Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

Something told me I should be beating the chest with pride. Something was telling me I should dust off the old mashie niblick with the hickory shaft and smack a few balls in wild celebration.
But there was none of it. Golfer Danny Lee had just dropped a 25-foot off-the-green birdie putt to win a whopping $6.3 million at a LIV professional golf tour event in Arizona.
That's $117,000 for each of the 54 holes he played.
He's been scratching around on the professional circuit for eight years without a win.
I wanted to share his delight, his triumph; all those Saudi riyals. But I couldn't.
I just prayed he would receive his absurdly, his obscenely fat pay check, rip it up, then throw it back in the smirking faces of LIV, puppets for the Saudi Arabian sports washing machine. Of course that was never going to happen. And it didn't happen.
But what a statement to the world, and to Mohammad bin Salman, the dubious MBS, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia that would have been.
Because LIV, as we now know, is financed by something called the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund of MBS's Saudi Arabia, the country which cocked a middle finger at the world after it butchered Jamal Khashoggi.
Accountability
Five years ago, Khashoggi, the renowned dissident, author and journalist was lured into the Saudi Arabian embassy in Instanbul. He came out in pieces, his body dismembered with a bone saw, simply because he dared suggest 'women today should have the same rights as men” and that 'all citizens should have the right to speak their mind without fear of imprisonment”.
Classified US intelligence reports sheeted responsibility for Khashoggi's murder back to MBS, who denied it.
So some people might think every cent of prize money won on that LIV tour is blood money.
This is about murder, this is about human rights; this is about accountability for a violent oppressive regime. And many people around the world feel very strongly about Saudi Arabia's thinly veiled attempts to garner respectability and acceptability on the international stage through LIV and sports washing.
And while Danny Lee was hitting every green on Monday, making all his putts, was his moral compass a bit skew-whiff? Just like Bryson DeChambreau, Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith, did Lee put money ahead of morals? Because doing deals with LIV is doing deals with the devil.
I can hear the howls of outrage from the nineteenth at clubhouses around the region. The hoary old argument that sport and politics don't mix, let the man enjoy his moment, and his money. Perhaps they should run their outrage before Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi. I'm sure she will forgive and forget and start watching LIV on TV. After all, LIV's chief apologist Greg Norman explained the murder by saying 'we all make mistakes” and that Saudi Arabia was keen to move on. I suppose that makes everything alright then.
Our teachers
So I wonder what MBS would have made of me brazenly and publicly speaking out just a short iron shot from Tauranga Golf Club's 14th hole on Cameron Rd last week? I broke all the rules, compromised my professional impartiality and integrity, and struck my own pathetically small blow for teachers.
As I drove past protesting teachers on Cameron Rd, something of the leftie, liberal, champion of the underdog in me made me wind down the window of the SunLive car and shout: 'Go brothers and sisters! You deserve every cent, every teacher aide you get” or some similar banality. It felt good, it felt liberating.
I got howls of support back from my new teacher brothers and sisters.
Solidarity on the picket line. If MBS had seen all this, he probably would have mobilised the secret police, the water cannons and tear gas and had us all slung in prison.
The teachers certainly made a better cut of protestor, good humoured and respectful despite their problems and smart, acerbic placards. 'Average yearly spend – $91,000 on a prisoner, just $9000 on a student.”
No chalk
And the one that resonated. 'I have no chalk and I can't afford to buy my own.”
Even if there's a tissue of truth, what does it tell Jan Tinetti, who controls the boxes of chalk? It just left a nasty taste – why do these people of such a noble and crucial calling, have to stand on streets corners begging for understanding and support, and chalk? It's interesting that our teachers start out on $51,358 a year.
And Danny Lee made $375,000 an hour on the golf course playing for MSB.