Preach!
'They're so stupid': Charles Barkley blasts PGA Tour and LIV Golf leaders as only he can
Cliff Hawkins
We’re all sick of the PGA Tour and LIV Golf’s will-they, won’t-they saga. It’s like a bad sitcom romance dragged out over eight seasons. The pair started courting each other back in June of 2023, and 14 months later, no deal has been reached. Professional golf remains estranged, and fans, baffled by the self-defeating incompetence on both sides of the divide, have tuned out in droves.
Chief among them is Charles Barkley.
Barkley has been a flagbearer for the sport of golf for decades. He’s stuck with it through thick and thin (mostly thin). But on the PGA Tour’s own Sirius XM Radio show Gravy & the Sleeze on Tuesday, the NBA Hall of Famer made it abundantly clear that he’s had enough, echoing the sentiments of countless golf fans in the process.
If you expected Chuck to pull his punches, where have you been? Barkley’s best attribute as an NBA analyst is his ability to cut through the fat and get to the meat of any issue, no matter how complex. Most of the time he plays his frankness for folksy laughs, but that doesn’t make what he says any less true.
Take his comments on Tuesday, for instance. Both the PGA Tour and Saudi Public Investment Fund have frittered away huge amounts of good will accrued by the post-COVID golf boom. They’ve cost themselves hundreds of thousands of fans—as evidenced by drooping ratings—and countless millions in revenue. Worst of all, they wasted a potentially historic year in which Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm should have been duking it out on a week-in, week-out basis. Instead they competed against each other once every couple of weeks for a few months. If that isn’t “stupid” or “idiotic,” as Barkley alleges, we don’t know what is.
Of course, we still assume a deal is coming, just as we have since the PGA Tour and PIF first announced their framework agreement. We assume there’s too much on the table for it not to get done. We assume those in power aren’t that stupid or that idiotic. But as Barkley would probably tell you, there’s an old saying about assumptions, and they might still make an ass out of all of us.