ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt Rips PGA Tour After Merger With LIV Golf

The PGA Tour showcased some hypocrisy Tuesday, and Scott Van Pelt was quick to call the organization out for it.

The Tour sent shockwaves around the sports world when it unveiled its impending merger with LIV Golf, the Saudi Arabian-backed league that prompted significant drama and strife along the golf landscape after its launch in October 2021. The PGA Tour publicly decried LIV Golf at every turn the past 20 months and seemingly encouraged its marquee players to do the same.

Now, those same PGA Tour stalwarts will play under the same umbrella as those who defected to LIV and made a serious chunk of change in doing so. This doesn’t sit well with Van Pelt, who took to Twitter shortly after the merger news broke.

“So, you preach loyalty to a tour and convince guys not to take 8 and 9 figure deals based, in part, on that loyalty and, in part, on the source of the money,” the ESPN host tweeted. “Then those guys find out on Twitter YOU took the very same money? Nino Brown, ‘Always business, never personal.””

PGA Tour players themselves surely felt the same way as Van Pelt. Words like “shocked,” “confused” and “disgusted” were used to describe the players’ reported feelings on the merger and how it was handled. LIV players, meanwhile, unsurprisingly were on the other end of the emotions spectrum.