I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a fried egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, Frida egg Egg, Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump.
Hello, and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today's episode asks the question have we learned the wrong lessons from Phil Mickelson's downfall? So, as you are no doubt aware, things have been moving quickly for Phil. He made headlines with some frankly wild comments about Saudi Arabia's efforts and golf. He got dropped by most of his major sponsors. He's been getting flak from golf media and even from some fellow PGA Tour pros.
A lot has happened, and if you've been following golf news lately, you've probably heard plenty about it, maybe too much so. In this episode, Andy Johnson and I try to give a fresh take on the whole situation. Now, we definitely aren't here to defend Phil or to say that he shouldn't face consequences for what he did and said, But we do want to explore what's motivating the backlash against him, and we also want to ask whether he
was saying anything that was worth listening to. This episode was partly inspired by an article I wrote for the Friday dot Com called Phil Mickelson and the Uses of Leverage. I'll put a link in the show notes, and if you're interested, check it out. All right, here's me and Andy. I think that where we should start is just where we are right now. Phil is being dropped sponsors.
He got dropped in the PIP standings too. Just out this morning, the morning of the recording, Wednesday morning, that he uh that he's finished number two in the PIP. After announcing a few months back that he won the PIP.
Toward the end of December, he sent out a tweet announcing his victory, even though reportedly the PIP calculations hadn't even been finished for twenty twenty one yet.
And then Tiger piled on this morning.
You know, yeah, well so that the PIP the full pip's stats were released today and Tiger obviously was number one. I don't know why there was any question that he would win it or not. I'm not sure if it was close, but you know, he's clearly gonna lead most of those categories just in terms of name recognition. He's the only golfer that a lot of people know. Phil Mickelson lags way behind him in terms of fame, but Phil was number two and so he got he got
plenty of money. I'm not sure how many millions he got. He didn't get the eight million.
Dollars top millions.
He's got six million. I think. I think that's a nice little chunk of change. And it sounds like Phil could maybe use some money at the moment. So I'm sure that any amount is welcome. But if people aren't familiar with what happened in the past couple of weeks, and you know, if you're following golf, then you're probably familiar with it. But he made some controversial, pretty shocking comments to Alan Schipnook about his involvement with the emerging
Saudi Golf League. He referred to the Saudis as scary mother efforts, but said that even though he was fully aware that this was a sports washing play, he used the term sports washing. I believe with Shipnook and even though he was fully aware of the abysmal human rights record that Saudi Arabia has, he was still willing to go along with us.
So once in a lifetime opportunity to reshape the PGA tour.
Exactly right, So human rights abuse is you know during journalists. Yeah, I get that, I get that, But what about reshaping the PGA tour? Okay, So, like these comments were, I mean, at least they seemed somewhat honest to a degree. That's maybe the only good thing that can be said about them. But obviously he just kind of laid out for everybody the moral failings of this entire enterprise, made it so clear, and so he got a lot of pushback.
Yeah, and this seemingly, this quote seemingly killed all the momentum that the league had. Obviously at the start of Riviera Week, it was all the talk. It was, you know, hey, this thing is going to happen. There are players that are signed, maybe even twenty players that are signed, and these comments came out and everything essentially crumbled around him.
Dustin Johnson put out a statement saying that he would stay on the PGA Tour for the time being. Bryce and Deshambeau stepped back from the Saudi who were Xander Shaffle even confusingly put out a statement that nobody was asking for that that he was not going to be on with the Super Golf League funded by Saudi Arabia. And so, yeah, it seems like this was a major setback for the Saudi League. But everything I've heard indicates
that it's still going to go forward. It just might not have some of the big names that it might have had before.
Yeah, it seems like, I mean that's the thing. Somebody with this william to spend billions of dollars, just doesn't give up because they first failed, you know.
Yeah, and they've hired all these people. There's this there's this emerging bureaucracy in place for the SGL and that's not going anywhere either. They're ready to do this. They're just not going to have Bryson to Shambeau and Dustin Johnson right away. They may have them later, you know, when it all calms down a little bit.
So you wrote a piece a little bit, I mean, everybody in the in the world's piling on Phil you know, and kind of celebrating the PGA Tour's great win. Your piece had a little bit different view. It was on the Frida egg dot com. If everybody wants to go read it, tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of what you gleaned from the situation.
