After a sparkling third round 79, sponsor invite Charley Hoffman met with media to clarify his various charges against the rules, governing bodies and PGA Tour. It’s quite a bizarre transcript.
While I realize we’re talking about someone who will never be confused as a former Oxford and Cambridge man, a few things become clear after reading Hoffman’s remarks. If you are paired with him, watch him like a hawk. And if this is the best the PGA Tour can do for its Policy Board when all bright hands are needed on deck, the future is not bright.
Q. Things often get sort of lost on social media, so I just wanted to ask what you really meant with the Instagram last night.
CHARLEY HOFFMAN: What I meant and what I said, I mean I think I explained it fairly well, but obviously not a huge fan of the USGA and how they govern us all the time.
“Govern us all the time.”
The perfectionist who tries to play golf for a living usually ends up saying to hell with it. I'm a perfectionist, and I had some success, but only because I was persistent and had some talent. In the end the game ate me up inside, and I retired earlier than a lot of guys do. Perfectionists are determined to master things, and you can never master golf. TOM WEISKOPF
I’m not going to quibble with Nickelodeon’s success in reimagining live sports in a way that’s fun for the kids since their NFL reviews have been glowing slime green.
Still, I’m not envisioning a scenario where the Lords of Augusta
Brian Steinberg of Variety reports on Nickelodeon teaming up with producer Bryan Zuriff of The Match fame, Excel Sports and players like Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas and Lexi Thompson to bring us the Slime Cup. The final “match” will be played in the Rose Bowl and the winner is to receive a Slime Green jacket .
“We are inventing our own golf match,” says Brian Robbins, president and CEO of Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon, in an interview. “It’s definitely different.”
Confirmed participants include: top-ranked professional golfers like Jon Rahm, Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas and Lexi Thompson; NFL superstars, Saquon Barkley and Justin Herbert; Terry Crews; and Nick stars Isaiah Crews, Kate Godfrey, Jaidyn Triplett and Tyler Wladis. Nickelodeon’s Gabrielle Nevaeh Green, who has provided commentary for the network’s Wild Card game-casts, will do the same for “Slime Cup.” Other participants could be named at a later date.
The Desert Sun’s Larry Bohannan considers the latest players v. brass showdown in golf. He highlights some of the differences between the last 1960’s battle the players had with the PGA of America that led to the breakaway PGA Tour and brings up a key point.
While the stakes and issues have changed—no TikTok and NFT’s back then—Bohannan notes that this time the leadership has listened and made adjustments with more money that comes in going out to players. While it’s debatable whether PIP’s and Comcast Biz Solutions Top 10’s do much to make the sport more fan friendly, they have satisfied some players into supporting the PGA Tour model.
However, something else may be driving player thinking (or greed?).
Mickelson’s point is that images of Mickelson, or any player playing in a tour event, are controlled by the PGA Tour. If you want to use a photo of a PGA Tour player for commercial purposes, well, the PGA Tour controls that image, not the player. So the tour has to be paid for use of the image.
That might seem normal, since other sports have similar regulations. But in a day when college athletes are making hundreds of thousands of dollars since the U.S. Supreme Court announced it is the athletes that control their name, image and likeness, should PGA Tour players have the right to control their NIL rights, or is that something the tour must control to operate successfully?
Golf.com’s James Colgan spoke to multiple PGA Tour executives who took issue with Phil Mickelson’s “obnoxious greed” remarks from that liberal democracy, Saudi Arabia. But at least he signed his name to his opinions even if they suggest he’s only about the money at this point.
A rebuttal was surely warranted given some obvious fibs and exaggerations by Mickelson. Yet not finding one Tour executive willingly going on the record highlights how much the organization is all bluff and no backbone.
Just like giving players waivers to play in Saudi Arabia with almost no meaningful strings, rebutting anonymously only says to the world: Phil was wrong but not wrong enough to sign our names to it.
Regarding the Global Home’s return volleys, Colgan writes:
In conversations with GOLF.com, PGA Tour executives painted a far different picture of the economics of golf’s largest professional tour, characterizing it as a highly successful, multi-billion-dollar business model built around its media-rights deals — and with constituents who’ve largely been content with that structure. (It should also be noted that the Tour operates as a federally registered non-profit, which means though it donates large sums to charity it also is sheltered from paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes.)
