MIAMI — Phil Mickelson often fancies himself to be one of, if not the, smartest people in whatever room he’s in. He thinks his brain is as big as his calves and as smart as his wit, and throughout his career the six-time major winner has never been afraid to speak his mind, for better or worse.
The recent news that the Official World Golf Ranking had rejected LIV Golf’s application for points has only stoked the flames of his fiery personality, and the 53-year-old opened about his thoughts on the ruling ahead of the 2023 LIV Golf Team Championship on Wednesday at Trump National Doral.
“I think that the majors need to protect their product, and there’s probably other ways that they can do that by creating slots,” said Mickelson, joining the chorus of players like Bryson DeChambeau who want majors to create LIV exemptions. “If they want to make sure they have the best fields in golf, they could create vehicles for players on LIV to play in majors where they don’t have to use the OWGR, which would undermine the TV contract and revenue of the PGA Tour if they gave points to LIV.”
“But I do want to bring to light as to why exactly they are doing what they are doing. It’s not what they are putting out there on the front page,” Mickelson said of the OWGR. “There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes as to the importance of us to the getting points to the PGA Tour.”
MORE: The ranking points row exposes what powers LIV Golf beyond Saudi cash — naked entitlement
Mickelson spent a lot of time on social media last week peddling his thoughts on why the OWGR rejected LIV’s application. The Associated Press reported the reason for the rejection was the OWGR was unable to compare the 48-player, 54-hole, shotgun start, no-cut events with the other 24 tours under its world ranking wing. Also stated to be of concern were the qualifying and relegation methods employed by LIV Golf.
The captain of the HyFlyers and one of LIV’s loudest proponents wasn’t having it.
“I’m just bringing like facts to life as to like why that’s happening,” said Mickelson. “But really, we as a group, as a league that’s trying to grow the game and bring it globally and promote the game throughout the world, as well as bring something different than the old, stodgy format that we’ve had for decades, we just need to focus on what we are doing and make our product as good as possible, as interesting as possible. We need to make tweaks into our program. The OWGR need to obviously make tweaks but we need to tweak our format to continue to evolve and be more interesting and easier to understand.”
“We have enough on our plate to make our product more and more exciting and appealing that we shouldn’t worry ourselves with what they are doing,” said Mickelson, who wouldn’t lift the curtain for a peek at what those changes may be.
“Well, we have a lot of ideas internally and I think we should keep that there because we still have to do not only — we might have ideas but we have to see if they are good ideas, if they are going to work,” explained Mickelson, which led to a few smirks from his colleagues around the room. “It’s important that we continue to evolve our product, our presentation. This was kind of the idea at the beginning. Like we thought, okay, we’ll have the team championship, we’ll have the individual part. But all of that is flexible and should be evolved so that based on fans’ needs and wants, as well as television and other entities, so it’s easier to understand and becomes more appealing.”
LIV does have a promotional event in the works for December to aid in its (somewhat of a) promotion/relegation system. Don’t forget about the out-of-nowhere deal with the developmental MENA Tour, either. Those are just two examples of how the league has proven it will take drastic steps to earn world ranking points for its players, and Mickelson’s comments point to further moves in the future. For now, we wait.
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