Well, first of all, basically what convinced me to write the article was listening to what other people in the media and in the game were starting to say about the situation. And a lot of the blowback that Phil got was not necessarily about his involvement in the sportswashing enterprise,
which is I think the point of this. You know that that is the thing that was wrong here is that he was he was helping an oppress of government do its business knowingly, no, very knowingly, like he was fully aware of it, eyes wide open the whole time. That's what's objectionable here. But it seemed like that a lot of players, that a lot of members of the media, what was offensive to them was that he had betrayed
the PGA tour. And so the pushback on Phil wasn't so much we should reject this SGL because it is an amorl endeavor. It was we should reject the SGL because it's a threat to the PGA Tour. And this became especially clear to me when I heard what Brandal Shambly had to say on Golf Channel. There was, you know, a segment that he did after Phil released his so called apology that wasn't really apology. It was more of an extended self justification, an attempt to you know, men
some relationships that he had broken. But you know, Brandal said a lot of really persuasive things in this segment. He picked apart the statement, and I think in a really accurate way. He did mention that the Saudi Arabian government was not the entity to do business. He did mention those things, But the bulk of his commentary had to do with this betrayal of the PGA Tour, and he ended up saying, how does golf desperately need to change the game of golf is booming, the PGA Tour
is doing extraordinarily well. And then he went on to call the PGA Tour a very philanthropic tour that takes care of players from the time they get out of college until they want to hang it up. I can't imagine a tour that takes care of players from the beginning of their career into late age other than the etc. Etc. Etc. Obviously, Brandall Shambily's employer, Golf Channel, has a very close relationship with the PGA Tour. That became closer with the recent
media deal. And I started to realize that the reason that people were mad with Phil and were kind of shunning him in this moment wasn't that they wanted to reject sports washing and golf. It's that they wanted to prop up the PGA Tour.
You know, something I just thought of is on the Shotguns Start, we had seller shy on who's the lead producer of I hope I got that right. He's not executive. I think it's lead producers. The correct title of CBS Sports is Golf Broadcast, so what you watch on CBS. He's done a really good job. He's been in place for like a year. But we asked him about, you know, the idea, because his predecessor had talked about how they're a partner of the PGA Tour. It's a broadcast, you know,
not media. They aren't. You know, there's a very clear delineation between being a partner and being media. And you know, this thought just popped in my head when you were talking about it is is Golf Channel. They're a partner of the PGA Tour, and I think it's the same type of relationship there. You know, what's what's beneficial for the tour is beneficial for its partner. And I think that's the thing that everybody needs to keep in mind when when you're you know, with with these things, is
that that this is more of a partnership. This isn't a media relationship like a you know, there's no competing media organizations right there are partners and that's it.
A lot a lot of people have a lot to lose if the PGA Tour goes.
Down, exactly. And that's the thing is that Golf Channel. You know, that was a question that had started to brew up because it seemed like this was going to happen. Was like, wait, where's this going to be telecasted? Who has the rights? Like what's the rights to deal look like? And I think one of the things is that this threat of a competitor, whether it was the PGL off the BAT which later turned kind of into the SGL.
When you know, the initial rejection of the PGL, which was a couple of years ago, the premier Golf League. Part of their investor group was the Saudis, you know, and now you look back, it's like, well that was a lot better than everything being the Sadis. Which is what happened is the Saudis just stole the idea and put all their own money into it.
Well, it's hindsight's twenty twenty, you know, we like nobody could have predicted that the Saudis would break off and form their own, you know, version of the Premier Golf League.
Well, that's what happened. They got feedback and it was like, oh, get the Saudi Arabia money out of it, and they tried to do that, and then all of a sudden, you know, they just did it on.
Their own, and they have a lot less money now, you know. That's the That's the other problem is that the involvement of the Saudis gave them a lot of financial might the original Premier Golf League, and once the Saudis were out of it, it was they have a lot less of an advantage over the PGA Tour in that sense.
But I think you think about the last two years of this going on, the tour has changed a lot. We have the player what we talked about at the beginning, the Player Impact Program we have, you know, the potential for this NFT partnership that Phil talked about. With the PGA Tour, we've seen, you know, talks of doing different tournament formats and pushing in directions where the fall maybe we don't have all these tournaments that are consequential to
the FedEx Cup. There's all these changes that are being talked about. And what has done that is competition. Competition is a very good thing in every single industry. It makes companies better. If there's no competition, what happens is the big gorilla in the room becomes complacent. And I think that's a really good way to describe the PGA Tour for the last twenty.
Years is incredibly complacence.
