The Press Box - ESPN's Kevin Van Valkenburg on Covering the LIV Golf Tournament

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

As drama swirls around the PGA and the new LIV Golf Tournament, ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg joins from London to get Bryan Curtis caught up to speed on all the action. They discuss how the LIV Golf Tournament came to be, why this story matters, why the PGA is facing an “existential threat,” and why LIV Golf is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Host: Bryan Curtis Producer: Troy Farkas  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey everyone, it's Peter Rosenberg from Cheap Heat. Join me and the fearless, physically large stat guy, Greg, and of course Super Agent 35 under 35 Dipperstein as we tackle the biggest stories in pro wrestling each and every week. To hear us, follow the ringer wrestling show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Stay mage and enjoy yourself. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Pressbox.

Brian Curtis of the Ringer here along with producer Troy Farkas, who's sitting in for Erica. While the NBA finals have been going on, something very unusual has been happening in the world of sports. The Live Golf Tour, which is funded by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, started play outside London this week. Kevin Van Valkenberg, who writes fabulously about golf or whatever's on his radar for ESPN, is there. Now, Kevin and I will get into these serious questions about what the Saudi government is doing

by recruiting golfers to the tour, in some cases by reportedly offering them more than $100 million. We'll talk about what a renegade golf. do or could do to the PGA, but in staging the first live tournament, there was also a lot of comedy from what Phil Mickelson wore on the course Thursday to the robot, yes I said robot, that was serving drinks to reporters in the media tent. I told Van Valkenberg that in covering this tournament he has already tweeted out a couple of Dan Jenkins novels. Let's hear more from our man in the media tent. Here's Kevin Van Valkenberg. All right, Kevin, there are some serious things to talk about. But I want to start with the comedy.

Have you ever live tweeted a sporting event where you had to repeatedly assure your audience, no, this is not a joke? This is a first. And it may be a function of so much of golf Twitter functions on that sort of thin line between comedy and tragedy or stupidity. And so I think it definitely in this situation, I had to kind of make clear a couple times that, that I was not kind of being sarcastic or that some of these things were actually happening. And you may be able to hear in the background, there are airplanes flying over as though I'm calling you from like a World War II bunker outside of England somewhere. And so that is kind of all part of the spectacle and the show here.

There may also be a concert that begins later. So I hope that the press box listeners are ready for anything. London Calling with KV. our new podcast. What was the strangest thing you've seen all week? Strangest thing. It had to be a bunch of professional athletes stuffing themselves into black London cabs

that then drove across fairways towards tea boxes. And so seeing Phil Mickelson or Graham McDowell or Ian Poulter like sitting knee to knee in a London cab that then drove on a golf court. is definitely a surreal experience that I never imagined I would see. And then, of course, there was like a full, like, British military trumpeted salute on the T's for both days to start us off. So that would also factor in.

I saw you at the PGA a few weeks ago. We were denied the first big Phil Mickelson press conference since his comments about the Saudi government back in February. On Wednesday, you got that press conference? What was it like? very surreal, very kind of awkward and stilted. It felt a little bit like a therapy session at times. Phil alluded to the fact that he has done,

has hereford to it, hundreds of hours of therapy. And you can, I think it's fair to say that when you ask him questions, that he is using a therapeutic technique where you are sort of pause for five, ten seconds to think about what you want to say so that you don't let your emotions run, hot. And so Phil did that quite a lot. So it was like almost like being at a dramatic reading of someone's lines or, you know, in a movie like, all right, Mr. Mickelson, please read the part of disgraced golfer dealing with controversy. And he kind of takes a minute to method act and get

into it. So that was, it was very strange. Did I read that at least two writers were hauled out of these press conferences by the authorities? Yeah. The first day, it was sort of strange because they said the press conference was going to go 30 minutes. And as it got a little bit tense and heated, this was a press conference with Kevin Naw and Lee Westwood and Neil Westwood and Walter. They decided to kind of cut it off at 24 minutes. And one of the reporters was kind of in the midst of asking a question, which they wouldn't take. And as often kind of happens, you see in the White House scrums, the reporter decided to kind of, I think notably shout out. the question to see if he could get an answer.

