Brandel Chamblee Not Backing Down After Being Called a ‘Paid Actor’ for LIV Golf Criticism: LIV Players Are ‘Used for the Benefit of Some Very Bad People’
Rich Graessle/AP
The Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee doubled down on his criticism of LIV Golf in response to Brooks Koepka’s coach calling him a “paid actor.”
Chamblee drew the ire of Claude Harmon III — a swing instructor who most recently worked with Koepka — when he opposed the idea of Koepka joining the U.S. team for the Ryder Cup. Koepka, one of the world’s top golfers, left the PGA for LIV. Since then, however, he’s continued to compete in and win PGA events, including the recent PGA Championship.
If Koepka stayed loyal to the PGA, his placement on the team wouldn’t even be up for debate. Because he now competes for the rival company, Chamblee argued it would “elevate” and “legitimize” LIV if he competed in the Ryder Cup.
Despite the name-calling from Harmon, Chamblee is unwavering in his stance.
“To raise the question whether LIV has been good for the PGA Tour is to miss the very human and most important point of the whole issue of sportswashing,” he said in a lengthy tweet. “It is bad for the people who continue to be oppressed by the man who funds LIV Golf. And as I have said many times, like the pollution that hangs over our biggest cities, its darkness is better seen from a distance and its stench is too easily dismissed as the smell of commerce. It poisons and dulls our sensibilities making it easy to forget that many a bad movement owes its greater success to the apathy of conformism.
“So while Brooks Koepka’s win at the PGA Championship was impressive, it should not distract us from the simple fact that LIV players are being used for the benefit of some very bad people and to the detriment of a great many more good people. That LIV Golf, with its inability to develop stars and seeking to buy them like high performance cars, is undermining the dignity intrinsic in golf.”
Chamblee also denied the notion that his comments come from any higher-ups, claiming “no one for whom I work with or for has ever tried to influence what I am going to say.”
“This is where the debate crashes headfirst into the nexus of politics, sports and narcissistic greed,” he said. “Where those who want to escape it most often cloy at whataboutisms, to stop the discussion with a pejorative accusation because they don’t want their motives to be discovered.”