Yes, And the people that have been hurt the most by the complacency of the tour is the fans. And I think that is very telling of the product that they put out. Like diehard golf fans love golf like they're gonna show up. Regardless whether they're like thrilled about showing up or not is different. But if they're really excited about showing up, you're gonna you're gonna broad the net. They're gonna people are gonna be like, wow, Like why does Andy want to watch golf so bad? You know?
And I think that's the thing that gets missed a little bit, especially with golf in this weird space where you don't really have owners that have financial interest in, you know, in the fans.
Right.
There's no owner that benefits from having sellouts at every single tour event, right or their tour event outside of these individual tournaments that don't really have much power. And because of that, the complacency can be at a at a level unseen in any other professional sport.
Really, And this is getting into what the main point of my article was, is that one thing that Phil was talking about to Alan Chipnook into other journalists that he spoke to in the past couple of months. Yeah, John Huggins Golf Digest article from early in February has gotten somewhat swamped by the subsequent quotes that Phil Ncholson
gave to Shipnook. But that John Huggen article on Golf Digest where Phil talked about the quote unquote obnoxious greed of the PGA Tour was pretty sensational too, and important for understanding where Mickelson is coming from, and part of where he's coming from is trying to create leverage against the PGA Tour. It is very, very difficult to change what the PGA tour is doing for a multitude of reasons,
some of which you just described. But one of the reasons it's so difficult to change what the PGA Tour is doing is that they're just not incentivized to do anything that might make the majority of its membership mad. And right now, the majority of its membership is not of the stature of Phil Mickelson. The majority of its membership is these kind of middling players. I mean, nobody who's on the PGA Tour is middling. They're all exceptional, but in terms of PGA tour players sort of also rans.
Their interest is in making as much money as possible, and right now the PGA tour system is designed to kind of overpay them. But the problem is nobody knows who these people are. They're being rewarded for no particular reason. And so what would be better for the fans is if there were a tour that serve the interests that serve the interests of the top players. A little bit more because the top players are who we want to see week in and week out. The top players are
the ones who actually drive interest in the game. We want to see those players reliably show up to tournaments and compete with each other and have rivalries with each other. But right now, the way the tour is, with all these tournaments spread out on just about every weekend of the year in order to give playing opportunities to the majority of PGA Tour members, it becomes just so hard to follow the season, and you just never know when
Roy McElroy, John Rahm, Colin Moore, kylewa Victor Hovlin. You don't know when these guys are all going to show up at the same tournament, and so it's just hard to keep track of the storylines. And even when there's a strong field, not everybody is there.
And the other thing is that you have these huge high points in the story of the season, and you can make an argument that some of the lowest of lows are in between them, those weeks between majors because none of the guys are playing.
And then there's the FedEx Cup playoffs, which are nothing, you know, like even players are starting to speak up about how lacking in juice the FedEx Cup playoffs are. Nobody wants them, nobody's interested in them. This should be a high point of the season, but it's not so.
The and this is I think the the I guess the substance of the SGL as a threat, you know, beyond once you get past the not so good humanitarian things, the bad humanitarian aspect.
Let's just pretend that this con is being put forward by the Premier Golf League without the Saudi backing.
Yeah, when you look at it from that sense, is like, oh, the playoffs like would be pretty cool if it was twenty events and the players were at all twenty events, Like you'd have some really cohesive storyline. I'm you know, it's going to be really interesting to compare it. Contrast the Netflix documentary with the F one stuff that they're doing. Obviously they're doing a F one Drive to Survive style documentary.
Is like, I just was going through my head, It is like, how do you do the F one stuff? If Hamilton and Verstapen aren't at every like that's the you know, overriding kind of big story, right, and if they just aren't at races, kills the story. There's no story.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean so it's become almost a cliche to compare Formula one to golf and talk about all the things that Formula one does better. But I think it's a really interesting comparison because the sports have quite a few similarities in the way that they're kind of individual sports with these interesting, sometimes kind of cranky characters who form rivalries with each other. But in F one, it's just twenty drivers. That's all you're following over the
course of the season. They're at every single race because they can't miss a race. If one of those drivers is not in the race, then that means that they're
injured or sick or something has happened. But they're at every single race, and so you get these great kind of season long dramas like we had last season with Verstappen and Hamilton, but also between the teams that are farther down the order that don't have as fast cars, there are rivalries between them too, and interesting characters that we as fans get to know over the course of the season because we're seeing them at every single race
and kind of getting familiar with their quirks and their relationships. With each other and all that stuff. Golf has absolutely none of that.