And this caused like a huge ruckus and allegations, you're being rude, you're not being polite. And then he sort of went outside and was not allowed back in until they had sort of a long discussion between them. And so there was all this kind of weirdness of the press room of like, wait, did Rob Harris of the Associated Press just get tossed out of the press conference? Is he being ejected from the event? And then 10 minutes or so later, he was allowed to come back in. And then yesterday, what happened was kind of really, this was more egregious, I think, is that Alan Shipnuck, who had written this excellent biography of Phil Mickelson, went to go and joined the media scrum and was essentially kind of like blocked by two, you know, undetermined origin for security guns and was like, wait, I want to be here. And they were like, no, you're not, you're not allowed in here. Like, not really being specific that it was like at the wishes of Phil or Greg Norman.

But as sort of later revealed on Twitter, Greg Norman was standing behind the scrum, sort of staring with an evil genius snarl on his face. So Alan, to his credit, handled it like a pro and didn't sort of try to, you know, I think I would have been a lot more hot. I would have been, you know, shouting back and forth. And he de-escalated the situation. So sort of a good lesson that, you know, it's always best to kind of keep your cool in those situations. but I didn't really realize it was going on because I was trying to ask Phil Mickelson about, I don't know, human rights

or some sort of larger thing that's not about golf. And he was quickly pivoting to, well, I had a tough day putting on the front nine but the putter came back in the back. So it's definitely like a very surreal couple days. But you also can't help but feel like, am I standing at the sort of precipice of a huge, like, fracture in the history of golf as a professional sport?

and will, you know, there's only, I think, four American media people here. And so you can't help but feel like, all right, like I'm here to sort of document a little bit of history. You mentioned the words White House. Who was presiding over these press conferences with the golfers? That is one Ari Fleischer, who we were sort of given no, like, hint or indication that this would happen,

but in walked Ari Fleischer. And this is kind of where the bit of like, this is not a joke began because there's a couple of my, followers said, like, this seems like some sort of madlibs type of thing, that like Ari Fleischer, who, you know, tweets out the memorable TikTok each year of what happened on 9-11 and the dramatic sort of things would end up working for the essentially the Saudi government to, you know, sports wash its golf league and approve its larger reputation. And I will say, Brian, like, it's really fun to be around the English press who kind of doesn't really, um,

care about the sort of pleasantries of, you know, insulting the subjects in some ways. And so they were quickly like, you know, how do you square this? And they had done their research because I wasn't aware of this tweet. But Ari Fisher had sort of said at one point, you know, President Obama is spending billions like a Saudi dictator who doesn't want to be overthrown. And so the reporter was like, you know, how do you square that attitude with your current sort of employer? And he, huff and puffed. You can talk to me about that offline. And, you know, I, that was a long, long time ago in the world of global affairs, you know, and I, to my knowledge, he didn't meet with reporters afterwards to discuss anything online in a, in a breakout session. But, you know,

Ari Fleischer has shown, I think that if you are offering a check, that he will consider taking it to do his whatever particular set of skills. So, you know, I guess, kudos kudos to Ari for getting that bag. So the golfers who shut up are asked over and over again, why are you here? Do you understand the ramifications of you being here? What do you think was actually revealed in their answers?

I would say that what was revealed was that they had had some media training. Certainly they wanted to spin this the best that they could. And I know for a fact that Liv sat with them and tried to media train them all and gave them a sort of long list of talking points and things that they could say. But nothing can really, you know, make you believe as a media person who's been doing this for a long time, that what someone is saying up there is genuine when it is clearly not. I don't think anyone, you know, it was almost kind of comical at one point when Taylor Gooch and Kevin Knaw were talking about, one of the biggest reasons they were here is because of the shotgun start format and that you would never get a bad draw again.

It was very unfair sometimes when you'd catch a bad side of the draw, like at the PGA championship, and this would finally equal those things out if that was worth throwing the golf world into chaos. Look, would it be better in some ways if they just said it's a lot of money and everybody's got to make choices and I made this one? I don't know. I mean, I think that would maybe open them up to a little bit of attack initially, but would also be seen in some ways as refreshing. and be like, yeah, we all know what this is about, so why not just admit it? But I think that part of getting the guarantees of this stuff is sort of saying, no, no, like, this is the, we're doing this for larger purposes. And that's, you know, anyone who believes that this is really about like the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's interest in growing in a game of golf is really kidding themselves.

