LIV Golf will be hard to ignore this week.

The rebel golf league is usually all too easy to miss, judging by abysmal television ratings on something called The CW Network and galleries that make the Sony Open in Hawaii look like the Ryder Cup.

But this is the week of The Masters, the sport’s third-best major and the first time of the year that the bad guys surround the Alamo. The hired guns from Saudi Arabia have some of the best players in the world and took three of the top five spots in last year’s homage to the game at Augusta National with Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson taking second and Patrick Reed finishing fourth. Spain’s Jon Rahm won the event to defend the PGA Tour but crossed the pond for an estimated $500 million, leaving only 2013 Sony Open champion Russell Henley and his fourth-place finish among the top five by a PGA Tour member a year later.

All five of those guys will drive up Magnolia Lane this week, but Henley will get plenty of help carrying the flag for the PGA. Scottie Scheffler is the heavy favorite and Rory McIlroy chases the career slam while carrying the burden of defending the soul of his sport.

McIlroy has to be the sentimental favorite after being hung out to dry by the big tour but still being unafraid to say “I still hate LIV” after great American hero Jimmy Dunne brokered some kind of peace between the warring organizations. PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan fled his moral high ground when he was reminded how much money Federal Express and his other sponsors make in Saudi Arabia but the unlucky Northern Irishman stood firm against sportswashing.

The practice of a country covering up evil policies with a premier sporting event has been around since the Rumble in the Jungle 50 years ago and it seems to me that it has the opposite effect. Sure, it prevents sports stars from talking about bone saws and Jamal Khashoggi but the chilling details are just a click away and the curiosity that comes with the blatant attempt leads me to look things up that I wouldn’t otherwise.

McIlroy’s issue is more about the fracturing of the game he loves than about human rights abuses or Saudi Arabia’s role in the Sept. 11 attacks, but he has still had the courage to say he would retire before he would ever play for LIV.

McIlroy is the only good guy in this drama, but are Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Rahm really the bad guys? Of course not.

All any of the top players really want is to tee it up in the majors. Some LIV guys like Talor Gooch may have put that in jeopardy if the Official World Golf Ranking, which has all of the credibility as boxing’s crooked sanctioning organizations, remains the benchmark for playing the premier events and that’s a little unfair. But they all know that there is a simple solution: Win this week (or any other major) and you are in all four of them for the next five years. That’s why Rahm was comfortable jumping. The money is well worth not being able to tee it up in the Texas Open or John Deere Classic, because he wasn’t going to play those anyway.

Now he gets to play a few fun 54-hole events in his shorts while listening to music and prepare for the majors how he sees fit. Which is better prep, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas pleasing sponsors at lesser tournaments or Rahm and Koepka dialing everything in for Augusta? I believe the latter, and last year’s leaderboard kind of bore that out.

We are in an age where professional golf and professional wrestling seem to have merged, complete with Mickelson’s heel turn and Monahan’s hypocrisy. Just give me the action inside the ropes and I am fine, I am one of the few who watched Sunday’s thrilling showdown between Denny McCarthy and Akshay Bhatia, but I have to admit that the drama outside the ropes adds to it.

The dead dinosaurs under Saudi Arabia allow them to buy anything they want — including golfers, boxers and soccer players — but they haven’t been able to meet the price to purchase Augusta National Golf Club just yet.

I am a man without a country or religion, but I don’t want to see the Public Investment Fund’s splurging pay off in a major champion.

Go, Rory.