[ad_1]
Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee, who has ripped Phil Mickelson in the past, was not buying the star golfer’s apology on Tuesday.
“The statement was six paragraphs,” Chamblee said in a Golf Channel interview. The first paragraph was about him pretending to be a victim. The second paragraph was about him pretending to be an activist. The third and fourth paragraphs were spin damage control about him getting paid either now or certainly in the future, when you consider he wrote the Saudi operating agreement for this tour.
“The last two paragraphs were him reminding everyone that he’s a good guy.”
The 51-year-old Mickelson caused an uproar last week when author Alan Shipnuck released an excerpt from his upcoming unauthorized biography of the six-time major champion. Mickelson described the Saudis as “scary” in the excerpt published on the Fire Pit Collective, but said he was looking past their controversial history of human rights violations by working with a Saudi-backed tour to gain leverage with the PGA Tour.
Chamblee, who also defended author Shipnuck against Mickelson’s charge that the statement he made was off the record, said golf is in a good place and disputed Mickelson’s contention the game desperately needs change.
“How does it (golf) desperately need change?” Chamblee said. “The game of golf is booming. [Golf manufacturers] for the first time ever are having to deal with supply. Do they have enough supply to furnish all those fans of the game of the game that are out there playing in record numbers. The PGA Tour is doing extraordinarily well.”
Here’s Mickelson’s full statement and apology:
Chamblee also said Mickelson, who also saw KPMG end his sponsorship deal with him, was being disingenuous and “playing the victim” in his statement about being “willing to take all the hits” to bring about change. Before the apology statement, Mickelson also had received criticism from top PGA Tour stars such as Rory McIlroy.
“Is it because there’s no professional golf tour on the landscape that is funded by arguably the most reprehensible regime in the world?” Chamblee said. “Is that how the game needs to change? I don’t think anybody thinks that’s how the game needs to change.
“That major stars of the PGA Tour need to abandon what is a very philanthropic tour that takes care of players from the time they get out of college until when they want to hang it up. …. I can’t imagine a tour that takes care of players from the beginning of their career until late into old age other than the PGA Tour; whereas the Saudi-backed tour is pretending they can just pick 30-40 players, statically, and that represents the best of the game.
“They have no feeder system for this tour and certainly when they start playing poorly, they’re will be gone.”
Chamblee said four out of the six paragraphs in the statement by Mickelson were spin and damage control.
“You can get just rid of the first two paragraphs,” he said. “You can get rid of the last two paragraphs. And really just focus on the third and fourth paragraphs, that’s what this statement was all about. It’s more about damage control with LIV Golf Investments. It was more about Phil having money and control and him working both sides of the street.”
Chamblee, who ripped Mickelson for playing in Saudi Arabia in 2019, said this is another instance where Mickelson was trying to have it both ways, comparing it the time Lefty took down Tom Watson after the U.S. Ryder Cup team’s loss to the Europeans in 2014.
Chamblee — who spoke out against Mickelson’s actions at the time — said Mickelson called him a few days later and the two talked for around 30 minutes, where “he told me all kinds of bad things about Tom Watson, trying to make the case that this was all Tom’s fault [and] certainly not his fault.”
“When I hung up I thought it was Phil at his manipulative best, trying to call me to put words in my mouth, so that I will not continue [to criticize him.],” Chamblee said. “What was I think even more telling after that, was that a week or two after that I began to hear other journalists essentially, almost verbatim, spitting out the very words that Phil had told me (about Watson), which made me think that Phil had probably called numerous journalists — again trying to working both sides of the room — so that he could come back wrap his arms around the Ryder Cup as if he were the triumphant savior.
“Meanwhile he’s the one that had been punching holes in the boat but he wanted to steer it into the harbor and act like he was the heroic captain.”
Later in the interview, Chamblee made notice of the one group that didn’t receive any apology — the PGA Tour.
“There was no effort to mend fences with the PGA Tour [in the statement],” Chamblee said. “He made quite an effort to mend fences with LIV Golf. Quite an effort there, because there it’s about money and control.”
Chamblee also said Mickelson has roughly a $250 million pension plan after he’s done playing and he wouldn’t be getting that in any Saudi-backed tour.
[ad_2]