Phil Mickelson ripped Brandel Chamblee for all the wrong reasons

Phil’s comments on Brandel and how an analyst should operate are as misguided as his explanation for his running putt at the U.S. Open.

For a player who has not really been in contention at a golf tournament, Phil Mickelson has had as eventful a summer as any pro golfer. There have been rules violations, verbal spats, rumored Tiger matches, trick shots, and other oddities. Even when he’s not winning, Phil is a content-generating machine

The significant share of Phil furor and amusement this summer has been devoted to the running putt at the U.S. Open and his explanation that followed. We’ve run through the many divergent and concurrent opinions on that matter. The summer comments, however, that I found more bothersome received far less attention, probably for good reason. They weren’t about some rules embarrassment in full view at a major championship. I was puzzled more by a quote Phil delivered to Alan Shipnuck from a profile earlier this month.

The subject is Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee, who is setting aside his full-time job this week to take up his former career as a pro and play the Senior Open. Phil’s comments on Chamblee, in full:

“He and I don’t see eye to eye on anything. I just like people who build up the game. I view this as we’re all in the game of golf together. We all want to grow the game. We all want to make it better. And I feel like he’s made his commentating career on denigrating others. And I don’t care for that. I like people who help build the sport up and promote it for what it is, rather than tearing down and ridiculing others.”

He lost me after the first sentence. I’d expect this misguided philosophy from many people around the game but to get it from Phil, of all people, is disappointing. An analyst’s job is not to build-up and promote. The game has plenty of promotional and self-serving apparatuses.

Chamblee is good at his job because he does not do this in an arena where so many do. Phil is often celebrated because he does the same! Chamblee pours on praise when he thinks it’s warranted and if something is off or a situation demands a critique of what went wrong, he provides it. Of course he is not always right, but it’s an honest effort, entertaining, and usually informative to the consumer.

That consumer hears enough talking heads telling them what happened. We need more people providing context on the why a good or bad thing happened. Sometimes that may piss a player or viewer off but the job is not to “build up” everyone and everything at the cost of real analysis.

A fine example comes from Chamblee and “Live From the Open” just this past Sunday, when we got a holistic view of Tiger’s charge at a 15th major. There was the positive — how great his swing looks and the genuine awe at a comeback that seemed so improbable. But there was also balance about why he fell short on the back nine, how that’s been a troubling trend, and evidence to support it being a real problem. Ignoring those problems that may not be rosy to talk about and may upset a Tiger fan would be a disservice. Trying to analyze Tiger’s Sunday back nine troubles with research is not “denigrating” or being overly negative. It’s adding value beyond the easy Tiger praise. It’s the job.

There is a common jab that Brandel only won once on Tour so he doesn’t have enough credibility to speak on the game. This is, to put it bluntly, the most facile and ineffective rebuttal. Mark May was a college All-American, had a long pro career and won two Super Bowls. I would still rather listen to and trust Joel Klatt or Kirk Herbstreit, who maybe had shorter, less successful playing careers than Mayday.

That anyone would view Chamblee as making a career by denigrating others is an indictment on the hackneyed and useless fluff that is the status quo. Fear of backlash from equipment companies, ruling bodies, sponsors, agents, and players corrupts too much coverage of the game. Chamblee is not Skip Bayless taking uninformed, intractable positions. He stands out because he doesn’t phony his way through it. He works to gather all different types of information and give an opinion based on his experience in the game. He can be wrong and get out over his skis, but the fact that he’s not afraid of that happening is what makes him one of the stronger analysts we have.

This isn’t a call for analysis to get meaner but rather to stop the backlash against anything that’s a legitimate attempt at critical analysis. Brandel’s not mean and neither is Phil when he speaks out on something. I don’t know Brandel and, while I obviously think he’s good at what he does, I write this less as a defense of him and more as an objection to Phil thinking coverage of the game should operate this certain way.

One of Phil’s great attributes is that he does speak his mind more often than the usual robotic pro. Sometimes it’s pre-mediated, sometimes it is off-the-cuff. He may be right or horribly inaccurate, but it’s often genuinely how he feels about a matter. It can get him in trouble on occasion but it has been an asset to how we view his career and contribution to the game. If he had tried to keep his public-facing opinions as filtered as possible, it is not as full of a career as the one we’ve enjoyed and celebrated.

An obvious example of this is Phil’s 2014 Ryder Cup commentary, however uncomfortable in the moment, becoming the impetus for a “task force” overhauling the USA’s approach. Changes of some sort were of course coming after another embarrassing defeat in 2014. But with the cameras and microphones on, Phil ripped into Tom Watson, sitting just a few seats down the dais.

The comments were useful and effective and had real value. He didn’t just throw a brick through a window that could be replaced. In front of everyone, he drove a bulldozer through the entire process and left the PGA of America with no choice but to completely rebuild. Not all of it may have been right, but it added to our frame of reference and understanding of the week. It was quite obviously entertaining as hell, too.

Phil has added to our understanding time and again with critical statements, whether it’s about shady ballmarking practices or a wisecrack about another player. It’s enjoyable but it often also adds real context compared to something run through an unhelpful PR-filter that provides nothing. We tend to measure careers based on trophies and on-course accomplishments. But, on balance, the full view of Phil’s career is amplified by the personality and so much of what he has offered in the public.

Phil trying to explain away his U.S. Open running putt as some sort of premeditated end-around the rules felt on-brand. His comments on Chamblee felt so off-brand it stunned me into writing about them. I’d rather him say “Brandel sucks for X,Y,Z reasons” than suggest that the job of people associated with golf is to hold hands and sing kumbaya to build each other up. We wouldn’t want that from Brandel or Phil and the game has been made better because neither blindly adhere to such a dishonest promotional philosophy.