And let me make myself clear on desert golf. I don’t just not like it. I despise it. The courses are all the same. Fairways meandering through phony mounds and airlifted boulders, papier mâché mountains in the distance, slow greens, fake waterfalls, decorator palm groves, Brooke Shields lagoons, reptile exhibits and much cactus can you do? DAN JENKINS as Bobby Joe Grooves
And let me make myself clear on desert golf. I don’t just not like it. I despise it. The courses are all the same. Fairways meandering through phony mounds and airlifted boulders, papier mâché mountains in the distance, slow greens, fake waterfalls, decorator palm groves, Brooke Shields lagoons, reptile exhibits and much cactus can you do? DAN JENKINS as Bobby Joe Grooves
Congrats to the man who's covered some of the great golf images in the modern era.
Bill Fields, the PGA of America’s lifetime achievement award winner in journalism, saluted David Cannon at The Albatross. And Brian Wacker profiled Cannon a few years ago and it’s worth checking out.
DAVID CANNON TO RECEIVE PGA OF AMERICA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN PHOTOJOURNALISM
Cannon’s career to be celebrated on May 18 at PGA Championship in Tulsa, Oklahoma
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. (Feb. 8, 2022) — The PGA of America today named David Cannon of Sussex, England as the second recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Photojournalism. Cannon and his work will be celebrated on May 18 in the leadup to the 2022 PGA Championship at Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Tour pros would rather go through an IRS audit than play in a pro-am. Publicly they say they love meeting interesting people and how great the pro-ams are. In truth, they loathe them. They're out there for six hours, see countless bad shots and hear the same stale jokes. If Tim Finchem announced next Monday that pro-ams were henceforth eliminated, he'd find 200 cases of champagne on his porch Tuesday morning. TOM WEISKOPF
Golf.com’s Michael Bamberger assessed Phil Mickelson’s attack of the PGA Tour and majors making money off the player backs and suggests Lefty’s never talked better but also may be going about this the wrong way. In making his point, Bamberger also inadvertently hinted at another potential problem Mickelson created for himself.
The fellas playing MLB, in the NFL and in the NBA, have an appealing level of individuality, but they are union workers playing team sports. They have, really, a completely different mentality.
If Mickelson really wants to affect change the most effective thing he could do is get 150 or so Tour players to stage a sit-down strike on the eve of, say, the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Then get that group to agree on media rights, purse distribution, governance structure and a million other things.
Good luck with that.
There has been some talk about Phil getting Tony Romo money to talk golf on TV. He’d be good at that, but it would bore him. It’s easier to imagine him as the commissioner of a golf league. Which one is hard to say just now.
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
It seems to me that a mad puppy threatens golfers. The gentility that wants its course called a “championship course”. I am not thinking of any particular course, but I hear this foolish phrase constantly used. Most courses are not fit for a championship, never will be fit for one, never will get one and nobody wants to see one there. Then, why in the name of goodness should we set up this nonsensical standard and then spoil our courses trying to live to it. BERNARD DARWIN
Pebble Beach in 80-degree weather with no wind howling off the Farallons, no clouds scudding in low and gray, no foaming surf crashing over the greens and fairways is like Samson shorn, Man o’ War limping, Muhammad Ali hanging on the ropes and bleeding. I can’t look. It’s enough to make you gnash your teeth when you see players hitting 4- and 5-irons to No. 17, to see them teeing off with 3-woods on 18 and in general insulting the course as if it were some pitch-and-putt in Chillicothe. It’s like seeing the USS Missouri aground, the Titanic hanging off an iceberg. Golf at Pebble Beach was never meant to be a walk in the park, a dance with your sister, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. JIM MURRAY
Phil Mickelson’s “obnoxious greed” claims have not gone over well in a variety of ways, namely that he’s in Saudi Arabia collecting a hefty appearance fee from some pretty shady characters.
His comments were posted on Golf Digest’s Instagram account and earned this reply from Brooks Koepka:
DK if I’d be using the word greedy if I’m Phil…�”
The Daily Mail offered this headline to Derek Lawrenson’s story, which ran for some time on its home sports page.
After his opening 67 in the PIFSIPSIA, Mickelson was sort of asked about his comments to Golf Digest.
Q. There's a lot of buzz this week; is the sport itself the true nature, the competition, something to lose, to gain?
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