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.

Video of a portion of the incident emerged later, including a revealing look at who was standing directly behind Shipnuck throughout:

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:

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]

About Jay Rigdon

Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.