Even with the PGA Tour and LIV Golf asserting plans to merge, tales in regards to the rivalries between gamers on the respective sides are nonetheless simmering.
Because the Saudi-backed LIV tour was amping up, plenty of golfers, together with Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, got nine-figure offers to leap ship for the upstart league.
In an excerpt of golf author Alan Shipnuck’s new guide LIV and Let Die revealed on Hearth Pit Collective, Koepka was mentioned to have been perturbed at PGA Tour loyalists like Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth, who grew up in households with means, for judging him over accepting the payday.
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Shipnuck described a scene in the summertime of 2022 during which Koepka, Johnson and his spouse, Paulina Gretzky, and Pat Perez and his spouse, Ashley, had been partying at a personal bar at Adare Manor in Eire, across the JP McManus Professional-Am.
Perez reportedly thanked Johnson profusely for recruiting him to LIV, the implication being that it modified his life financially, whereas Koepka chimed in with a chip on his shoulder.
“F*** all of these nation membership children who speak s*** about me,” the guide attributes Koepka, referring to golfers like Spieth and Thomas who criticised him for the transfer.
“You assume I give a f*** what they assume? You assume I care what individuals say about me? I simply had three surgical procedures, and I’m supposed to show down US$130 million? I grew up with nothing. After signing that contract, the primary particular person I referred to as was my mother. We each cried.”
LIV Golf and the PGA Tour introduced plans to merge in June, beautiful everybody who had witnessed the divisive rhetoric between the excursions’ leaders and gamers over the earlier two years.
Nevertheless, there was some regulatory scrutiny across the proposed merger, and different bidders for the PGA Tour together with Endeavor and Fenway Sports activities Group have reportedly emerged, so it stays to be seen what the golf panorama will appear to be going ahead.
This text initially appeared on the NY Submit and was reproduced with permission