One Christmas about 15 years back, Brandel Chamblee’s older brother, Bill, was readying to leave the family home. Their mother was sad to see him go—you know how the end of the holidays can feel. Brandel had an idea for how he could help: “I was like, ‘I’ll get him to stay another three hours.’ My mom’s like, ‘How are you going to do that?’ I go, ‘Watch.’”
With his brother, an avid hunter from Texas, halfway out the door, Brandel called back to him. “Bill, I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “The Second Amendment is an outdated constitutional right—it’s a lot like the law in England that you have to teach your kids archery.”
“By the way,” Chamblee tells me with a smile, “I do not think that.”
But that’s all it took to get Bill going. Soon the brothers were arguing about the necessity to arm oneself against an oppressive government, the right to hunt. Round and round they went. “I’m not going to say I held that view,” says Brandel, “but I wanted to argue that view.”
“And I looked at my mom, and I was like, ‘See? I told you I’d get him to stay three hours.’”
Brandel Chamblee—his real name, born Brandel Eugene Chamblee in July of 1962—likes arguing. To him, arguing—specifically about golf, a game for which he’s become the most prominent and polarizing voice—is a sport, just the most recent one he’s lent his driven, obsessive personality to. Before that, it was playing golf, which he picked up as a teenager when a friend took him out for a fortuitous round in Irving, Texas, where he grew up. And before golf, it was plenty of other things: baseball, riding cows, riding baby bulls, football, track. But no matter the discipline—whether throwing a spiral, hitting a cut, or crafting an argument—Chamblee has devoted a level of attention that’s, to steal the phrase that his Golf Channel colleague Rich Lerner uses whenever Chamblee pulls out a historical factoid from the recesses of his mind, “impressive … but troubling.”
“It didn’t matter what I did,” Chamblee tells me over dinner in August. “I wanted to be a professional at it.”
Golf is particularly tailored for those who prefer to lose themselves in rabbit holes. Its lack of a perfect outcome, its rooting in the unpredictable whims of nature and in Beautiful Mind–level math equations, its reliance on infinitesimal mechanics and inexplicable mental fortitude—all of it mixes together to produce a virus that, in most cases, cannot be cured once it finds a host. “I’m trying to unravel the mystery of what I’m watching,” Chamblee says. “Golf is … I don’t know that anybody has the answers.”
Chamblee has been looking for them for most of this century. When his career as a player on the PGA Tour ended in 2003—he finished with one career victory, at the Greater Vancouver Open in 1998, which you probably already knew if you’ve ever looked at Chamblee’s replies on X—he joined the Golf Channel as an analyst. From that point on, he’s spent his life talking golf. “It’s a ton of work,” he says, “but it’s not work to me any more than hitting golf balls is.” Chamblee, though, is perhaps better known for how he talks golf, and for how it makes people feel. The list of notable names who have been personally aggravated—to various degrees—by Chamblee would make for an all-time leaderboard: Tiger Woods, David Duval, Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy, Brooks Koepka, Collin Morikawa. The list of non-notable names would be much longer: You can’t set foot in any pro shop in America without finding someone who has an animated opinion about him.
Chamblee is confident, articulate, convicted, and incredibly committed. He speaks with an assurance that he is right because, as far as he’s concerned, he always is. He wears beautiful, light-colored suits. His hair is impeccable. He looks as if a John Hughes villain grew into middle age. Plus—and this cannot be ignored—his name is Brandel Chamblee.
As golf’s most dramatic event, the Ryder Cup, approaches this weekend, Chamblee finds himself in the middle of all of the drama. The sport has been torn asunder by outside agitators with bottomless pockets and problematic résumés, but in a cultural moment when most lie down or tire in the face of an overwhelming amount of dollar signs, Chamblee has puffed his chest out and dug in—hard. “You want me to ignore the biggest crisis that pro golf has ever faced?” Chamblee tweeted shortly after LIV launched. “A crisis that pits two free market tours (PGA and DP World Tour) against an oppression tour (LIV). The former tours rooted in the traditions of the game while the latter in sportswashing? Not going to happen.”