I mean, come on. Like, it's not that at all. And then we can have a debate and discussion about what are the overall value of Saudi Arabia, you know, seeking to prove its global image and maybe doing some larger good. But we also have to kind of talk about the dark stuff too. And so I'm just of the opinion here that like the Gulf is the least important part. It's the sort of, you know, what this kind of represents. Because it's really in a lot of ways like a clash of the east and the west and the sort of understanding of what we want the future of the Middle East to be. And so it's a tough week for the stick to sports crowd because it's literally impossible to do that here.

So for people just tuning in, you references a second ago, but the Saudi government wants to do what with this golf tour? There is a large, there's a huge amount of money that Saudi Arabia has set aside $600 billion and more in what they call the public investment fund, where they are investing around the world in different areas in the sort of hopes to diversify the Saudi Arabia economy because I think wisely they've realized that like petroleum is not going to be around forever. And so they know that a country that doesn't sort of grow and change and diversify isn't going to be any kind of global power that they are now forever. And so over the last, you know, 10 years or so, or really a few years, but the plan is called Vision 2030. It's to invest in a lot of companies and also invite investment into the kingdom. They're building a city kind of out of the blue

out of nowhere where it's only a desert existed that is essentially going to have like a 125 mile like Las Vegas style strip where a train can get from it in there and back in like half an hour. And all of that is going to require like an enormous amount of business investment. from other countries. It's even, you know, so much that Saturday can't just build it on its own. And also they want like culture and they want sort of, you know, things that are American and European and African and Asian to sort of be a part of their country. And so in doing that over the last few years, what they've done is have huge investments in horse racing. Everybody kind of probably knows that like if you want to be

somebody in horse racing, you have to sort of, you know, take money from people who are most interested in horse raiding, which is people from the kingdom. And they've bought a controlling interest in Newcastle United, the Premier League soccer team, which was very controversial when that happened. And there was a lot of pushback about whether the Premier League should allow that. And they've made huge investments in WWE. You know, they've brought over an event there. And golf is kind of next in line. Formula One is a huge. You know, Formula One's popularity is exploding. And they realized that and sort of got involved in that too. So all of the of that is meant not just like no one is thinking this golf venture is going to be like profitable

on its own if ever but not for like a long time if ever so what they're doing is sinking 500 million to you know they i think greg norman has said their their outlay is essentially they're willing to put two billion dollars into it over the next four or five years and hope that that can sort of burnish help burnish their reputation worldwide and when you think about how many wealthy businessmen and world leaders play and love the game of golf, it might be a really smart strategic bet for them. And so if you can have Phil Mickelson play with the prime minister of Japan because you're, you know, you've paid Phil Mickelson $200 million. Doesn't that help you drive investment to your country? Your bet it does. And so they're essentially being, you know,

bought up in the way that Fox Sports probably bought up Tom Brady, which was not to sort of be a common on air about football as much as it was to sort of, you know, schmooze with big time wealthy people. And the reputation burnishing part of this, this is not a secret. This is something that has been more or less explicitly stated. Yes. I mean, this is, you know, they, anyone of the listeners here can Google Vision 2030 and see that they've put this all essentially on the website. Now, they're not saying like, hey, we're doing this to burnish our reputation, but they're

saying, like, we want you to. invest in Saudi Arabia because we're modernizing our country. We're moving into the next millennium where we want to diversify our economy. All of that is spelled out right there. So like I've there's been a lot of you can't it's been tough to tell on like Twitter this week about what are like genuine engagement and what is like this army of bots that is sort of fighting back against you making legitimate points. But it's all kind of spelled out on the website. It's not some nefarious plot. It's something that they're kind of really up front about. Hey, we want to do this. And I think what's interesting and what's a really nuanced conversation, Brian, is like,

we ought to be able to talk about whether like the horrible things out there, yes, we have to acknowledge us. But also, like, is this like in net large a good thing? They would argue it's a good thing for the future of the country. And I think it's a journalist job to sort of show like, okay, if you were arguing that, you have to kind of ask the people who are involved in, sort of sports watching it. Well, are you aware of the sort of awful things? And what I think is most interesting to think going forward is what's going to happen for Phil Mickelson or Dustin Johnson if another Jamal Khashoggi situation emerges. You know, if you're playing the event in Bedminster or Portland, Oregon and something else awful happens, you're going to have people

asking you about it. Are they prepared for like, it's not all in the past. The past is not the past. It's still present. So here's a question. I guarantee. guarantee you've heard in your mentions, and I've heard on sports radio a few hundred times, why are we holding the golfers responsible when the U.S. government and U.S. corporations do business with Saudi Arabia all the time? What do you say to that? Well, I'm doing it because I cover golf. I can't. Someone was like, what are you going to ask President Biden about Yemen? I was like, I don't know. I haven't been in a press conference with President Biden in my life or any president.

