I don't think anyone has weighed in on this one yet, and as you guys know well by now, golf and me are like Forest Gump and Jenny and my golf game at the minute is just like Forest's famed box of chocolates - you really don't know what you're going to get next. It could be anything from a six iron from 180 yards to two feet to two drives hit straight out of bounds on the first hole and that my friends is golf, some days you have it, some days you don't.

Today's post however is not going to focus on my own game like many of my golf posts here on SportsTalkSocial over the the last year, but rather it will focus on the big golf story of the past week. I don't remember seeing anybody writing about it yet, so I will give some background to the story first, then give my own opinion and the opinion of golf professionals and I'll finish off by inviting you to share your comments in the box below.

Big Phil

First things first, I like Phil Mickelson. I've always liked Phil Mickelson. He has always been an exciting player, a magician with a wedge and a six time major winner, most famously last years PGA Championship which he won at the age of 50, making him the oldest ever major champion. His post round interviews, general demeanor and how he carries himself has always painted a picture of a relaxed and caring guy who would make time for anyone.

That was the Phil I knew or at least I thought I knew, but the recent happenings have cast some doubt on those opinions and a more egotistic and greedy Phil has emerged in a story about a break away Saudi- backed golf series that looks to go against the US PGA, without whom Phil would have a few less zeroes at the end of his bank balance.

Hive is the perfect place to hear about this story, as it relates among other things to the US PGA's plans to monetise footage of players taking shots in the form of NFTs. I expect that 95% of you reading this will understand what an NFT is, but there will always be some who don't, so let me define it for you.

What is an NFT?

NFT stands for Non Fungible Token - ok now let's move on, as clearly everybody is down with the word Fungible and uses it in everyday parlance, as much as the word parlance or pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (that's the longest English word by the way!) which you guys use every other day. Ya so, Fungible, eh, what in the name of Jeebus does that mean?

The term is borrowed from Economics and fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units can be interchanged and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from another part. A good example would be an Iphone that has come straight out of it's box new. So moving on then, Non-fungible means that something is unique and can’t be replaced with something else. It is a one of, say like the Mona Lisa for example, sure there are many prints of Leonardo's masterpiece, but there is only one original, which I was lucky enough to see from a distance through a trove of camera snapping tourists at the Lourve around fifteeen years ago.

So now let's take the full word NFT - Non Fungible Token. A non-fungible token is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain or secure digital ledger. It can be sold and traded for Fiat currency or other Crypto currencies. Digital files such as photos, videos, and audio are fast becoming popular across the music, film and sports industries. Ethereum's blockchain is the most popular chain for NFTs, other blockchains can implement their own versions of NFTs, and here on hive we have a version of Punks designed by @themarkymark, which is an NFT.

Ok, now you should all know what an NFT is, let's take it back to Big Phil.

The Interview

Phil is working on a ghost written autobiography and Alan Shipnuck is the ghost writer so himself and Phil have had lots of chats and conversations over the past year. Alan wanted to get some headlines and column inches for the new book, and so released some quotes from a conversation with Phil from November 2021. He claims the comments were on the record and Phil has since come out saying vehemently that they were off the record. Here is a taster of some of the qoutes from Phil - be careful now not to burn your eyes when reading them.

Phil on Saudi Arabia

“They’re scary motherfuckers to get involved with,”

“We know they killed Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates. They’ve been able to get by with manipulative, coercive, strong-arm tactics because we, the players, had no recourse. As nice a guy as [PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan] comes across as, unless you have leverage, he won’t do what’s right. And the Saudi money has finally given us that leverage. I’m not sure I even want [the SGL] to succeed, but just the idea of it is allowing us to get things done with the [PGA] Tour.”

Phil On NFTs

“I don’t want to say it’s infuriating, but it is definitely more than frustrating,”

“The Tour is sitting on multiple billions of dollars worth of NFTs. They are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital content we could be using for our social media feeds. The players need to own all of that. We played those shots, we created those moments, we should be the ones to profit. The Tour doesn’t need that money. They are already sitting on an $800 million cash stockpile. How do you think they’re funding the PIP? Or investing $200 million in the European Tour? The Tour is supposed to be a nonprofit that distributes money to charity. How the fuck is it legal for them to have that much cash on hand? The answer is, it’s not. But they always want more and more. They have to control everything. Their ego won’t allow them to make the concessions they need to.”

Phil on the PGA Tour

“The Tour likes to pretend it’s a democracy, but it’s really a dictatorship,”

“They divide and conquer. The concerns of the top players are very different from the guys who are lower down on the money list, but there’s a lot more of them. They use the top guys to make their own situation better, but the top guys don’t have a say.”

“I know 20 guys who want to do this,”

“and if the Tour doesn’t do the right thing, there is a high likelihood it’s going to happen.”

Other Players Thoughts

Unsurprisingly this did not land well with his fellow professionals and Rory's interview below was the general feeling amongst players who would agree that Phil was egotistical.

Rory on Phil

“I don’t want to kick someone while he’s down, obviously, but I thought they were naive, selfish, egotistical, ignorant,”

Justin Thomas on Phil

"He's obviously very passionate and feels very strongly about certain ways and has made that very vocal. At this point, as much as I hate to say it, it's his problem and not ours."

Brooks Koepka on Phil

"He's still a great friend of mine. I don't know why he said what he said or why he said how he said it, but all I can say is I support him as a friend, yet I don't agree with everything he said. I'm 27 years old. I can count myself pretty lucky to be where I'm at in life."

I agree with Rory and the majority of other players. This smells exactly the same as the notion of a European Super League in soccer. Once again greed and money are to the forefront and loyalty and appreciation is nowhere to be seen.

The images used are not my own and the following are the sources:

https://pixabay.com/
https://www.golfchannel.com/news/2021-pga-championship-phil-mickelson-wins-pga-championship-becomes-oldest-major-champion

https://www.pgatour.com/news/2021/05/23/phil-mickelson-wins-pga-championship-kiawah-island-oldest-ever-major-winner.html

Peace Out