Dirt: LIV laugh love
The agony and ecstasy of Phil Mickelson.
Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.
Drew Millard unpacks the golf drama you didn’t know you cared about.
Starting a new sports league is hard. You’ve got to tweak the presentation and rules of your sport in a way that differentiates it from its other extant major leagues. You’ve got to work out broadcast deals, sell some ads, and generate some buzz in the media. And, perhaps most importantly, you have to figure out a way to lure in enough top-tier talent that the product itself is compelling once all the noise dies down.
Of course, having a bunch of money to throw around tends to grease the wheels of this whole process, which probably explains why a new professional golf circuit called LIV Golf plans to spend $2 billion building itself up over the next two years. Ostensibly, the league is being led by its commissioner Greg Norman, a retired golfer who dominated the sport in the years before Tiger Woods hit the scene, but it’s more accurate to say that he’s a frontman for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, who are directly backing LIV. (BTW, LIV is the Roman numeral for 54; it’s pronounced “live,” as if it were a verb, because why not.)
Now, an already rich guy taking a well-paying job from a shady entity does not make you especially evil in this world, or even especially special. But there’s something disconcerting or even sinister about LIV Golf that differentiates it from your run-of-the-mill Series A-stage founder with big dreams and flexible morals. Some of it has to do with Norman’s entire vibe — as a deeply tanned Australian one-percenter nicknamed “The Shark” who likes to hang out on yachts, he’s more similar to a James Bond villain than he isn’t — as well as the level of extremely direct involvement on the part of the Saudis. Critics of the league call it the latest example of the kingdom’s practice of “sportswashing” — i.e., doing a bunch of cool sports stuff in order to distract from its numerous human rights abuses.
Though it’s only been a thing since June 9, LIV has already poached a gaggle of P.G.A. players, including notable names such as Dustin Johnson, who looks like a haggard Bradley Cooper and was the highest ranked golfer in the world until a couple years ago, long-hitting superstar Bryson DeChambeau, notably slow-playing tactician Kevin Na, and Pat Perez, a fan favorite who is extremely “fun” in that he collects sneakers, is sponsored by Bill Murray’s golf clothing company, and really loves classic rock.
But no defection to LIV Golf has stung the P.G.A. more than Phil Mickelson’s.
It is impossible to overstate how much Mickelson means to professional golf. He spent years playing an ever-reliable foil to Tiger Woods, always giving Tiger a run for his money but never actually beating him when it counted (namely, in Major championships). After Woods hit a slight slump in the early-mid-2000s thanks to a swing overhaul spurred by a knee injury, Mickelson won the first major of his 13-year career at the 2004 Masters, and as Tiger weathered injuries and public scandals, often taking large swaths of time away from the game, Mickelson came into his own, winning the P.G.A. Championship, the British Open, and two more Masters in a ten-year span.
Recently, Mickelson has evolved into something of a Tom Brady figure in golf, using everything from intermittent fasting to pulsed electromagnetic-field therapy to CBD gum to turn himself into an ageless wonder who’s capable of winning Majors against players who hadn’t been born when he turned pro. He was also a darling of the golf media, cracking jokes and speaking his mind at a time when professional athletes were receiving media training in order to become as boring as possible in public. Which is to say: Mickelson knew how to win, and he knew how to do it with pizzazz.
Or at least that’s the nice way of saying it. The other way of saying it is that Mickelson’s spent his career in the shadow of an objectively superior player, has a history of cheating at golf, has the personality of a lesser Barstool Sports podcaster, and golf writers only put up with his bullshit because he’ll actually talk to them. Either way, Mickelson’s entire career seemed to come to a head in February, when the biographer Alan Shipnuck published parts of a late 2021 interview with Phil in which he revealed that he had taken an active involvement in crafting the operating agreement for a then-unnamed LIV Golf, and that despite being well-aware that the Saudi regime was full of “scary motherfuckers” who “have a horrible record on human rights” and “execute people over there for being gay,” the league presented “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
His beef with the P.G.A.? It was over motherfuckin’ crypto, baby. “The Tour is sitting on multiple billions of dollars worth of NFTs,” he told Shipnuck, going on to seemingly describe his wish for a pro golf version of NBA Top Shot that must have seemed like a way better idea last year than it does now. “They always want more and more,” Mickelson, the second-highest-earning golfer of all time, said of the P.G.A. “Their ego won’t allow them to make the concessions they need to.”
