINALLY. THEY SEE THE VALUE. WE ARE GOING TO GET PAID WHAT WE DESERVE TO GET PAID. SIGN ME UP’. This was followed by ten moneybag emojis.

He was responding to news that a country with a toxic human rights reputation was in talks with the ATP Tour to buy into the world of tennis that would see the desert kingdom host some of the circuit’s top tournaments, making some very rich players even richer.

Kyrgios, who has never won a Grand Slam event, has so far earned about £10m from tennis. He believes he’s been short-changed.

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It’s a bit like when Sergio Garcia, defended the golf players’ decision to join the rebel Saudi LIV outfit last year to “achieve things for our families”.

With a personal fortune of around £50m just how much money does he, his wife and child need?

Kyrgios was characteristically blunt when asked why he was playing in an exhibition tournament in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, last December. “Well, the money is pretty good. I am not going to lie”.

He made such an admission because he knew that playing sport in a country which executed 81 people in a single day, jails women’s rights activists and had a dissident journalist murdered is controversial.

It’s problematic for someone like Kyrgios because the Saudi authorities are using people like him to “sportswash” their reputation so the word “Saudi Arabia” conjures up in the public mind the image of a famous athlete lifting a trophy, not an executioner swinging a sword.

Some players like Rory McIlroy and Andy Murray understand why this is unacceptable. Why earning obscene amounts of money to make an evil regime look good is, well, obscene.

Nick Kyrgios (Image: free)

“It’s the human rights, stupid” was McIlroy’s attitude when he turned down hundreds of millions of pounds to join the Saudi breakaway league.

Human rights abuses is also the reason Murray turned down millions to play in Saudi saying he would never go, however much money was on the table. “I wouldn’t play, no”, he said.

So, what’s the difference between McIlroy and Murray, and the likes of Kyrgios and the world number one Carlos Alcaraz who says he has “no doubts” he will play tennis in Saudi Arabia at some points after news of Saudi-ATP partnership emerged.

Is there something in the Celtic blood which gives them a moral backbone, which the Spaniard and the Australian lack? I suspect they are probably a bit better informed but both have also achieved so much in the careers that they don’t need to go.

By comparison, Kyrgios and Alcaraz are just beginning, but they should realise how misguided it sounds when sport stars defend their decisions to go to Saudi saying: ‘I’m just here to compete, I don’t understand anything about politics”.

That was what rebel cricketers who went to play in South Africa during the apartheid era said.

Sports stars cannot be apolitical when they themselves are pawns in a political game, as was the case then and is now in Saudi Arabia.

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The second trope is when they say that because their home country does business with Saudi Arabia then that makes it somehow all right for them. A convenient excuse which also does not take into account their central role, as celebrities, in the whole sportswashing exercise.

But it’s the third excuse, which the Saudis themselves give, which is so disingenuous that you’re left thinking: “Is that really the best you can come up with to excuse what you are doing?”

And it’s this.

Last week America’s CBS TV show, 60 minutes, broadcast an interview with Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Sport, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Saud. It was about how the Saudis were using their petrobillions on things like soccer, boxing, motor racing, golf and tennis to sportswash their image.

Responding to the charge that Saudi Arabia is not still not fit to hold international events (while political prisoners are jailed and executed) Prince Abdulaziz said: “We’re not perfect.”

The interviewer, Jon Wertheim, replied: “I think no country would say they’re perfect, but are you saying that every country has a leader that, according to the CIA, has ordered the murder of a journalist. Are you saying that every country has 81 beheadings in a single day?”

To which the prince says: “We had a mass shooting a couple of weeks ago in the US.”

Wertheim couldn’t believe what he was hearing and pointed out that a mass shooting is not “a government act”.

To which the prince waved his protest aside with the words: “Still, whatever – whatever, people died.”

The Saudi sports minister is trying to conflate a random act of terror by a deranged citizen with barbaric detentions and killings by a state to suggest that every country has its problems and we should just cut the Saudis some slack.

Anyone can see how misleading this is, except maybe if your name’s Nick Kyrgios or Carlos Alcarez.

Or have they been blinded by the piles of money on the table which they believe they “deserve” for knocking a ball over a net.

Maybe they should be made to watch an execution or two so they can decide whether those poor souls got what they deserved.

Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail