Bruce Dowbiggin
LIV & Let LIV: Phil Mickelson Gets His Revenge

Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold. If so, it’s appropriate that in the teeming rain, chilling winds and falling trees of Augusta National this weekend that Phil Mickelson got a measure of gotcha’ on the PGA Tour.
He could have staggered in the marathon of Sunday, as Masters organizers— who loath him— tried to catch up after weather delays, But from as low as even par on Sunday the 53-year-old ended tied for second behind Rahm at eight under. For a three-time winner of the green jacket that was probably not up to his expectations. But as a guy who could instead be playing the relaxed Champions Tour, just making the cut in the biblical storm conditions was an accomplishment.
Second? WTF? He set the record for the best finish by a golfer in his 50s or older. Where on Monday the golf world shunned him, by Sunday night they were eating from his hand again. But more than that for Mickelson— if it’s possible— he achieved the satisfaction of bringing his fellow LIV players into the heart of the PGA Tour’s belly and walking away tied for second with Brooks Koepka.

AUGUSTA, GEORGIA – APRIL 04: Talor Gooch of the United States, Dustin Johnson of the United States, Phil Mickelson of the United States, and Harold Varner III of the United States walk down the 11th fairway during a practice round prior to the 2023 Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club on April 04, 2023 in Augusta, Georgia. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
For the entire week, the debate had been how the rebel players would be greeted by the stuffy culture of Augusta National and the panjandrums of the PGA Tour. Would they be ostracized? Would they be shunned? Would they be given the cold shoulder at the Champions Dinner?
On Golfchannel the discussion was about the preparation the players had had on the LIV Tour, with its 54-hole tournaments, limited schedule, raucous presentation. Had players like Koepka, Cam Smith, former Masters winner Patrick Reed, Joaquin Niemann, Harold Varner III, Abraham Ancer, Taylor Gooch and, yes, Mickelson had enough preparation for the diabolical examination of Augusta National. Were guys who jumped ship for the dough properly motivated now that they had financial security?
By Sunday night it was irrelevant. In all there were three LIV players (including Phil himself) inside the Top 16. Nine in the Top 40. Mickelson had been the face of the new league since it popped up last year, the focus of the wrath against it. Now he delivered. And so did his compatriots on the controversial rebel league.
Mickelson is never one to shy away from wearing the black hat. While Woods is now a “good guy” Phil has embellished his bad-boy reputation the past two years with inflammatory interviews, lawsuits, lost sponsors and prickly encounters with authority. Rumours of his financial peril and questionable personal behaviour were always in the background.
(In one Phil story he was playing a high-stakes money game with an NHL owner— who thought the round was a lark with the superstar. When the match ended with Mickelson winning a bundle, the owner thought Phil might just call it a wash. Uh, no. He insisted he be paid the entire amount— in cash. American dollars. The chastened owner had to send out for the money as Phil waited in the parking lot of the club.)
That will all be dismissed by the dominant performance of Mickelson and Koepka— who led virtually the whole way through storms, delays, wind and rain. While the liberal sports media still dismissed the LIV players for taking the evil Saudi petro dollars, the unity of the LIV crew at The Masters was underlined when those players on the grounds waited around to cheer their fellow LIV players on at the 18th green.
If the PGA Tour thought that this past weekend would drive fans away from LIV, the opposite is probably true. Seeing the quality of the players at Augusta will pique the interest of many fans. Seeing the PGA Tour’s biggest spokesmen in Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas both miss the cut also didn’t enhance the Tour’s invincibility.
Mickelson’s other revenge this past weekend came over his former rival Tiger Woods. For much of the quarter-century since they rose to prominence together Tiger was the athletic, trim superstar. The man with the steel-trap mind. The machine who churned out 15 majors.
Phil? Critics ripped him for denying his talent, his wavering inattention to fitness. They said he lacked seriousness. We will never forget being on PEI with Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson as they ripped Mickelson’s mental game after he threw away the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot on the 18th hole.
But Sunday showed that Mickelson still has plenty of tread on his tires when it comes to his fitness. Having lost about 20 pounds, he had little problem walking the sodden, hilly layout. As Brandel Chamblee suggested on Golfchannel maybe Phil didn’t maximize his physical prime, but he didn’t punish himself as so many now do in the gym. Chamblee suggested Woods won’t be the only golfer with a wrecked body from over-training.
That was underlined by the pathetic sight of Woods—five years younger than Phil — dragging his battered right leg around behind him as he fought the extreme conditions. In the end he couldn’t manage the pain of plantar fascinates, withdrawing Sunday morning when the leg would not respond to the hours of treatment he needs now to compete.
He looked a spent man. Yes, the leg injury was from his terrible car crash in Los Angeles in 2020. But even before that Woods’ body was failing him after years of punishing workouts. At one point he was doing Navy Seal training, emulating his father’s career. While Woods wouldn’t confirm it, his first serious knee injury was likely produced by this military conditioning. Next came back problems exacerbated by the stresses his bum leg caused.
Now, it appears that it’s all over for Woods as a competitive player if the Tour doesn’t allow him to ride in a cart. Mickelson— who has a lifetime Masters and U.S. Open exemption— will still find a way to match up with the young bucks of the Tour for a few more years. Other LIV stars will keep popping up— and perhaps winning— the majors under their exemptions. The PGA Tour will deny that LIV made them radically overhaul their business model. Sure.
It’s not a beautiful outcome. And Mickelson is hardly an Eagle Scout. But for four wet, miserable days in April he showed what hand is in the sports business. And that was worth the price of admission.
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Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his new book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx
Bruce Dowbiggin
Canadians Thinks America Owes Them. Trump Has Other Ideas

