PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – Golf Channel commentator Brandel Chamblee is never one to hold back with his opinions. But he delivered a doozy, even for him, while discussing Rory McIlroy and his recent comments about the Premier Golf League, a potential rival league to the PGA Tour with financial backing tied to Saudi Arabia.
“I think he just pointed out the flaws in what it would mean to take the money, and the flaws would be that these Tour players are called independent contractors. If you’re lucky enough to ascend to a place on the PGA Tour, I can’t think of another – I can’t think of anything else in life where nobody gets to tell you what to do,” Chamblee said. “The Tour can’t tell you what to do. You can fire your caddie if you don’t like the pants he’s wearing, and they do it. Ed Fiori famously fired his caddie. ‘Why did you do it?’ (He said), ‘I don’t know, I just got tired of looking at him.’ Managers kowtow to you, the Tour kowtows to you, caddies kowtow to you. Nobody tells a Tour player what to do.”
“Well, maybe their wife,” interjected fellow Golf Channel analyst and former Players champion Justin Leonard.
“Fair point, but at least nobody in the business world, outside of their wife, gets to tell them what to do,” Chamblee said. “You find me another sport where they have that autonomy, and now all of a sudden they are no longer autonomous, they are beholden, and not only are they beholden, they’re beholden to people that in my estimation are not unlike a drug cartel.
“You’re talking about the most egregious acts against humanity. These people put homosexuals in bags and throw them off buildings for sport. They chop up journalists. So every morning you’d have to look in the mirror and go, ‘Do I really like where this money is coming from? Am I not somewhat complicit? Am I not being a ventriloquist? Am I not sort of being a part of the euphemizing of these atrocities?’ And you’ve got one guy to stand out and say these are the problems here. Yeah, there’s a lot of money, but there’s a lot of existential baggage that comes with that.
“And he thought it through, and he said – it was a beautiful line: ‘I wasn’t really happy with where the money is coming from.’ And that one line, that one line is his brilliance. ‘I wasn’t really happy with where the money is coming from,’ because think about that philosophical question. Somebody comes to you and says, ‘I’m going to pay you 10 times the money you’re making to do the exact same job, but with it comes a little baggage,’ and then we all sort of hedge a little bit here and a little bit here, and the next thing you know you don’t care if they’re throwing homosexuals off of buildings for sport, chopping people up and killing them because they changed their religion. I applaud the man. What he does on the golf course is one thing, but what he did in the media center, I mean, that’s rarer than the athletic skill that he has.”
Andy Gardiner, the Premier Golf League’s CEO, has previously stated that the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, which invests on behalf of the Saudi government, is one of the primary financial engines of the startup.
It should be noted that Chamblee’s employer, Golf Channel and NBC, just signed a nine-year deal to continue as one of the chief broadcast partners of the PGA Tour.
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