“Significant increases in prize Money in the men’s professional game has resulted in the long-term reassessment of the business model for professional golf,” Slumbers said here Wednesday.

There you have the forces at work when the 151st British Open tees off Thursday morning: the purity of the competition among a talented field of 156 on a classic layout — and what to do about the river of filthy money that will be used to present that purity to the public for decades to come. The two don’t go together at all, yet they’re partners in the sport for the foreseeable future.

Everything you need to know about the 2023 British Open

When the British Open begins, and certainly when a champion is crowned here Sunday, there will be plenty of room to discuss the winner and how he won. Royal Liverpool has this century produced two worthy and popular champions — Tiger Woods in 2006 and Rory McIlroy in 2014. The finishing stretch — reachable par-5s at Nos. 15 and 18 along with a devilish 136-yard par-3 17th — could make for dazzling drama.

But when the golf world wakes up Monday morning, the champion will have his claret jug, and the rest of the sport will still have looming problems to deal with.

“The world of sport has changed dramatically in the last 12 months,” Slumbers said, “and it is not feasible for the R&A or golf to just ignore what is a societal change on a global basis. We will be considering, within all the parameters that we look at, all the options that we have.”

Translation: If Saudi Arabia comes to us with some lightly laundered money through its Public Investment Fund, we almost certainly would take it. The winner of the last major of the season will earn $3 million from a record $16.5 million purse for beating 155 of the best in the world. The winner of a regular old, 54-hole event on the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit: $4 million for beating 47 dudes, some of whom are still among the best in the world.

There’s a disparity. That kind of money has a funny way of making otherwise reasonable people look away from a heinous past — and, it’s important to note, present — of human rights abuses, of mistreatment of women and LBGTQ+ people, of suppression of free speech. It shouldn’t. But it will.

To be clear, the PIF — which is now an acronym as familiar to golf fans as GIR (greens in regulation) or OWGR (Official World Golf Ranking) — has massive, $400 billion-plus investments in the companies that own Google and Facebook, in Amazon (whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), in Microsoft, in Starbucks, on and on. If our every action was governed by whether the Saudis had a finger in it, we wouldn’t buy much or do much.

So sports has become a natural extension of that flood-the-zone strategy. Golf is the buzziest business at the moment because the PGA Tour and the Saudi-backed LIV Golf series pledged to fight each other to the death until they decided to work together, and no one knows how that’s going to turn out in the short or long term. But the money has already been injected into soccer — Cristiano Ronaldo now plays for Saudi team Al Nassr, and English club Newcastle was purchased by a Saudi conglomerate in 2021. It has been injected into racing, both of horses and of cars. It is poised to be injected into international cricket.

And it’s not just the Saudis. Qatar spent $220 billion to stage the World Cup, and its investment fund just sank around $200 million to purchase around 5 percent of Monumental Sports and Entertainment, Ted Leonsis’s company that owns Washington’s Wizards, Mystics and Capitals — a silent partner by NBA rules. A group called the Abu Dhabi United Group for Development and Investment — a front for the United Arab Emirates royal family — owns Premier League power Manchester City. On and on.

Golf is unforgiving. Rory McIlroy remains undaunted.

Because the valuations of sports franchises in the United States and overseas continue to rise, this can be a nice, safe place for a sovereign fund to put tiny bits of its bottomless pit of money. It gives those groups skin in a Western game and lets them cash out when and if the franchise is sold. What fun.

More money in more sports also helps normalize it all. It has also made me wonder — because all these investments have forced sports fans who might not otherwise consider the human rights and free speech records of various regimes to think about them — whether this involvement in Western enterprises might serve to pressure those regimes into overhauling the way they treat their own citizens.

“Gulf dictatorship acquisitions of American and British sports organizations are only a small part of their strategy to exert influence and control over our political, economic and cultural systems, working to export their domestic repression by censoring critics and to ensure our continued military protection for their vulnerable rule,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), wrote me in an email Wednesday. “Anyone who thinks that the influence is going the other way to liberalize tyrannical rule in Saudi Arabia or the UAE hasn’t been paying close enough attention to what’s actually happening.”

DAWN was originally established by Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who, the CIA has determined, was ordered murdered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018. DAWN’s people work daily to expose human rights violations across the Middle East.

Two years ago, the idea that such a group would have keen interest in golf would have seemed absurd. Yet before last week’s appearance by PGA Tour officials in front of a Senate subcommittee looking into the potential PGA Tour-LIV partnership, DAWN published five questions senators should ask about the deal, most to do with the as-yet-to-be-determined degree of reliance on the PIF and, by extension, on bin Salman.

“We are capitulating to his power,” Whitson wrote me, “despite his abuses, and [showing] that all our supposed Western values are actually for sale. That’s part of the point of this buying spree: he wants to rub our noses in our greed and weakness.”

Candace Buckner: Sportswashing isn’t what we say now. It’s what we won’t be saying later.

That’s a lot for a single golfer to handle. One thing that has become clear at the major championships this year — the only time PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV players are all together — is that any animosity in golf doesn’t fall along LIV-PGA Tour lines among the competitors.

“I think everybody thinks that just because there’s a divide with LIV and the PGA Tour that the players are actually divided,” Brooks Koepka, a five-time major winner and LIV member, said this week. “I don’t think that’s the case at all.”

But the dynamics for the people who govern the sport are different. The amount of money the Saudis will inject into golf hasn’t been determined, but it already has been transformative. The best version of the game is played when legacy, not money, is the primary motivator. But the money — in both its sums and its sources — is what defines golf’s present and will determine its future.