Yeah, and I think like the thing that you know, for golf, what's missing out? Right, we're talking about F one, but like what is missing out is that imagine last year, Right, You've got a guy like Ricky Fowler who's like on the down in a decline. His decline in a way gets muted because he's not everywhere. Right, It's like, okay, place here, He's not there, like it. It gets like diminished, like you kind of hear about it every month once, but the weeks in between when he plays mutes it.
And then on the other side of the coin, you've got a guy like Sam Burns who had like a meteoric rise and we got to the end of the year and everybody's like, oh what great year Sam Burns had, and people talked about it during but the same thing happened is like this guy coming like this young star is kind of trampled by these intermitten weeks when he's not playing, and these other pop up stories that are really a lot of times insignificant, like whoever won the
John Deere I can't remember, you know, whoever won the John Deere? Whoever won the three m Like, these things come in and they and they kind of trample down the big stories, the ones that people like that you can build on. And what it does is it really hinders the top players, which Phil has. I don't think he's gotten fully there to Maybe he has, but he wants.
The money, like he's motivated by the.
Money, the money, but he doesn't understand the harm that this does to the big stories which are generated by the big name players. Like why people don't like it's really hard, Like you ask somebody who's your favorite golfer A lot of times, like I my entire life, I've kind of just been like, I don't know, you know, outsided Tiger. It's like, you know Tiger, I don't know who else. And it's like, well, why you don't have
a feeling? Why don't you don't have Like a really easy answer is because these stories never get to volop fully.
And think about how much this would benefit somebody like Victor Hovland, who is tremendously likable, a great player and up and coming young but I feel like he has gotten the short end of the stick here in terms of public popularity because of the way the PGA Tour season is structured. He hasn't starred enough, he hasn't been put out front enough, he hasn't been given the opportunity to bring to people his engaging personality and his fun style.
Of play well. And then you also think, like a good example of this is Brooks Kopka right where Brooks Kepka, you know, he flew under the radar for a long time, felt like he was getting disrespected all the time, and then all of a sudden, you know, and people were like, well, he's a dial tone. He has nothing to say. Was what the general consensus on brooks Koepka was for years. Oh he's got nothing to say, and then all of a sudden one year he just comes out guns ablazon
with all these opinions. But it's just because he was actually given the opportunity to talk because he had become such a big star from all the major success and he had gotten passed, you know, and all of a sudden, then it's like, oh, this guy actually says stuff of substance like we have you know, this is it's unbelievable how blunt this guy is. Like he probably was pretty similar to that, but he just hasn't ever afforded the opportunity.
And this is someone very in the similar vein that had this meteoric rise but was drowned out by everything else going on, way too much stuff going on. It's like, you know, it's like, I imagine you probably could sympathize to this. When you edit something somebody sends you ten thousand words and you edit it down to three thousand words, it probably gets a lot clearer what the actual point of the article is.
Yeah, concision focus is a big deal in both writing and in the presentation of a sports entertainment product. And the problem that the PGA Tour has right now is that there are too many tournaments, too many players, and it's disjointed and people don't get a clear idea of what's actually happening and who the true characters in this game are, who the true best players in the game are, and just what to focus on week to week. That's the problem with the product, and to bring it back home.
The reason that problem is so intractable, the reason the PGA Tour wouldn't be able to fix that problem on their own, is that the top players don't have much leverage against the PGA Tour. It's the majority of players who have leverage against the PGA Tour. Their interests are served by this schedule and by this structure of things. And if the Phills of the world had, you know, more say in how the PGA Tour did its business, then I think the fans would benefit. Yes, the top
players would benefit too, They'd get more money. And that is what Phil's interest is. I don't think he's super interested in what the fans think, but I think that in pursuing that advantage, that the top players having more influence would benefit the fans in the end. And that is that is the big point that people are kind of missing from what Phil was trying to do. That what he was trying to do might have actually, in a weird way, if he were doing it differently with
clean money, might have helped improve the PGA Tour. But that's getting lost now because you know, Brandal's out there on Golf Channel shouting about the PGA Tour pension.
Yeah, And I think that's a big thing here, is that you know, it started talking about how the owners and other sports or proxies for the fans way the only way golf can function really well, is if the top players, the people who stand to make the most money, if the sport's uber popular, are the top players, and they are actually the people that could be the proxy for the fans, they would understand. Mike phil talked about it. I'd be miked up all the time. I'd mike everything
up if if I saw financial benefit from it. But I don't see any I don't see a dollar more if I agree to be miked up. And he talked about that, like if that paradigm shifted, because right now, you know, the majority of the PGA Tour is guys that are just happy to be up there making millions
of dollars playing golf. The guys at the very top see the huge financial opportunity that they bring that they have, and that they the value that they bring to the PGA Tour, which is why, you know, it seemed like a fair good, fair chunk of them were ready to break despite you know, the awfulness of the Saudi Arabia regime.
