Phil Mickelson played a fantastic round of golf at The Masters Sunday, but wasn’t prominently featured on the day’s television broadcast. Boomer Esiason and Gregg Giannotti disagreed about why that was the case.
During Boomer & Gio Monday, the pair talked about how well players from the LIV Golf tour played at the major tournament over the weekend, before Esiason said the situation with Mickelson put CBS in a difficult position.
“I totally understand why they downplay those guys,” Esiason said. “Because those guys tried to ruin the PGA Tour. Now, again, The Masters aren’t part of the PGA Tour, but they are partners in a lot of different things…CBS is in a weird spot. NBC will be in a weird spot for The U.S. Open, and ESPN will be in a weird spot for The Open Championship because they’ll have to deal with the same kind of stuff.”
“But it’s not less of a story because Phil (Mickelson) went to LIV, it’s more of a story,” argued Giannotti. “You might disagree with the decision, or CBS has an issue with what Phil did or the LIV guys did, or Jim Nantz or whatever…”
“Hold on. Wait a minute,” Esiason interrupted. “You gotta remember that CBS has a contract with the PGA Tour, and (LIV Golf) tried to torpedo that.”
“But the fact of the matter is that Phil Mickelson doing what he did yesterday — journalistically — needs to be treated like a huge thing,” rebutted Giannotti. “It just has to be. To me, you can’t have your personal or business feelings going into the broadcast. That was a huge deal…All these guys were non-factors, and here is Phil Mickelson — at 52 — shooting a 65 in windy conditions on Sunday at The Masters, and it was treated like an ‘Oh, by the way’ situation.”
The pair have been previously critical of the upstart LIV Golf league. After a commercial aired during their morning show on WFAN promoting a LIV Golf event in New Jersey last year, Esiason said “So we took the blood money, Trump Bedminster took the blood money, Trump Doral took the blood money too, that’s the last event that they have.”
When did NBC lose the rights to the (British) Open Championship? Boomer says that ESPN has them but I thought NBC did.