He may have the shock value of Stephen A. Smith, the dulcet delivery of a Taylor Sheridan character, and the haircut of Tucker Carlson, but he is also the only commentator taking on the gargantuan task of being golf’s moral compass—a mission he carries out with surprising skill, care, and fearlessness. His mere existence and the reaction it generates raise a question about not just what we want out of sports commentary but what we need. And as Chamblee seeks to unravel the mysteries of our most mysterious sport, there is one thing that’s evident: He is the voice of it.
“All right. I don’t wanna oversell it. That might be the best salsa in the world.”
We are not sitting outside of a taqueria in Nuevo Nayarit the night before the Mexico Open at VidantaWorld. We’re in Atlanta on the eve of the Tour Championship, in a corner booth at Houston’s, an upscale chain with locations across the country You get the sense that he goes to Houston’s a lot because he tells you he goes to Houston’s a lot. “I think I’m bringing Rich here Friday night,” he says excitedly, already planning his next pilgrimage. He coaxes you to get the burger, to try the artichoke dip, to eat the salsa before he finishes it himself. “It’s not a Mexican restaurant, and I don’t know what’s in there, but it’s probably cocaine.”
“Grab some of that,” he instructs me as I dive in. “Right on your plate there. I’ve actually never tried the sour cream. I’m sure that’s good too.”
It’s frankly endearing—a little adorable, even—to witness a man take this much pleasure in a restaurant that lies somewhere between the Cheesecake Factory and Ruth’s Chris. But it’s also representative of the gusto with which Chamblee tackles basically everything in his life. Nothing is done casually. Everything is addressed and broadcast with wonder.
“I want to get to the bottom of things,” he says. “I get up, and I get a cup of coffee, and I just start digging. … I want to have something interesting to say. And I want to find something that’s interesting to me. And that’s it. That’s what you want to do: find something to sink your teeth into.”
If you’ve ever watched an installment of Golf Central or Live From, the Golf Channel’s roving flagship coverage program that broadcasts at every major tournament and certain signature events, over the past 20 years, you’ve seen the pages of Chamblee’s legal pad flap in the wind. At a major, he’ll bring about five of those pads to set, filled with things like the Official World Golf Ranking top 100 broken down by strokes gained; the results of the last 20 championships, annotated; and shot-by-shot breakdowns of players in contention, including distances, wind speeds, and anything that may have reminded him of Shakespeare’s Hamlet
“I think he’s the most prepared analyst in all of sports,” says Matt Hegarty, executive producer for the Golf Channel. “He never lays up a segment. He never lays up a show.”
The day after our dinner at Houston’s, Chamblee spends the time between their noon preshow and 6 p.m. post-round show hunkered down in a small trailer on the outskirts of East Lake Golf Club. With the historical Tudor-style clubhouse looming in the distance, he sits in a solitary corner, sleeves rolled up, absolutely grinding tape. After watching Scottie Scheffler’s approach on the third hole, he turns from the TV to his laptop to get the exact stats of the shot. Then he does it for the next shot. And the next. And the next. As he flips through the tabs on his browser, I notice that one of them is open to “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and I consider that it’s just as likely that he’s scouting the art of profile writing because one is currently being written on him as it is that he wanted a refresher on Gay Talese. He tears a page out of the legal pad and strategically lays it on his desk. By midday, you can’t see the surface of the desk anymore. “Somebody a long time ago said to me that the faintest pen is better than the strongest mind,” Chamblee says at dinner. “And I’m like, ‘Write this shit down. Write it down.’”
“I don’t say this lightly: I think there’s a case to be made he is the greatest desk analyst in the history of sports,” Lerner tells me outside of the trailer. “The breadth of his knowledge, the depth of his research, his willingness to take bold positions that are well thought out, that are informed by his deep data dives, his command of the English language … unmatched.”
If you ask Chamblee, this sort of obsession was ingrained in him growing up. His dad, a contractor and salesman, left for work at 7 in the morning and came home at 10 at night. “And my mom never sat down,” he adds. His father promoted an environment of competition among Chamblee’s five siblings. “My dad, he gives everybody shit constantly. Constantly poking you, trying to find your weakness, get at you, start an argument with you, see if you could argue with him, hang with him. He’s always poking everybody—telling everybody they suck at gin, they can’t play pool, they can’t play poker. He’s the guy that’s just always stirring the pot.”
Unsurprisingly, a couple of Chamblee’s siblings became litigators. So did he, in a way. “I just think I was born with grit,” he says. “And when you make an argument, you want to win.”
