{"id":84459,"date":"2025-08-20T20:07:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T20:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/84459\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T20:07:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T20:07:11","slug":"liv-golf-sets-up-interview-then-revokes-reporters-credential-after-he-refused-to-take-it-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/84459\/","title":{"rendered":"LIV Golf sets up interview then revokes reporter’s credential after he refused to take it down"},"content":{"rendered":"

LIV Golf<\/a> revoked the media credential of a local golf reporter in Michigan after he refused to take down a podcast interview that was set up by the league itself.<\/p>\n

Bill Hobson owns and operates Michigan Golf Live<\/a>. His YouTube channel<\/a> by the same name has just under 5,000 subscribers and its content is largely contained to courses, travel destinations and local golf happenings in the Great Lakes State.<\/p>\n

\"LIV<\/p>\n

LIV Golf signage during day three of the LIV Golf Invitational – Singapore at Sentosa Golf Club on May 05, 2024 in Singapore, Singapore.<\/p>\n

Podcaster asked for interview guest before LIV Michigan event<\/p>\n

As LIV Golf<\/a> descended upon Michigan<\/a> this week for its 2025 team championship event at The Cardinal at Saint John\u2019s resort in Plymouth, near Detroit, Hobson \u2014 who has long asserted publicly that he\u2019s \u201cnever been a big fan\u201d of LIV \u2014 saw a chance to learn more about the league and promote it for his listeners.<\/p>\n

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So, when LIV Golf\u2019s media relations team asked if Hobson would like to conduct a podcast interview with Pat Perez<\/a>, a former player who now works as a TV analyst for the league, Hobson jumped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n

\u201cLIV reached out and said, \u2018We\u2019re doing PR for the tournament, would you like to interview Pat?\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Yeah, sure, I’ve never talked to him, but I’ve always found him very intriguing and very interesting and he’s part of their broadcast team now, so obviously he’s been pretty well schooled in all of these things.\u201d Hobson told Golfweek on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

What ensued was a saga Hobson couldn\u2019t have imagined would be caused by his podcast, one that is typically listened to by \u201ca few hundred, maybe a thousand people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discussion with Pat Perez touched on normal golf subjects<\/p>\n

Much of the roughly 30-minute phone interview centered around light-hearted topics. Hobson and Perez<\/a> shared laughs as they chopped it up about the LIV Golf team championship, the festivities surrounding it, the league\u2019s plans beyond this season, and of course, “Happy Gilmore 2.”<\/p>\n

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But a question regarding the harder-hitting issues that have hung over LIV Golf like a cloud since its inception seemed to send the league\u2019s public relations department into a frenzy.<\/p>\n

\u201cNothing was ever conveyed to me as, \u2018Hey, whatever you do, don’t bring up these things,\u2019 because I wouldn’t have done the interview with that sort of a restriction,\u201d Hobson told Golfweek on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

During the episode, Hobson \u2014 confessing his skepticism about LIV Golf \u2014 asked Perez if he felt that the controversy surrounding the league had begun to die down as it wraps up its fourth season.<\/p>\n

Perez said he understood why some people may not like the fact that LIV split up the sport of golf and implemented a team format on a closed-circuit tour, but he asserted that if they come to experience it in person, they might change their mind.<\/p>\n

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Hobson, in response, emphasized that he didn\u2019t take issue with the existence of a competitive league with a different format, but rather the source of its funding: Saudi Arabia\u2019s Public Investment Fund.<\/p>\n

Perez offered his thoughts on the matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people don\u2019t like the funding from the Saudis, but you know, they\u2019re involved in so many things in the United States and I think people do forget that,\u201d Perez said during the podcast interview<\/a>. \u201cThis is not like some group that\u2019s not involved in the United States currency in some form or another, what they do or how they do it. You know, we sell tons, 100s of millions of dollars of weapons and ammunitions and stuff like that to the Saudis, so if it was such a big problem, why would the United States sell them all this artillery? Last time I checked, they bought $850 million worth of artillery from us, so if they\u2019re such a threat to the United States as far as terrorism and all that stuff, why the hell would you sell them all this equipment?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pat<\/p>\n

Pat Perez of the Aces during day two of LIV Golf Adelaide at The Grange Golf Course on April 22, 2023 in Adelaide, Australia.<\/p>\n

The two men moved on from the topic without so much as an argumentative comment, and the rest of the conversation remained cordial and friendly, as their relationship has since, according to Hobson, who said Perez could have declined to answer such a question and he would have honored it.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThere’s literally nothing in this [podcast] except two guys who sound like they’re sitting over for a pizza having a talk,\u201d Hobson told Golfweek. \u201cI try to conduct myself with professionalism, which I think you could probably get some evidence for simply by seeing the text messages that Pat Perez and I have exchanged since all of this just blew up, because he’s fine, and I can’t quite figure out why the explosiveness and why LIV decided to take a complete non-story and turn it into one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Soon after interview, LIV Golf officials asked for edits<\/p>\n

