John Smoltz favors McIlroy, Scheffler over LIV
Ahead of the American Century celebrity golf tournament, baseball hall of famer John Smoltz breaks down the best celebrity golfers and why he favors the PGA over LIV.
- LIV Golf revoked a Michigan reporter’s media credential for the team championship at St. John’s in Plymouth, after he refused to remove portions of a podcast interview.
- The media member, Bill Hobson, asked LIV analyst Pat Perez about the league’s funding by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
- LIV officials contacted Hobson after the interview, requesting he take down the podcast or edit out the discussion regarding Saudi Arabia, but Hobson declined.
- Hobson founded and runs Michigan Golf Live, producing local TV, radio and multimedia content that largely spotlights golf courses in Michigan.
LIV Golf 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.
Bill Hobson owns and operates Michigan Golf Live, which has existed as a local radio program for 26 years. His YouTube channel by the same name has just under 5,000 subscribers. Its content is largely contained to courses, travel destinations and local golf happenings in the Great Lake State, and also runs on FanDuel Sports Network Detroit.
Bill Hobson asked for interview guest before LIV Michigan event
As LIV Golf descended upon Michigan this week for its 2025 team championship event at The Cardinal at St. John’s resort in Plymouth, near Detroit, Hobson — who has long asserted publicly that he’s “never been a big fan” of LIV — saw a chance to learn more about the league and promote it for his listeners.
So, when LIV Golf’s media relations team asked if Hobson would like to conduct a podcast interview with Pat Perez, a former player who now works as a TV analyst for the league, Hobson jumped at the opportunity.
“LIV reached out and said, ‘We’re doing PR for the tournament, would you like to interview Pat?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, 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.” Hobson told Golfweek on Wednesday.
What ensued was a saga Hobson couldn’t have imagined would be caused by his podcast, one that is typically listened to by “a few hundred, maybe a thousand people.”
Discussion with Pat Perez touched on normal golf subjects and LIV Golf funding
Much of the roughly 30-minute phone interview centered around light-hearted topics. Hobson and Perez shared laughs as they chopped it up about the LIV Golf team championship, the festivities surrounding it, the league’s plans beyond this season, and of course, “Happy Gilmore 2.”
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’s public relations department into a frenzy.
“Nothing was ever conveyed to me as, ‘Hey, whatever you do, don’t bring up these things,’ because I wouldn’t have done the interview with that sort of a restriction,” Hobson told Golfweek on Wednesday.
During the episode, Hobson — confessing his skepticism about LIV Golf — asked Perez if he felt that the controversy surrounding the league had begun to die down as it wraps up its fourth season.
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.
Hobson, in response, emphasized that he didn’t take issue with the existence of a competitive league with a different format, but rather the source of its funding: Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Perez offered his thoughts on the matter.
“A lot of people don’t like the funding from the Saudis, but you know, they’re involved in so many things in the United States and I think people do forget that,” Perez said during the podcast interview. “This is not like some group that’s 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’re 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?”
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.
“There’s literally nothing in this [podcast] except two guys who sound like they’re sitting over for a pizza having a talk,” Hobson told Golfweek. “I 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.”
Soon after interview, LIV Golf officials ask for edits
About 10 minutes after wrapping up the interview, Hobson began receiving calls from LIV Golf officials who he said sounded panicked.
“It’s the strangest scenario that I’ve been a part of, ever,” Hobson said. “In the 26 years of my show, certainly I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re pretty bland. [Michigan Golf Live] features courses and destinations. We do some event coverage, but you won’t find anybody who would say that I have some sort of clickbait, ambush, sneak-up-on-you approach to anything.”
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. Hobson kindly declined.
As a result, he received several more phone calls from escalating levels of LIV officials over the following 48 hours.
“I told them, ‘Those were perfectly fine questions and he answered them fine,’” Hobson said. “They said, ‘No, he didn’t answer them fine. He was out of his lane and he shouldn’t have gone there. I said, ‘Well, you understand that’s not on me.
“I had not agreed to any limitations or, you know, ‘I won’t go there’ 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, ‘No, no, right here, he said he wouldn’t do that.’ There isn’t any such thing. And I wouldn’t have done the interview with that.”
LIV Golf officials revoked Hobson’s credential
Ultimately, Hobson’s refusal to delete or edit the episode featuring Perez led to the league revoking his media credential to cover LIV Golf Michigan on Tuesday.
Hobson said LIV Golf instead offered him spectator tickets to “come and enjoy the event.”
“It’s largely unprecedented to revoke an already-granted credential,” Hobson said. “You 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.”
Hobson found the move even more baffling, considering he interviewed LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil 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 St. John’s as O’Neil prepared to serve as a keynote speaker at a Detroit Economic Club meeting.
“I had [O’Neil] on live with me for like 15 minutes,” Hobson said. “I 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.”
While he’s made it clear that he’s not the league’s 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.
“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 ‘Hey, you have to go to an event and you’ll see that it’s so much fun.’ That’s why I applied for the credential. I was actually expecting to be denied, but I got approved in very short order.”
‘I’m not Adam Carolla or Joe Rogan’
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.
“I 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,” Hobson said in a YouTube video posted Tuesday explaining his situation with LIV.
Instead, the story has become one of “paranoia” on the part of LIV, according to Hobson, who says this serves as a classic example of making a mountain out of a molehill.
“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.'”
Golfweek reached out to LIV Golf, and league officials declined to comment.
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