Breaking: It’s now being reported that in the 2024 U.S. election, zero Canadians voted for Donald Trump. In fact, zero Canadians voted for anyone on the ballot. They’re not allowed to. And yet rage monkeys in the Canadian media seem to have the idea that Canada is— and should be— an immediate priority of POTUS 47.
Here’s Globe & Mail/ CBC wind therapist Andrew Coyne about ten exits past normal on the idea of Donald Trump on Canadian soil. Okay, on Alberta soil. “We’re going to roll out the red carpet for the wannabe dictator of America at the very moment he is moving to suppress dissent with armed force?” (You mean like the Truckers Convoy?)
Cartoonist Michael DeAdder, who likely cries if you use improper pronouns, says “Hold my kombucha”. His latest etching has Trump asking a veteran what he did in the war. The witty retort is “Fought against people like you”. Get it? Trump murders six millions Jews. But The Hill keeps this guy working, and the laughs just keep on coming. Free speech!

The presumption is jaw-dropping. Even as Trump’s approval rating hits 53 percent, Canadians online were echoing Democrats’ fever dreams of forming a shadow government to take over from Trump via coup. This sense of impunity at a distance is why the Canadian government— along with other drive-by virtue signallers UK, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia— have imposed sanctions on two sitting members of the Israeli cabinet. They know it will rile Trump’s America.
For ordinary Canadians, Trump became a post-it note to justify giving Team Liberal another swing at ruining the nation. “We used to be such friends! He’s a tyrant.!” This just in: Love him or hate him Trump is employed by Americans to do their bidding. He’s not a sentimental buddy of Canada who’ll cut us some slack for old time’s sake. He has no remittance from Canada to please the Laurentian elites. If your defence is non-existent and your military gender-obsessed: you had it coming.
Are his policies jostling Canada? Absolutely. Read Art of the Deal. The 51st state jibe when Justin soiled himself was rude. But it worked on pliant Canadian liberals. Now the The Little Banker is disavowing the dissolute decade of Trudeau while employing Conservatives’ policies on defence spending, inter-provincial trade and border security. Hell, he’s naming longtime Tories to his personal staff.

In the end Carney knows this ain’t mock Parliament. That his dossier begins and ends with satisfying the beast to the south. None of this should be a surprise. Yet Canadians dozed when Trump made clear in his election campaign that the American economy is the greatest in the world. If you want to fish in that pond it’s not going to be for free. That means tariffs for a range of U.S. industries that couldn’t compete in a Biden world.
We can argue how well tariffs work, but Trump wants them to reduce taxes on the people who elected him. Not the Canadians who fly first class but pay economy. And who have pushed his approval ratings into the 50s, higher than ever before. (Likely to spike higher after the No Kings Riot season peters out.)
No wonder Canadians preferred the guy before Trump, the senile sock puppet whose government was run by anonymous figures using the auto-pen. Sleepy Joe let Canada slide into mediocrity and financial peril without any judgement. It was comfortable. Then The Donald had the nerve to expose the ditch Canada was in.
Canada, Trump pointed out, was delinquent on its defence, harbouring Chinese drug lords, printing money like Canadian Tire and its banks were involved in money laundering. That was the nice stuff. Try Organized fentanyl networks operating with impunity in the largest cities of the nation So dumping on Trump in salty cartoons allows Canada’s Mod Squad to ignore the real issues that should have been litigated in the April election.
We have written extensively about the ruse that was played on gormless Canadians in “U.S. Voters Smelled A Rat But Canadian Voters Bought The Cheese” We have catalogued Canada’s drug and money laundering disgrace in “Chinese Gangs Dominate Canada: Why Will Voters Give Liberals Another Term?” We’ve described the real-estate bubble economy created by Trudeau and sidekick Carney that threatens to crash the economy and ruin seniors’ pensions in
In the end, it is still la-la-la-la We Can’t Hear You. Trump-obsessed Boomers more concerned with the equity in their jumped-up bungalows gave the finger to the next generations and blamed it all on Orange Man Bad. In the monotone of Canadian political comment it all seemed so easy. Turn against Trump. Cash another dividend. Cheer on MSNBC and CNN bitch sessions.
The Family Compact don’t get it. Their Antifa heroes down south plan demos and “nonviolent” activity to crater the public resolve. In Canada that still works. But in the U.S. the Covid reverb is hitting the natural governing class of the nation. While they craft fine phrases about democracy the consumers remember them using a virus to stop society.
The appetite for Gavin Newsom blovaitors and Jen Psaki fart catchers is crashing in America. Riots may be coming in the U.S., but it won’t be like George Floyd and Covid and the pussy hats. At some point Canada’s docile classes better wake up, too. America owes them nothing. They need to earn the respect.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, his new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org . His 2004 book Money Players was voted sixth best on the same list, and is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca.
Bruce Dowbiggin
Simone Biles Fails To Stick The Landing Going After Riley Gaines

