Golf Media Cheer DeChambeau But Silent on His Consequences — Lying Four

Bryson DeChambeau didn’t invent golf’s distance crisis. But in 2020, he did lay it bare.

When DeChambeau famously put on 50 pounds to add strength and yardage to his arsenal, he was not the first player to expose golf’s failure to mitigate equipment advances. But where — to that point — the crisis had been marked mostly by mere fissures, DeChambeau ripped them open into a chasm. Over a 17-event span in 2020, he notched 14 top-10 finishes, including a dominant six-shot U.S. Open win at Winged Foot.

In his defense, DeChambeau did not create the problem. He merely benefitted from it.

History has a habit of repeating itself.

Through DeChambeau’s week in the spotlight at Pinehurst No. 2, ending in a dramatic one-shot win for his second U.S. Open title, he tore open another industry-wide failure to confront a difficult question: namely, how should “game day” coverage of LIV Golf players and events be told in the context of that golf league’s sole purpose and its players’ complicity?

That Saudi Arabia’s government is one of the world’s most brutal human rights abusers is not up for serious debate. Likewise, LIV Golf’s only purpose — to “sportswash” the Saudi regime’s well deserved international reputation — is universally acknowledged.

Even so, three years into life with LIV, journalists across the golf media landscape continue to treat its events as just another golf tournament — and, likewise, to cover LIV’s players as just another golfer.

It is the definition of normalizing. It is everything that LIV Golf’s masterminds could have hoped for.

The problem would be harmful enough if it were a mere failure to mention the obvious: that DeChambeau’s win further legitimizes a golf league that exists to legitimize the Saudi regime. But often, it is worse than that: an active resistance to any hint of criticism. During the U.S. Open’s Saturday broadcast, when NBC’s Mike Tirico lamented DeChambeau’s ineligibility for the 2024 Olympics, analyst Brandel Chamblee answered with an unremarkable point. “I would agree that it is unfortunate,” Chamblee said. “But all of the players that went to LIV, they well knew, they well knew that they were going to a tour that did not qualify for World Ranking points. They’ve made no concessions to gain those points by altering their format in such a way that they could.”

Criticism was swift. “I think there’s a time and a place for those opinions,” one prominent podcaster answered. That was perhaps the broadly shared sentiment’s softest phrasing.

There is indeed a time for such discussion: now. That very moment when Chamblee spoke, and every moment after from then until now, was the time — that very moment, when discussion of LIV and the sole reason for its existence was most relevant.

Would that even had been possible. Would that journalists anywhere within golf media’s ecosystem — legacy publications, barebones podcasts, or anything in between — showed any hint of having wrestled in the past three years with how to discuss LIV Golf in any context outside a leaderboard.

Doubtless, no golf writer on the planet asked for this conundrum — and a conundrum it is: how to cover strokes and putts and geopolitics at the same time? There is no obvious answer. Just as doubtless, though, silence is no solution.

The only comparison that comes to mind is political media’s reluctant practice to note expressly former President Donald Trump’s falsehoods. In a media landscape where traditional, day-in-and-day-out news coverage revolved around taking a president’s word in good faith political reporters ultimately accepted that they could not accurately tell a story without offering obvious context: that Trump’s statements often were outright lies.

How that lesson should apply to golf media’s coverage of LIV and its players is not clear. If it has no other relevance to LIV coverage, though, it teaches that simply reporting what happens in front of you is not an option. There is more to the story — and the “more” is the story’s most important part.

If the fundamental goal of journalism is to tell objective truths, then omitting those truths is no less a failure than denying them. Even at its best, golf media’s coverage of DeChambeau’s week at Pinehurst fantastically succumbed to the former of those failures. The moment is long past for the industry to confront it.

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