Between framing his willingness to collaborate with people he admitted were human rights abusers as A Labor Issue, Actually, and openly talking shit about the Tour, Mickelson had suddenly found himself in a situation he couldn’t get himself out of with a one-liner or a demonstration of his legendary flop shot technique. He ceased all activity on his usually lively social media feeds, signing off by posting a non-apology-apology claiming his statements were off-record and taken out of context (as far as I can tell, neither of these things are true) and stating that he was going to take some time away from golf to “prioritize the ones I love most and work on being the man I want to be.”
In the not-particularly-progressive world of professional golf, a couple months of radio silence could have, and probably should have, rehabilitated Phil. And yet, just before he was scheduled to make a comeback at the P.G.A. Championship in May, Phil doubled down on his previous statements in the dumbest and most 2022 way possible: by liking, and then swiftly unliking, a pair of Tweets defending him that had been posted by randos. (As Golf.com pointed out, he wasn’t tagged in them which strongly suggests he came across them by doing some name-searching.)
Within days of people noticing, he withdrew from the tournament, and wasn’t heard from again until June 7, when he hopped back online to announce that he had been going to therapy, and that he was, in fact, joining LIV Golf, and would be playing in its first event, scheduled for June 9 to 11 in London. After shooting a first-round 69 on Friday the 9th, Phil’s scores climbed upwards as the weekend wore on. He finished the tournament tied for 33rd place out of the 48-golfer field, managing to best randos such as the Australian journeyman Bernd Weisberger and the 15-year-old amateur Ratchanon “TK” Chantananuwat by a single stroke.
Though the P.G.A. has suspended its defecting members, including Mickelson, from playing in its tournaments, the P.G.A. doesn’t actually run its Majors — i.e., the only tournaments that people really care about — meaning that for now, the LIV Golf squad can compete in them. So just days after his inauspicious showing in London, Mickelson was back in America for the U.S. Open, sitting in the media room fielding reporters’ questions about LIV Golf and Saudi Arabia.
After coming back this month, Mickelson has become taciturn and guarded with the media, delivering canned answers to increasingly probing questions, including those regarding an open letter from a group of 9/11 survivors and widows/widowers harshly criticizing the P.G.A. players who defected. “I have deep, deep empathy for [those who lost loved ones in 9/11],” Mickelson said at a pre-Open press conference, a response which one 9/11 widow called “insulting.” No matter the circumstances, if you didn’t have anything to do with 9/11 and yet you find yourself apologizing for it, then you have already lost.
On first blush, all of this feels fairly straightforward: Greedy rich golfers bad; P.G.A. and 9/11 families good, etc. But the fact that the P.G.A. has responded to the very existence of LIV Golf by throwing suspensions at the players who join it smacks of anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior. It’s certainly not because of their moral qualms (Mickelson, for example, has been sponsored by ExxonMobil since 2004.) And while Phil Mickelson is insanely rich, there are weeks on Tour where lesser-known players struggle to earn more than their expenses — having more monetary control over their own images might legitimately make a difference in their financial lives. A better tactic on P.G.A.’s part would be to simply ignore the league — instead, they’ve added to the buzz.
After all, minus the pizzazz and overproduced promotional videos that are inexplicably narrated by Dennis Quaid, LIV Golf’s cast of aging legends, goofballs, also-rans, and never-quite-made-its feels less like pro golf’s answer to the UEFA Champions League and more akin to a big-budget version of Ice Cube’s Big3 basketball league, which offers players like Joe Johnson, Nate Robinson, Nick “Swaggy P” Young, and Rashad Lewis — fan draws who’ve nevertheless lost a step — a chance to compete alongside global players and their fellow former NBA-ers. Big3 isn’t trying to be a competitor to the NBA as much as it’s a soft landing, an alternative to full-on retirement or leaving one’s home to go play in Europe or Asia. Plus, you might get a chance to hang out with Ice Cube, who is objectively cool. But if you sign up with LIV Golf, the best you can hope for is to go swimming with a shark.
— Drew Millard