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. George Orwell
Or, in the case of Olympic legend Simone Biles, only gymnasts believe in the incendiary issue of trans men competing in women’s sports. Biles, who has made a secondary career as an object of pity, took exception when former swimmer Riley Gaines, an opponent of trans men competing against women, sent a picture of Minnesota softball team that recently won a state title with a pitcher who is reported to be transgender.
“Comments off lol,’ Gaines wrote in response to the post which wasn’t permitting any comments from the public. “To be expected when your star player is a boy.”
That brought Biles into the fray. ‘You’re truly sick, all of this campaigning because you lost a race. Straight up sore loser. ‘You should be uplifting the trans community and perhaps finding a way to make sports inclusive OR creating a new avenue where trans feel safe in sports. Maybe a transgender category IN ALL sports!! ‘But instead… You bully them… One things for sure is no one in sports is safe with you around!!!!!’
She then poked Gaines again, saying: ‘Bully someone your own size, which would ironically be a male.” (Gaines husband is 6-foot-4)

The loser reference was to Gaines having lost to a trans swimmer in an NCAA race. Since then Gaines has launched a campaign to outlaw biological males from competing with cisgendered girls and women. She has testified in the U.S. Congress and has appeared in numerous interviews espousing a position supported by the vast majority of Americans.

One might think the proof of this position— unquestioned as recently as a decade ago— would be obvious. But Biles and gender radicals who’ve tried to make trans into the Emancipation Proclamation of the 21st century are not giving up the fight.
Here’s someone named Nancy Armour in USA Today. “There is no scientific evidence that transgender women athletes have a physical advantage over cisgender women athletes, but that hasn’t stopped Gaines from claiming they do..” When legislation banning trans men in girls/ women sports was presented in the U.S. Congress 106 Democrats voted against the motion. The chattering class on CBC, MSNBC and CNN likewise have a cohort of those opposing the ban.
But it was the outburst from Biles that most appalled fans who’d worshipped her as the GOAT of Olympic gymnastics and then sympathized with her victimization by Dr. Larry Nasser. Even when she bailed on her teammates at the 2024 Games they cut her slack. But suddenly a woman who’s preached against body shaming and intolerance was deriding a fellow athlete’s body and mocking her complaints.
Critics were quick to post Biles’ hypocrisy about compassion, citing her own tear-stained testimony about how she was taken advantage by a doctor. Here’s how we described her psychological distress last August during the Olympics. “Prominent among them was gymnast Simone Biles who described the abuse she’d suffered from a male trainer and on social media as the greatest female gymnast in history. Even as she added more golds to her mantle she’d seemed unable to find peace in her accomplishments.
“Due to mental blocks, she’d had to step away from the sport for a time to get her head straight. She had a lot of company from fellow competitors who described sexual harassment and intimidation on social media for their unhappiness. (Hence the constant mental health commercials on the TV broadcasts.)”
Now the same role model is mocking Gaines? It seems unthinkable. As for the claims that men have no advantage against women, it was pointed out that there are zero women who try to reverse the equation, going into men’s sports. They show the hard truths about competitive records of men versus women in a range of sports. They describe the physical risks for women playing against larger, stronger men. Here. Here. And here.
It’s still stunning to see Biles toeing the radical LGBTQ line while asking for traditional pity of a victimized woman herself. Or the amount of support that the cause has garnered from progressives throughout society. When did people became so obtuse about the growth this societal contagion?
We wrote earlier this year about how such notions take hold. MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….
“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way… Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.”
The new contagion is trans athletes. USA Today is just one example of how influencers try to legitimize campaigns to boost their own self esteem. As the battle to reverse the trans incursion shows, there are only too many willing to play politics in the gender debate. Like the pro-Palestinian movement in North America the trans athlete hoax exists is a bubble where reality and fiction can co-exist, knowing they’ll never be put to the test.
Orwell called it doublethink “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Biles and the liberal elites have it mastered. Nursing their grievance while finding it a fault in others.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, Bruce is regular media contributor. The new book from there team of Evan & Bruce Dowbiggin is Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL & Changed Hockey. From Espo to Boston in 1967 to Gretz in L.A. in 1988 to Patrick Roy leaving Montreal in 1995, the stories behind the story. In paperback and Kindle on #Amazon. Destined to be a hockey best seller. https://www.amazon.ca/Deal-Trades-Stunned-Changed-Hockey-ebook/dp/B0D236NB35/
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