About 10 minutes after wrapping up the interview, Hobson began receiving calls from LIV Golf officials who sounded panicked.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the strangest scenario that I\u2019ve been a part of, ever,\u201d Hobson said. \u201cIn the 26 years of my show, certainly I\u2019ve never seen anything like it. We\u2019re pretty bland. [Michigan Golf Live] features courses and destinations. We do some event coverage, but you won\u2019t find anybody who would say that I have some sort of clickbait, ambush, sneak-up-on-you approach to anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

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LIV officials seemed to think otherwise. They asked Hobson to take out the question regarding Saudi Arabia and another about former LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman<\/a>. Hobson kindly declined.<\/p>\n

As a result, he received several more phone calls from escalating levels of LIV officials over the following 48 hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told them, \u2018Those were perfectly fine questions and he answered them fine,\u2019\u201d Hobson said. \u201cThey said, \u2018No, he didn\u2019t answer them fine. He was out of his lane and he shouldn\u2019t have gone there. I said, \u2018Well, you understand that\u2019s not on me.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had not agreed to any limitations or, you know, \u2018I won’t go there\u2019 categories. They may have made those up in their own minds, but I would invite or defy them to come up with some sort of screenshot that says, \u2018No, no, right here, he said he wouldn\u2019t do that.\u2019 There isn’t any such thing. And I wouldn’t have done the interview with that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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LIV Golf officials revoked Hobson’s credential<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Hobson\u2019s refusal to delete or edit the episode featuring Perez<\/a> led to the league revoking his media credential to cover LIV Golf Michigan on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Hobson said LIV Golf instead offered him spectator tickets to \u201ccome and enjoy the event.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s largely unprecedented to revoke an already-granted credential,\u201d Hobson said. \u201cYou know, I’m accustomed to not getting approved. Augusta’s got that down to a rhythm for me. That’s pretty much automatic. But I’ve covered, I don’t know, 120 tour events and Ryder Cups and majors and I’ve just never even been remotely close to scratching the surface of what’s happened here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hobson found the move even more baffling, considering he interviewed LIV Golf CEO Scott O\u2019Neil on live radio just a month ago. The interview came to be while Hobson was filling in as a host on WJR-AM in Detroit, which was emanating from The Cardinal at Saint John\u2019s as O\u2019Neil prepared to serve as a keynote speaker at a Detroit Economic Club meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had [O\u2019Neil] on live with me for like 15 minutes,\u201d Hobson said. \u201cI asked him the hard questions, and of course, he was fine, he answered them fine. So, I cannot quite figure out how the same guy who had the CEO on a month and a half prior could be a mystery to anybody in their PR team.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Scott<\/p>\n

Scott O’Neil, LIV Golf CEO, looks on during the award ceremony on day three of LIV Golf Chicago at Bolingbrook Golf Club on August 10, 2025 in Bolingbrook, Illinois.<\/p>\n

While he\u2019s made it clear that he\u2019s not the league\u2019s biggest supporter, Hobson wanted to give it a chance as it stopped in his home state of Michigan for its final event of the 2025 season.<\/p>\n

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“Our world is not primarily coverage of professional tours, but I do a little bit of commentary here and there and so yes, anybody who has followed us at all would know that I’m not pro-LIV,” he said. “I said when the event was announced in Michigan that I need to go to this. I need to cover it so that I can actually have some credibility, because people are like \u2018Hey, you have to go to an event and you’ll see that it’s so much fun.\u2019 That’s why I applied for the credential. I was actually expecting to be denied, but I got approved in very short order.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘I’m not Adam Carolla or Joe Rogan’<\/p>\n

Hobson planned to attend LIV Golf Michigan as a member of the media and put his personal opinions aside to provide proper coverage of the event.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did all of this with the intent of helping spread the word about the tournament so more people would attend. I put a link to purchase tickets in the podcast notes. I encouraged people to come out and see it for themselves and see the beautiful Cardinal golf course for themselves,\u201d Hobson said in a YouTube video posted Tuesday<\/a> explaining his situation with LIV.<\/p>\n

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Instead, the story has become one of \u201cparanoia\u201d on the part of LIV, according to Hobson, who says this serves as a classic example of making a mountain out of a molehill.<\/p>\n

“I’m not Adam Carolla or Joe Rogan. There are not 10 million people listening to my podcast. [I told LIV], ‘My podcast neither causes cancer nor cures cancer, but you’re acting like it does both. Just let it go. You’ll be okay.'”<\/p>\n

Golfweek reached out to LIV Golf, and league officials declined to comment.<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: LIV Golf revokes media member’s credential after podcast interview<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LIV Golf revoked the media credential of a local golf reporter in Michigan after he refused to take…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[50415,49,48,622,50416,6674,1447,50414,82],"class_list":["post-84459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-bill-hobson","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-hobson","tag-liv-golf","tag-michigan","tag-pat-perez","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}