You know, like that's the thing, and that I think is one of the other aspects of this that really sucks, is that Saudi Arabia is now the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room and is preventing anybody else from creating an upstart league that could potentially disrupt the PGA Tour.
Yeah, nobody is hurt more by the Super Golf League than the Premier Golf League. They just don't have a port of entry anymore into the golf world, and that's a bummer. Now, I'm not sure that I necessarily want there to be a big schism in men's professional golf where there's the PGA Tour and then this breakaway super
league that has nothing to do with it. What I'm interested in is some pressure being applied to the PGA Tour, because from my perspective, the PGA Tour's current product couldn't really get much worse.
Listen, and this is from two people that love golf and that watch golf every week. We like I have to. It's like, I, you know, if anything, you know, like like we're the ones that like you Sometimes I you know, it's Saturday afternoon and I'm sitting there watching golf on like a beautiful Saturday, and I think to myself, what the hell am I doing right now? Like what like why am I watching this? And it's because, you know, your your core fans are never gonna leave, but you
can alienate them, you know. And I think that's like part of this like next generation of golf fans. I don't think they watch as much golf as they just enjoy the commentary around it. They enjoy the social media aspect of it. And you know, I think one of the mistakes that the tour makes is that they they might be aware that their product's not great, right, but the worst thing you could do when you don't have a great product is do more of it. You shouldn't
put your product out there more. It's a very counterintuitive thing. It's like, well, like, if our product's not good, we need more volume. But that's no, No, that's not what you should do. You should have less of it.
You know. It just makes things worse for the.
Because yeah, and it makes your flaws more and more apparent. And that's the thing is that like the the deficiencies of the coverage, the deficiencies in the product of like you know, who's you know with you know, you go on a leaderboard and week to week you care about twenty percent of the leader board that that's not good. Today's pod is brought to you by Frida Egg Events. So we have events that are coming up for registration. We have meadow Brook that will be up on Monday
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Where do you think Phil goes from here? What do you think is next for him?
It's a great question. I mean, I nobody knows what his status is with the tour. He could be suspended.
Yeah. An underrated part of the Shipnook article is Phil admitting that he and three other big time players hired lawyers to draft up and operating an agreement for the Super Golf League, and not more than anything else than that he said might be the main thing that gets him potentially suspended or banished from the tour.
He is obviously burnt up not only capital within the PGA Tour that he had built up over thirty years of being one of the tour's highest profile players big ticket items like he burnt up a lot of internal capital with the tour and their employees, but he also built up a lot of capital with his peers on the PGA Tour's colleagues on the PGA Tour, which I don't like, you know, Phil seems to be a guy that likes to be liked, and I think that's gonna be a tough thing for him if he goes back
to the tour. You know, it's gonna be a lot different feel around the tour because of his actions. But that being said, it's golf sometimes a lot, you know, things just get brushed over and everything's acts like everything's you know, rosy and everything's all good. So you know, I mean, he's a reigning PGA champion, Like I think
that's another underrated aspect of this whole thing. The guy won a major last year, like this is we're ten months removed from one of the greatest major championship moments in the history of golf.
He was literally posing in the Kiowa sunset with his trophy less than a year ago. And that's a big reason I think that, you know, I think that Phil still has a lot of leftover good will among the public, and I think that there will be eventually an argument that's persuasive to a lot of people that he got
screwed in this whole affair. Now I don't necessarily agreed with that, I agree with that, I think he was intentionally putting himself out in front of this, being the public face of the Saudi League, in order to take some of the heat off the other guys and be able to recruit more players. I think he was doing this very knowingly, and he has nobody to blame but himself. Again, but I think eventually people will ask the question, well, why didn't all these other guys get the same treatment?
I think that should question should be asked now actually with a lot of.
Okay, here's a list. These are players who played in the twenty twenty two Saudi International. Abraham Answer, Paul Casey, Bryce and De Shamba, Tommy Fleetwood, Sergio Garcia, Tyrol Hatton, Dustin Johnson, Jason Cocrack, Graham McDowell, come on, Graham, Kevin nah Joquing Neeman, Louis Use, tazan Ian, Poulter, Xander Schoffle, Hendrik Stenson, Harold Varner, Johnny Vegas, Bubba Watson, and your boy Lee Westwood.
