Alan Shipnuck recently reported the explosive comments Phil Mickelson made about the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia-backed, Greg Norman-led Super Golf League that would be a direct rival of the PGA Tour.
In a statement released Tuesday by Mickelson, he called his comments “reckless,” apologized, said he had made mistakes and needed to be held accountable.
Mickelson also said his November interview with Shipnuck was off the record.
Shipnuck fired back. The writer for the Fire Pit Collective and author of the soon-to-be-released “Phil: The Rip-Roaring (and Unauthorized!) Biography of Golf’s Most Colorful Superstar,” stands by the excerpt from his book about Mickelson saying he was one of the architects behind the proposed Saudi Arabia league and despite the country’s oppressive regime, he hoped to use the league that is guaranteeing exorbitant amounts of money as leverage against the PGA Tour.
“He sent me a text on the morning the excerpt dropped. He was less than thrilled,” Shipnuck wrote in a column on the Fire Pit Collective. “Just as in the statement he released on Tuesday afternoon, Mickelson made a half-hearted attempt at revisionist history, trying to say our talk had been a private conversation, but I shut that down real quick.
“He knew I was working on a book about him and asked to speak, saying he wanted to discuss media rights and his grievances with the PGA Tour, both of which inevitably lead back to Saudi Arabia. If the subject of a biography phones the author, the content of that conversation is always going to inform the book, unless it is expressly agreed otherwise.”
There was no agreement, Shipnuck said.
“Not once in our texts or when we got on the phone did Mickelson request to go off-the-record and I never consented to it; if he had asked, I would have pushed back hard, as this was obviously material I wanted for the book,” Shipnuck wrote. “Mickelson simply called me up and opened a vein. To claim now that the comments were off-the-record is false and duplicitous.”