Brooks Koepka taunts Brandel Chamblee with four words tweet after LIV Golf-PGA Tour merge

Brooks Koepka’s rubbed salts in the wounds of Brandel Chamblee, one of his biggest critics, on social media following an announcement that the PGA Tour, LIV and DP World Tour are unifying.

‘Welfare Check on Chamblee,’ tweeted the 33-year-old, who recently became the first LIV player to win a PGA event by claiming victory at the PGA Championship.

Chamblee, who’s a former PGA Tour pro, has previously criticised Saudi Arabia’s foreign investment fund, also known as PIF, for backing LIV Golf. 

He’s also regularly questioned several players’ love for the game, including Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed and Bryson DeChambeau after they took large payouts to join the rebel circuit and accused the former members of the PGA Tour of helping Saudi Arabia with its ‘sports washing’ strategy. 

Last year, Chamblee and the Golf Channel were slapped with a $750million lawsuit, filed by Reed, with the 2018 Masters winner alleging that the 60-year-old ‘calculated, malicious’ comments on air that have ‘had a direct effect on his livelihood.’ 

Koepka became the first LIV player to claim a PGA event by winning the PGA Championship

Brandel Chamblee – an ex-PGA pro – is a put-by-put analyst for Golf Channel and NBC Sports

Often outspoken, Chamblee has now found himself as a target of LIV golfers’ wrath, but that hasn’t stopped the TV personality from doubling down on his attacks on the rival tour. 

Koepka’s coach, Claude Harmon III, also recently went public with his remarks on Chamblee, calling him a ‘paid actor by NBC and Golf Channel.’ 

‘Brandel is a paid actor by NBC and Golf Channel… And I mean, I love him, I think Eamon is a fantastic writer, but for Eamon Lynch and Brandel Chamblee, who worked for NBC Golf Channel to utter the words ”sportswashing” when the company they work for televised the last two Winter Olympics in Russia and China with the same leaders that they’ve had,’ said Harmon III via Golfweek.     

‘It’s not like they were good leaders back then. It’s not like Putin was a good guy, right?’

The announcement of golf’s biggest merge comes a year after LIV Golf was founded. PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan was at the Canadian Open that week and said pointedly about any player who joined LIV or was thinking about it: ‘Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?’

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan struck a deal with LIV without informing PGA players

Now they are partners, giving Saudi Arabia a commercial voice in golf’s premier organization.

‘They were going down their path, we were going down ours, and after a lot of introspection you realize all this tension in the game is not a good thing,’ Monahan told The Associated Press via a phone interview. 

‘We have a responsibility to our tour and to the game, and we felt like the time was right to have that conversation.’

The deal was in the works for the last seven weeks, when Monahan first met with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, governor of the PIF. Players typically approve changes to the schedule and other competition matters. On this one, they were left out.

‘No one had word of this,’ Monahan said. ‘Our players expect us to operate in the best interests of the tour.’