It’s been a weird week in the world of golf, with the inaugural LIV Golf event teeing off today in England as the PGA Tour announced immediate suspensions for all participants who are or were members.
That includes Phil Mickelson, who hadn’t played a competitive round since writer Alan Shipnuck published incendiary quotes Mickelson gave him about the entire LIV enterprise. The firestorm over Mickelson’s words led to Phil losing most of his sponsorship deals, although he might have lost a lot of it anyway once he officially joined the Saudi-backed upstart league. (A loss that outweighed by the reported $200 million figure he received for joining.)
While the streaming broadcast was interesting in a few ways (most notably the amount of golf shown and the potential effectiveness of a shotgun start format for presentation purposes), the entire enterprise is so obviously a shameless cash grab by aging and/or irrelevant players in service of washing the image of an autocratic regime that it’s hard to describe any part of it as “fun.”
Which leads us to after Mickelson’s round, when Shipnuck himself was preemptively asked to leave by security officials.
Well, a couple of neckless security dudes just physically removed me from Phil Mickelson's press conference, saying they were acting on orders from their boss, whom they refused to name. (Greg Norman? MBS? Al Capone?) Never a dull moment up in here.
— Alan Shipnuck (@AlanShipnuck) June 9, 2022
Video of a portion of the incident emerged later, including a revealing look at who was standing directly behind Shipnuck throughout:
Here's a snippet of video of @AlanShipnuck getting removed from Phil Mickelson's post-round interview this evening at the LIV event outside of London. Not shown: one of the security guards twice putting hands on Alan, who on both occasions said, "Do not touch me." Video by @CNN https://t.co/zQRTKfUNwd pic.twitter.com/r5jj0ysibe
— Fire Pit Collective (@firepitstories) June 9, 2022
Amusingly, Shipnuck actually contacted Norman about the incident before knowing Greg had been standing there throughout, and in typical Norman fashion, he tried to pretend he wasn’t aware of it:
You cannot make this shit up! I texted Greg Norman before someone sent me this video – I had no idea he was lurking behind me. pic.twitter.com/thgdMlfTAR
— Alan Shipnuck (@AlanShipnuck) June 9, 2022
Just incredible stuff there. It’s a perfect example of how all of this is such a mismanaged operation; whether Shipnuck was booted due to Phil’s insistence or because Norman wanted to make some kind of point, it’s still very, very bad strategy. (In addition to being fairly bad optics; manhandling journalists is probably the sort of behavior LIV is supposed to be pushing OUT of people’s minds when they think of the Saudi government.)
Shipnuck, to that point, had simply been tweeting Mickelson’s round. Trying to kick him out like this, and then playing dumb when asked about it, is guaranteed to make it a much bigger story than it otherwise would have been.
This sort of blundering bullying is exactly what you’d expect, though, from everything that’s happened so far with LIV.
[image via Twitter]
