Golf media applauds DeChambeau but remains silent on its consequences

Bryson DeChambeau did not invent the distance crisis in golf. But in 2020, he laid it bare.

When DeChambeau gained 50 pounds to add strength and distance to his arsenal, he wasn’t the first player to denounce golf’s inability to mitigate equipment advancements. But where – until now – the crisis had been marked mainly by simple cracks, DeChambeau has carved them into a chasm. Over a span of 17 events in 2020, he notched 14 top 10s, including a dominant six-shot win at the US Open at Winged Foot.

In his defense, DeChambeau did not create the problem. He simply took advantage of it.

History has a habit of repeating itself.

During DeChambeau’s week in the spotlight at No. 2 Pinehurst, which ended with a dramatic one-shot victory for his second U.S. Open title, he ripped through another world-wide failure. industry to confront a difficult question: namely, how should LIV Golf’s “match day” coverage of players and events be told in the context of that golf league’s sole purpose and the complicity of its players?

The fact that the Saudi government is one of the most brutal human rights abusers in the world is not seriously debated. Likewise, LIV Golf’s sole objective – to “cleanse” the well-deserved international reputation of the Saudi regime – is universally recognized.

Despite this, three years into LIV’s existence, journalists across the golf media landscape continue to treat its events as just golf tournaments – and, similarly, cover LIV’s players as just golfers.

This is the definition of normalization. It’s everything the brains at LIV Golf could have hoped for.

The problem would be damaging enough if it were simply a matter of omitting the obvious: DeChambeau’s victory further legitimizes a golf league that exists to legitimize the Saudi regime. But often, it’s worse than that: active resistance to any hint of criticism. During Saturday’s broadcast of the US Open, when NBC’s Mike Tirico lamented DeChambeau’s ineligibility for the 2024 Olympics, analyst Brandel Chamblee responded with a trite point. “I recognize it’s unfortunate,” Chamblee said. “But every player who went to LIV knew full well that they were going on a tour that did not qualify for world ranking points. They made no concessions to earn those points by changing their format in such a way. so that they can.

The reviews were swift. “I think there’s a time and place for these opinions,” one prominent podcaster responded. It was perhaps the gentlest phrasing of the widely shared sentiment.

There is indeed a time for such a discussion: now. This very moment when Chamblee spoke, and every moment since then until now, was the moment – this very moment, when the discussion about LIV and the only reason for its existence was the most relevant.

Would that even have been possible. Could it be that journalists from anywhere in the golf media ecosystem – legacy publications, single podcasts or anything in between – have shown even the slightest trace of having struggled over the past three years on the way to discuss LIV Golf in any context outside of a leaderboard.

Arguably, no golf writer on the planet has asked this conundrum – and it is a conundrum: How do you cover shots, putts and geopolitics at the same time? There is no obvious answer. But it is equally certain that silence is not a solution.

The only comparison that comes to mind is the political media’s reluctance to specifically note former President Donald Trump’s lies. In a media landscape where traditional, everyday news coverage consisted of taking a president’s word in good faith, political journalists ultimately accepted that they could not tell a story accurately without providing obvious context: that Trump’s statements were often blunt and simple. lies.

How this lesson should apply to golf media coverage of LIV and its players is unclear. If it has nothing else to do with LIV coverage, it teaches that simply reporting what is happening in front of you is not an option. There is more to the story – and the “more” is the most important part of the story.

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 his best, DeChambeau’s week-long golf coverage at Pinehurst succumbed fantastically to the first of these failures. The time has passed for the industry to face it.

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