Phil Mickelson and Alan Shipnuck continue to be like oil and water.
The years-long feud was reignited in recent days when Shipnuck, Mickelson’s biographer, reported that the golf legend has “has been telling folks” that Jon Rahm leaving the PGA Tour for LIV Golf is a “done deal.”
Mickelson responded to the report on X, writing, “This isn’t true and I don’t know anything. I don’t want to know anything and I haven’t said anything. Alan is the worst liar and a pathetic human.”
Shipnuck called Mickelson’s response “typically sociopathic” and doubled down that Mickelson has told people “who are influential in the golf world” the Rahm news.
In a since-deleted post, Mickelson continued, “I can’t be any more clear. You are LYING. I have not spoken Jon’s name or about him. Every person I’ve been with the last couple weeks will swear by that. Name your source, you lying POS (I won’t go into the countless lies in your book, too many to even start.)”
Mickelson and Rahm, a two-time major champion, share an agent.
In the lead-up to Shipnuck’s book about Mickelson, he published an excerpt in which Mickelson told him that the Saudi Arabian nationals who launched LIV Golf are “scary motherf–kers to get involved with.”
Phil Mickelson called his biographer Alan Shipnuck a ‘lying POS’ in a since-deleted tweet. Getty Images
Golf writer Alan Shipnuck has been in a years-long feud with Phil Mickelson. X/AlanShipnuck
“We know they killed [Washington Post reporter Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights,” Mickelson reportedly continued.
“They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
Mickelson issued a statement saying that these remarks were “off the record comments being shared out of context and without my consent,” a claim that Shipnuck continues to deny.
In a tweet published Monday morning, Shipnuck published an email exchange in which he offered Mickelson the opportunity to respond to salacious elements from his book, and defended the idea that the comments about LIV Golf were on the record.
.@PhilMickelson wants me to reveal confidential sources. I don’t do that. I do try to be fair to anybody I write about.
When I was working on the Mickelson biography “Phil,” he called me because he wanted me to know what was really happening behind the scenes with LIV Golf and… pic.twitter.com/OzT9F8ZFtB— Alan Shipnuck (@AlanShipnuck) November 27, 2023
“After his comments were published in an excerpt on FirePitCollective.com, creating an intense controversy, Mickelson claimed our conversation had been off-the-record,” Shipnuck tweeted.
“I had previously asked him three times face-to-face to sit for interviews; we both knew this phone call was for the book and everything he told me was going in its pages. He never asked to go off-the-record. If he had, I would have pushed back hard because this was my one chance to interview him for the book.”
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