So, like, I can only control the part of my job that is my job. I hope that journalists around the world are asking those questions and the sort of, you know, whether we should, you know, be asking human rights questions around the world for any sports league, I think is an important part. But I'm doing it because my job for a few years in some tangential way has been to write about golf. And so that's what I'm doing here instead of just kind of, you know, this is a golf issue. It's also a global issue. And this is why sports journalists need to be more well-versed in things than just how far does a seven-iron go or what grind is in your wedge here.

Were you able to watch any of the TV broadcast in the media center there? I was. And it is a little disconcerting to hear Arlo White's voice on there. If you're a Premier League fan or if you're a Ted Lasso fan, he's the main broadcast. Someone told me today, I don't think Arlo White has ever played golf in his life. like he's not a golfer. So it's a little strange to have him doing that. Jerry Fultz, I think, is a very good announcer.

He kind of lends a professionalism to the broadcast. He used to be a work at Golf Channel. And, you know, here's what's kind of more part of the nuance thing, too, right? Is that a lot of the broadcast stuff, you could argue that it is kind of innovative. Like, if I'm going to watch a PGA tour tournament, do I have to outlay like nine hours of my day on And do I have to shift from Golf Channel to a streaming app to CBS to back to a streaming app here? This is like it's four and a half hours and it's all on one thing and there's no commercials. As a fan, like you could argue, hey, like I wouldn't mind something like this to sort of see, you know, I get to tune in.

I know when Justin Thomas is going to be on and I don't have to constantly look for what side of the draw he's going to be on. Like there are some innovative things. There's been some clumsy things too. I mean, there's a lot of names misspelled in some of the. the releases and, you know, people who you've never heard of. And this team element to it is, is a little bit weird. And anyone trying to pretend like they're following it or that they're like a big fan of the crushers or the stingers or the fireballs or something is kind of kidding themselves.

But, you know, some of it actually might be good for the golf world to kind of think about. Like if I was a WGC, which is tangentially part of the PGA tour, about a sort of a world event that just takes the top 50 players, I would think seriously about doing a shotgun start for two days at least because, man, you get that four hour window and you could say to TV broadcasts, like, let's just, you don't have to do this. You don't have to broadcast this for seven hours. Like, let's just all get the 50 players out there on the course at the same time and go. And I think there's some benefits for that. part of the presentation just seemed to be let's do the exact opposite of whatever CBS and Jim Nance would do. We're going to do Formula One style leaderboard down the left hand side. We're going to use the word chaos, which is not something I hear typically during a golf broadcast. We're going to have shots, shots, shots. You know, no beauty shots here, no bird song. It's going to be golf, golf, golf.

What did you make of that? I think that if you talk to golf fans or you dive into golf Twitter, which I don't know that I'd recommend. But one of the biggest complaints is the commercial load. It's so hard to want to watch golf, even if you really love golf, because of how many commercials there are. And yeah, commercials foot the bill. And so I understand why broadcast networks have to do it, my own included. But, you know, it's, it sometimes feels as a golf person that the golf is totally secondary to what you're being sold, that the golf only exists as, you know, a way to prop up the commercials, not the other way around. And that's hard, you know, especially if you watch soccer,

if you watch Formula One and the commercials are just, or the ads are just kind of in the background at all times and the action is constant, I can totally get why something like this would be appealing. They did have some personality profiles called how they live, where they would go to the golfers home. And it turns out how golfers live as they play. tons of golf and they want to win golf tournaments. Ian Polter made a cup of tea for the cameras. That was about his... drove his race car with his son.

