‘Welfare check’ on Brandel? Here are Chamblee’s questions on Saudi deal

On the morning of Tuesday, June 6, golf’s most recent major champion took to Twitter for a four-word slam dunk.

“Welfare Check on Chamblee,” wrote Brooks Koepka on Twitter.

There’s a book’s worth of backstory to this one, but the high points are the following:

1. Koepka and Chamblee have traded back-and-forths for years; their rivalry dates back some half-decade, predating even Koepka’s history with Bryson DeChambeau, and includes dismissive commentary from Chamblee and clown-nose photoshops from Koepka.

2. Chamblee has been particularly outspoken against the rise of LIV and those players — including Koepka — who made the decision to leave the PGA Tour and join. He has repeatedly decried the source of LIV’s backing; the controversial startup is funded by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund (PIF).

3. On Tuesday, the PGA Tour announced it was entering into a business agreement with that very same PIF, unleashing a news cycle that asked far more questions than it answered, including the following: What’s LIV’s future? and Who’s in charge of professional golf?

There was also a related question, one that Koepka was indirectly asking. Now that the PGA Tour was getting tied into that same controversial source of funding, how would the anti-LIV contingent respond? What would Brandel Chamblee say?

Golf Channel threw down a marathon day of news coverage; our James Colgan reported the network went more than eight hours without a commercial break. As for Chamblee? He referred to it as “one of the saddest days in the history of professional golf.” He added that he was “hugely disappointed” in PGA Tour leadership and the brokering of a deal that had come out of nowhere. He wondered how Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy felt about it all. He wondered about the integrity of the Tour going forward.

“I would imagine this is going to be a very hard and long day for Jay Monahan,” he concluded.

But after a couple days passed and Chamblee learned more about the potential deal, he seemed to recharge and get a handle on the situation to the point where he went back on the offensive. That included a rebuttal to Koepka.

“The fact that they thought it was cause for celebration was quite humorous, on the LIV side. I just don’t think they’re that bright,” he said on Rich Eisen’s show. “Because if the deal goes through, It will lead to the destruction of LIV, which means that their boss, their avenue back to the PGA Tour, is Jay Monahan.”

We’ll get back to the question of who exactly is in charge in a moment, but first more artillery from Chamblee:

“So Phil and Brooks and Bryson, I just don’t think they fully understand the ramifications of this deal,” he said. “If it goes through, they’re out of a job. They’ll have no place to play other than the major championships, who haven’t really made any movement to thwart LIV players. They have different parameters. But their avenue back to golf is going to be a highly penalized one, to play the PGA Tour. And they wouldn’t have done their case any favors with their gloating on social media.”

Chamblee also didn’t let Monahan off the hook — “not at all,” he wrote — but seemed more empathetic to the Tour’s decision. He declared that it would have been “next to impossible” for Monahan to anticipate the PIF would enter the golf space as such an irrational economic actor. Still, he supported the idea that the PGA Tour was still in charge.

Eisen pushed back on that.

“The Saudis bought golf,” he said, a line that’s been repeated in many corners with regards to the deal.

Chamblee isn’t so sure. The first goal of the agreement, he said, was to put an end to the lawsuits. The second was to create a partnership that would include the end of LIV. He thinks this will do both.

“The PGA Tour is in a control position. What PIF is doing; they’re investing in the PGA Tour for a company that for right now only exists in the ether. It has no outline, no goals, no direction. It may end up being some team events somewhere in the far reaches of the world. But it’s not going to be competing against the PGA Tour. Not in America.”

Even though he said he remained “disgusted” by the source of the money, Chamblee acknowledged the Tour may have been in an untenable position. He gave the Tour’s decision-makers credit for having golf’s best interests in mind, in contrast to Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the PIF lead in the agreement.

But Chamblee also fed into another theory floating around the new deal: It won’t go through.

“If it’s not blocked by the player board, it will likely be blocked by the DOJ, and if not that regulatory committee, the senate … and then the regulatory review of the EU and equivalent bodies in Asia. This is a long way from being a done deal,” he wrote on Twitter.

News

Then came Friday, when Chamblee synthesized all of the above in a 407-word tweet that asked some questions, answered some others, decried the derision directed at Monahan and dealmakers Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy, made reference to the movie Sully, ripped LIV defectors for the “soulless narcissistic greed” they exhibited and acknowledged that give the situation this may have been the “best possible scenario,” even as he lamented the entire situation. Here’s that tweet, for your scrolling convenience:

Chamblee’s Tweet:

It’s been a busy few days with news of the proposed PGA Tour/LIV merger and trying to both understand it and divine out if it does, in fact, mean the Saudis own professional golf.

It raises a great many questions, such as:

Why a tour that seemed to have the upper hand would merge with a tour that was beset with waning interest and seemed to be out of ideas?

How can a majority investor in a company not have the controlling position?

What proportion of this merger was driven by discovery and what was driven by economics?

Did the PGA Tour really not have any other economic solutions?

If the merger doesn’t go through because it is blocked by the Player Board or regulatory agencies, will the PGA Tour and the Saudis still find a way to be in business together and will LIV still die?

What does Yasir Al-Rumayyan even know about golf and since the likely answer to that question is, not much, why is he ON THE BOARD?

Given that the terms of the deal are so opaque it’s hard to know, with any certainty, the answers to these questions.

I do know that the derision being directed at the deal makers, PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, Jimmy Dunne and Ed Herlihy seems somewhat unfounded given the legal and economic realities they were likely dealing with. And to whatever degree they are guilty of selling out to the Saudis it pales in comparison to the soulless narcissistic greed of those players who defected to the Saudi league and in doing so gave LIV leverage and sent professional golf into a tailspin.

It’s likely that the PGA tour, like Captain Sully landing that plane in the Hudson, made the best of a very bad situation.

If it leads to the destruction of LIV, doesn’t disrupt the philanthropic foundation of the tour and neither diminishes the meritocratic appeal of the professional game nor dims the legacy of past and present players (excepting of course those who defected to LIV), as unconscionable as the source of the money is, given the irreparable harm the defectors caused the game this deal may have been the best possible scenario.

Regardless, the PGA Tour is now in bed with the Saudis and with the exception of the long ago days when the tour had exclusionary clauses within its bylaws, it’s hard to imagine a sadder scenario for professional golf.

Why does any of this matter? For one, it matters because Chamblee is among the most influential — if occasionally controversial — voices in the professional game. But it also matters because of what it reveals about the situation itself. For now, at least, there’s enough ambiguity in the result of this agreement and the future of the game that everybody can claim a win. Koepka. LIV. Phil Mickelson. Jimmy Dunne. The question of who is in control going forward remains, for now, unresolved.

Chamblee isn’t claiming a win at all. But he’s made it clear he has no intention of going away, either. Friday’s tweet came with a sidenote that it was sent from Beverly Hills, Calif., the site of next week’s U.S. Open. That suggests Chamblee is already on site — and in preparation mode.

Golf Channel’s Live From will be must-watch TV next week, one of his followers suggested.

“Not sure if we will have much to talk about,” Chamblee replied.