Tony was in there, too, right or yeah?
Actually, I don't know. That's a good question. He has played in the in this tournament before for sure, But all those names I just ran through. We're in the Saudi International Field. Now, rumors are rumors. I'm not gonna, you know, report them as fact. But I have heard those names mentioned as people who were very interested in the SGL. I'm not sure how many of them are still interested. But guess what they were in this as much as Phil Mickelson was. These guys are not done.
They weren't draft in the agreement. And that's but who are the other two.
Three other players? Three other players? Who are they? That's a good question.
Yeah, And you know, I think one of the things I was thinking about this the other day, the most popular like TV shows have had this unbelievable resurgence, and it's really all centered around the same type of TV show with a you know, for the most part, there's going to be some outliers, but this like this essentially main character who has very very clear character flaws.
They're talking about an anti hero.
An anti hero, yes, you go back the Sopranos, Tony Soprano, the Wire, the Walter Yeah, Walter White, breaking bad mad Man John hamm and mad Menn Don Draper not a good guy, but like extremely like likable characteristics where you find yourself And I think that's the draws like you find yourself rooting for this guy or this person that's not a good person. And I think that's like a lot of the draw of these TV shows. But it's
been a recipe for TV. And the thing that is it was is crazy about golf is the two biggest stars, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, fit this this exact character profile.
And they have for a long time. But Phil Mickelson hasn't necessarily embraced that. Like his image to a lot of people was the good guy. Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm gonna give you a thumbs up, I'm gonna I'm gonna look you in the eye and say your name. If you're paired with me in a pro am, I'm gonna sign your kids, you know, golf ball or golf glove, and uh yeah, that was his image. But for I mean, the the anti Phil sentiment has been building for decades,
the whole fig Jam thing early in his career. I know, rumors have been going around about Phil for a year and years and years, and then recently what he's had, the insider trading scandal, the Tom Watson execution at the Ryder Cup, hitting a moving putt at the twenty eighteen US Open.
The golf ball, so the equipment switch right before the Ryder Cup.
This has been going for years and years and years, but the public image that he was trying to put across just didn't fit with it. Now those that backstory has caught up with him, and so it'll be interesting to see how he incorporates that or doesn't or tries to tries to reject it and move on with another image. But he could try to, you know, embrace the anti hero. I don't know if that's likely.
It was just something I thought about this weekend about the two huge superstars and how they fit this bill, because I think in a way like they embody like what happens to you when you're out in the open for thirty years is like everybody has laws, you know, and these guys have flaws. They aren't perfect. They make mistakes. Phil Phil's made a terrible mistake, you know, and he
overplayed his hand. The quotes coming out like saying that to somebody, whether it was on or off the record, you know, it seems like it was on.
If you were to make a list of all the dumbest things to say in his situation, he said them to Alan Hipknuck and a few of them did. John Huggin, Yeah, what are you doing?
And and that's you know, in a way like I mean, I think the smartest thing he could have done, which he didn't do, was he should have just been like, yeah, I mean, I wanted this to blow up. I was just using this as leverage, like I didn't want you know, That's why I said what I said to Alan ship knuk Is. I wanted this all to blow up. I didn't want the Saudis to win. And and here it came to the eleventh hour and that's when it blew up. I blew it up, you know, like thank you.
You know, you could take credit for that.
That's the way he should have played, like, you know, if you that's the way he probably the only way he could have played this where he came out looking like a good guy.
Well it maybe the only way he could have played it to retain the support of the PGA Tour. And the big thing that has happened with Phil in these past couple of weeks is that he lost the support of the PGA Tour. And once he lost that, I mean, it takes a lot to lose it. Remember, like Patrick Reid is still supported by the PGA Tourah in spite
of in spite of everything that guy's done. I think Phil Mickelson still basically had Pontovidra's support until he came out and said I actually helped draft the operating agreement for his breakaway to her. Now that support is cut off, and now everybody's coming after him. The players are coming after him, the PGA Tours boosters in the media are coming after him, and he doesn't have that protection anymore now. It's it'll be interesting to see if he tries to
get back in their good graces. This episode was edited by me and Meg Atkins. If you have a minute, we'd love for you to leave a rating and review of the Friday podcast in iTunes. Just doing that is a simple way to support us and help us find new listeners. Thanks for being here today and we'll see you next week.