Norman Praises Beijing Olympics

Filed in archive Golf Business on April 28, 2008

Courtesy: BBC

Greg Norman certainly knows on which side of his bread the butter is found.

Norman finished respectably in the top 20 at this weekend's BMW Asian Open at Shanghai's Pudong Golf Club.

Norman is less a golfer these days than a golf course designer and builder and he's a very successful one, too.

After the tournament, Norman said "China is a power player in the game of golf now and it's going to become bigger and bigger".



Norman designed one of the 18 hole layouts at the enormous and enormously opulent Mission Hills Resort in mainland China.

Yes, there is money a-plenty for designer-name course builders like Norman and others.

So, the Shark (aptly so) is willing to ignore China's record on human rights and its other discretions to offer statements that keep him in good stead with China's money-men.

Norman captains the International Team at next year's President's Cup. He said yesterday that he would love to see the Cup played in China and he vows to have a Chinese player on his team next year.

That's all fine and politically correct but his comments about the Olympics leave me gagging.

Beijing will be the perfect host for the Summer Games, he said. How conveniently he ignores the suppression in Tibet, the violation of rights as Chinese authorities seize farmland from peasants for more factories, the complete lack of an effective environmental policy and its resulting levels of pollution and so on.

Yes, it's easy to ignore all that when the money is flowing and you can dip your lips into the sweet stream.

Sorry, Mr. Norman, countries like China don't - and won't - change by heaping praise on them. Gandhi would never have led India to freedom if he had said all was well and the British rulers were wonderful.

Norman would have been better to say nothing at all.

Instead, he sounds like an apologist for China.