I mean, it's just some guys are riding their tractor for maybe, you know, that 20 minutes from the camera's around. It's, it is riveting. No, I mean, it is funny to sort of see, you know, you're used to like constant commercials for insurance companies and then to say to have what's our, as you and I know, as ex kind of newspaper where people, in-house ads, just kind of always running on the live broadcast. It's kind of funny. I don't know quite much to make of it or whether that will be forever. I think one of the future

things to sort of see is like, will this ever be on TV or will there be commercials in the future? Will there be, you know, sponsors that will want to be a part of this? And all of that will kind of probably help determine whether this is a four-year venture or a 10- or 20-year venture. Yesterday, the PGA Tour suspended 17 golfers who are competing in this tournament, including Mickelson and Dustin Johnson. Suspension effectively means what? It means they cannot play in any PGA Tour event. They're not allowed to take a sponsor's invite into a PJ Tour event,

even if they're not a member. They're not allowed to accumulate any points in the FedEx Cup race. They're not allowed to play on the President's Cup team, which is the sort of writer, the PJ Tourist, version of the Rutter Cup. So some guys have basically said, I don't have any interest in fighting this. I don't care. I'm here and I'm happy to do that.

Mickelson has not purpose, I think has very purposely not resigned this. If I had to guess, Brian, I think that there's a part of Phil that loves the idea of a Mickelson versus the PGA Tour LLC going all the way up through the court system and the into the Supreme Court that he might want to sort of be the person who pushes back against this legally and because, you know, he's a lifetime member. Phil could play one tournament a year. He could play just the Arnold Palmer if he wanted to or just the memorial, just, you know, the Tigers tournament in Riviera. So I think he would, he's, his point was I've worked really hard for that. You get lifetime status when you win 20 times, which means you can never lose your

card anytime you ever want to play in a tournament, you can get it. And so he wants to kind of see if he can push that. So a lot of the other guys are just like, whatever, it's not worth it to me. Sergio Westwood, all these guys, like, I'd rather just move on. And, you know, this is just the beginning of that sort of how that's going to play out hardly the end because there are going to be guys who are legally going to challenge it. And I think it would be really interesting to see what, you know, courts these cases end up in, who those appointees, were who we're going to hear these cases because as we've seen that can affect dramatically how law it gets interpreted.

There's a certain golf loving president appoint these judges. Yeah. Yeah. As you know, it's people are like, how could you like sort of, you know, throw those conspiracy theories out there. I don't think that's a conspiracy theory at all. I think that's American life. And I think that there's to sort of pretend like that's not part of all this is,

it's totally naive. We're going to have an event later this year on the live. golf tour that is at Trump Bedminster. He is going to be there as part of this. And, you know, he has shown his interest in golf is not going away anytime soon. He's furious with the PGA tour for taking away his event at Dural and moving it to Mexico years ago. So all of that is a sort of backdrop in this drama. You call Live on ESPN a serious threat to the PGA tour. How serious do you think it is. Well, if you think about if every week the best 50 players in the world were not playing on the PGA tour and every week was essentially the Sanderson Farms or the 3M or the John

Deere, how valuable would that product be as a television product? It would probably be pretty difficult, right? If you, you know, some of the most watch tournaments of the year are the ones where all the good players are there, the Genesis, you know, that's held at Riviera Country Club in L.A. And that's because all the players, all the best players are there, the memorial, all the players are there. If you turn the memorial and the Genesis into, you know, what are the minor league tournaments now, I don't know how the product survives in a lot of ways, right? Because if things that are getting a 2.1 rating now are getting a 0.8 rating, man, what commercial sort of venture...

you know, what companies want to broadcast on that. And so I think the PJ Tour is facing an enormous existential threat right now. And I don't know, I don't know how I would advise Jay Monaghan to sort of fix it. His letter sort of essentially saying, well, everyone who left was just, you know, did it for money, money, money, we're more than that. There's, you know, I don't know that that's the right argument to make. Because if I'm Justin Thomas of Rory McElroy, I would love, Rory McElroy is one of my favorite. athletes and he has been outspoken about this, you know, saying morality matters more than money. How much more can this possibly, how much more money can you possibly need?

I don't know that that argument is going to play with people who are not Rory McElroy, because eventually $200 million sounds like a lot. Tiger only made $121 million in his entire PGA career. Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson just got way more than that in one day. Mm-hmm. So it's fact, more factually, say, by agreeing to play the entire, you know, a couple years, that's why they got so much money. Sure. I mean, you say the top 50, but there's a, what's interesting, right, is what amount, what, what percentage of the top 50 would have to defect before somebody flips on even a big tournament and says, I don't feel like the best players in the world are here or most of the best players in the world.

