Phil Mickelson utilized LIV Golf’s biggest stage to continue his campaign against the Official World Golf Ranking on Wednesday.
After taking to social media last week to deride the OWGR board’s decision to deny LIV Golf League’s request for players to compete for world rankings points, Mickelson said ahead of this week’s Team Championship that there’s more to it than LIV’s format and limited turnover rate.
“I do want to bring to light as to why exactly they are doing what they are doing,” Mickelson said at Trump National Doral on Wednesday. “It’s not what they are putting out there on the front page. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes as to the importance of us getting points to [match] the PGA Tour.”
OWGR president Peter Dawson wrote in a letter to LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman that the board’s vote to deny the request was unanimous, but he told the Global Golf Post that the decision was “entirely technical” and that the league could resubmit its bid in the future.
“We have enough on our plate to make our product more and more exciting and appealing that we shouldn’t worry ourselves with what they are doing,” Mickelson said when asked if LIV should work to address the hurdles presented by the OWGR board.
“… We just need to focus on what we are doing and make our product as good as possible, as interesting as possible. We need to make tweaks into our program. The OWGR need to obviously make tweaks, but we need to tweak our format to continue to evolve and be more interesting and easier to understand.”
Mickelson echoed the sentiments of Bryson DeChambeau, who said last week that the majors should find a way to include the best LIV Golf players.
“I think that the majors need to protect their product, and there’s probably other ways that they can do that by creating slots,” Mickelson said. “If they want to make sure they have the best fields in golf, they could create vehicles for players on LIV to play in majors where they don’t have to use the OWGR, which would undermine the TV contract and revenue of the PGA Tour if they gave points to LIV.”
Without making changes specifically to please the OWGR, Mickelson did acknowledge that LIV needs to continue to evolve.
As LIV concludes its second season this week, he hinted the player roster is “going to improve next year.” Mickelson said changes to the league’s structure and event format could also be in the works, although he declined to reveal details of any potential alterations.
“We have a lot of ideas internally. … We have to see if they are good ideas, if they are going to work,” he said. “It’s important that we continue to evolve our product, our presentation … so it’s easier to understand and becomes more appealing.”