Yeah. Golf has always been in sort of a weird spot, right? because the main thing that we have every week in our lives has always been the PGA Tour. But the PGA Tour doesn't control any of the majors, which are the only thing that really matter historically and the only reason why we really watch. Nobody cares that much about how many regular season tournaments you won. I bet most people couldn't tell you how many regular season tournaments Jack Nicholas won, but they could tell you in a second that he won 18 majors.

And so if the majors, sort of continue with their belief of like, yeah, you know, this is a you problem, not a us problem. We don't need to worry anything about this. Then I'm not sure like what the future is of the tour. Like how did they sort of make themselves more attractive? And I tweeted a long thread about this, but, you know, the PG tour when it was established was a for-profit entity. And Dean Beeman, who was the second commissioner, came along and sort of transitioned it into a nonprofit. And he did that because he realized, as of his background was in insurance, because back then,

professional golfers didn't just have golf jobs. They had to have other jobs, too, that the tour could pay a lot less taxes if they were a 501c6. Okay. So that was a genius move for 40 years of the tourist history because their tax burden was reduced. Anyone who sponsored a tournament like farmers or Genesis, whoever, could take a huge write-off by saying, you know, I'm going to put $20 million up to sponsor. this tournament and I'm I decreasing my tax burden by $20 million.

Well, there are laws that sort of say what a nonprofit can and can't do with its money. So the PJ tour found themselves a little bit hamstrung when it seems to just handing over money for the top players as based off of like what are essentially like appearance fees. Liv was sitting here saying, hey, we'll give you $10 million to show up. The PJ tour was saying we'll give you a million based on a player impact program that's partially determined by how many Google hits you get because that was how they had to sort of legally frame it. And then Liv was saying, you know what, we'll do 50 million in the PG tour. Just how do you respond to an organization that has so much money that legitimately losing $2 billion

or never turning a profit on that is a blink in the eye to them is almost a rounding error? And that's why this is such a huge kind of potential fracturing for the future of professional golf in America at least. I think I have a sense of how hard it would be to replace Steph Curry if you just removed him from an NBA game and from as a TV attraction. But how replaceable is Bryson DeShambo or Dustin Johnson if you just pulled them out of a golf broadcast? I think that the harder thing to think about in a lot of ways is there is some like dead

wood on the PGA tour of like and as some of the guys who are here were, you know, Martin Kimer, Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia. Graham McDowell. These are not guys who are particularly competitive on the PGA tour anymore. But their names because they sort of once were. So part, there's a draw to them. Bryson's a different deal because he's a draw, but also he's legitimately one of the 10 best players in the world. And Dustin Johnson would be sort of in that similar category, although he's 10 years older than Bryson. So there are legitimately like really great players who are kind of stuck in the Corn Fairy Tour. and stuck in the minor leagues who can't get status because it's hard to lose your PGA Tour card once you get it.

And there are so many guys who managed to kind of scrape together just enough points or use enough sort of exemptions to stay in the 125 people who get to keep their cards every year. So if this were like the NFL and this sort of aging veterans were like, I'm going to go somewhere else. The NFL would be like, great. Like, you know, we'd love to get rid of you because we got an enormous amount of hungry kids who are coming up who the product is. the sport, not that sort of name on the jersey or whatever. Well, in golf, the product has always been essentially the stars. You know, they're not teams you're rooting for. You're rooting for people. You're a Tiger Woods fan. You're a Phil Nicholson fan. You're a Roy McElroy fan. So while there are young, super talented golfers who could slot in and replace a Bryson DeChambo

or replace a Dustin Johnson, I don't know that the marketing has been set up over time to have that kind of pay off for a while. They need to sort of completely rethink of like, all right, you should totally be really into this young player, Victor Hovland, or I mean, that's not even a great example, like someone who, what's interesting is like two of the kids who are here,

one of them just won the US Samadar and one was the Instability champion. And they couldn't really get status on tour because it's hard. It's hard to sort of, there's so many good golfers who are scraping for those spots, but they're like, you know what, I'm going to take three, four million dollars and I'm going to go figure it out over there and I'm going to play my way into the majors that way. So the more complicated answer is like talent wise, yeah, there's enough golfers to fill those spots for sure. But can you convince

the public, which has only really for the past 20 years cared about Tiger Woods and very little else that they should really invest in the next sort of up and coming kid who, you know, like a Will Zalotauris who, you know, had to scrape his way on a tour and as probably a star. But I would say outside of golf fans, 0.2% of people know who will Zalotores. Two last ones before we let you go. Can you adjudicate the Phil Mickelson sweater controversy from day one of this tournament? I wish I could. So if anybody who's following me on Twitter, I know this is about Phil wore an Augusta National golf club pullover on the very first day. Like he walked to the first tee with it on.

And I was standing right next to him and he walked by me. And I was like, oh my God. Like Phil doesn't do anything accidentally unless he was like looking through his closet didn't have a pullover that didn't have any Calloway logos on it or KPMG logos on it or whatever. It had to go with this Augusta National one. But it's either like he was sending a message to someone like, hey, I want to be doing this or he did it. And then someone said to him, hey, you better take that off right now because Augusta doesn't want any part. of that because it disappeared quickly into the round.

And I really wanted to ask him about this because this is a nerdy insider golf thing. It's the kind of, this is not a master's polo, right? This is an Augusta National Golf Club polo, which you can only buy if you are allowed to visit the course outside the masters. Like you have to, you know, like Phil, he can go as a PJ tour player before, could go and play there any time. And then when he won the three masters, certainly he's invited back anytime he wants to in the off season.

So you have to like physically go in the pro shop. and hand over your credit card to get one of these things. They're pretty rare to be able to get. You can't buy one even if you want it. So I just was fascinated by this. I thought, what is he doing? Every move that Phil does is kind of calculated.

It's one of those things in a press conference where he's being asked. People are shouting questions. And so I was really, like, Phil, are you, why are you wearing this dust thing? I couldn't get it out without someone shouting over me. And I had to kind of defer. So I don't know, like, when will it ever solve this mystery? Well, I do know over the fact that he had a different vest. on midway through the round and the Augustine one did not reappear.

I love how you said on Twitter. It looked like someone had magic markered over the logo too. That's what it looked like to me. And I was really, I was trying to be sort of careful of that language because it could have just been, you know, gray thread instead of white or could have been dirty. Who knows?

But it looked like he was sort of, I know for a fact that Phil at one point played a tailor-made club during his career. And this isn't like a breaking news thing. but he had his caddy go and like color it in with a sharp B so that it was like trying to hide, you know, it was in his contract. It was okay to play. But he didn't want anyone to know that he was not playing a Calloway Club. So with that in mind, I was like, wait, did he use a marker or a piece of like spray paint to like cover this logo up because he didn't have any other pullovers?

Anyway, it was just a weird, weird moment on a weird day. I thought it was like the dream team, you know, where they were wearing the flags over the Reebok logos. That's right. Phil's own version. Finally, you revealed to the world the presence of the drink-serving press room robot. What can you tell us about the robot? The drink-serving press robot is very real. I was weighing in my mind.

I knew this would be the kind of thing that Twitter would delight in. But I was like, Kevin, is this horsewashing to show a picture of the live robot that is taking Chris? and Pepsi around. And ultimately decided, no, like the robot is its own comedic content. And so share a picture of the robot. The robot, it's self-driving. It's, I don't know how it determines. It's like a Rumba, I guess.

I stood my ground when the robot came up to me the other day, just to sort of see if the robot would either run me over or would I would have to break out my ill-fated college football days and throw a shoulder into the robot. And I didn't need to because the robot paused and artful. pivoted around me. It's about R2D2 sized from your video there. Yes, it is.

Wow. It's just constantly in motion. And you didn't partake? That's where you drew the line as a professional sports writer. I feel that would be an ethical violation to take a Pepsi from the, I reached and I was like, wait, I need to hold my ground. All right. Kevin Van Valkenberg, get yourself over to a pub where you can partake without any ethical

complications. Thank you for coming on the press box. Always, friend. Thank you. Huge thanks again to Kevin Van Valkenberg. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic from Troy Farkas, who is sitting in for Erica. David Shoemaker and I are going to be back on Monday.

We've got to talk about this Washington Post thing, which has been so big in the news over the last couple of days. Plus, more lukewarm takes about the media. Have a great weekend.