The annals of YouTube are littered with Chamblee’s most famous skirmishes over the years on the Golf Channel desk. The Great Forward Shaft Lean Debate between him and Frank Nobilo in 2014; the David Duval Ryder Cup brawl; the Brad Faxon fracas at Oak Hill in 2023; the 17th-hole argument that Chamblee and Paul McGinley trot out every year at the Players Championship There’s a certain strife inherent to obsession: If one’s pursuit is by definition singular, it is bound to come into conflict with the whims of others. And in those moments, Chamblee is not wont to recede. “He bows up,” Lerner says. “Brandel welcomes a scrape—you want to go, he’ll go.”
But these scrapes feel different from much of what you’ll see not just in the friendly country club confines of golf commentary but across sports media as a whole. Chamblee is Paul Newman in the boxing scene in Cool Hand Luke, taking licks and never staying down (and looking good while doing it). There’s a level of confidence with which he argues—some mix of preparedness and innate self-assuredness—that seems to irk those he’s in the ring with and whoever’s watching the fight. As temperatures rise, he carries on with a look that says, “I could do this all day.” And whether or not you want to see him win, you definitely wouldn’t mind seeing him take another punch.
When you ask Chamblee a general question about on-air debates turning into heated arguments, he immediately delves into his greatest hits, as if he knows what you’re specifically asking about.
On Nobilo: “Look, I love Nobilo to death, but there were a few moments where I could feel it heating up. When I played the tour, we used to have these conversations about who would you least like to get in a fight with, and it was always Ernie Els and Frank Nobilo because they’re both crazy. You think they might just kill you. And they’re both tough. Nobilo’s wrists are this big around. He’s got a watch on that, if you unfold it, it might cover 10 yards. So I would always make sure I was at least an arm’s length away from him when we were talking on the air. If you look, I’m leaning back because I’m like, if he throws a punch, he’s just going to clip my nose. … That one, probably, could I have been more diplomatic in that one? Maybe. And maybe he could too. Maybe we could do that differently. But it was honest and real, and I thought he held his ground beautifully.”
On Duval: “What I didn’t know was that week he had been tapped on the shoulder by Davis Love to be in the locker room with the Ryder Cup team. … I got loads of respect for David, and we kissed and made up after that, but I said to him the next day, ‘Listen, I did not know that you were in the locker room in the Ryder Cup.’ I was like, ‘Our show is meant to be objective. We tell the truth on this show. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. I appreciate that. But I know you didn’t disagree with me—you did it because you’re in the camp with the Ryder Cup team.’”
You wouldn’t characterize any of Chamblee’s response to the heat he gets as defensive. It’s more accurately another instance of his conviction in the face of pushback. Like all good golfers, he commits to every shot. Chamblee is driven by two things—truth and entertainment—and he doesn’t fear what he might encounter to achieve those goals. “I look at TV like this: If your meter is just doing this,” Lerner says, moving his hand along in a boring, straight line, “you’re dead.”
To that point, it’s worth considering the setting: The Golf Channel desk is a platform for Chamblee’s thoughts and opinions, sure, but beyond that, it’s a vehicle to foster interest in the sport. The best way to do that may be by pissing people off—with well-researched points, of course. “So much of golf media is sycophantic and fawning,” says Kevin Van Valkenburg, newly appointed director of content at Fried Egg Golf. “I don’t feel like he is ever interested in being buddies with the people he’s talking about. Even when he says something where I’m like, ‘Oh, that sounds crazy to me,’ I appreciate that he’s coming from a place of this radical honesty.”
“I say this,” Brandel tells me from across the table at Houston’s. “Truth is like poetry, and people fucking hate poetry.”
In 2022, after years of rumors and maneuvering, LIV Golf, a PGA Tour competitor backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, officially arrived. With the PIF pumping billions of dollars into the endeavor, LIV boasted radical changes to match its “golf, but louder” slogan—54-hole tournaments, shotgun starts, music on tee boxes—and big-name defectors: Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson. More than three years later, golf finds itself suspended in disarray. In an effort to stem the flow of players to the rival league, the PGA pushed itself to the financial brink, and then reversed course on its initially staunch position of resistance and entered into negotiations for a merger with LIV. The same day the merger was announced, DeChambeau appeared on CNN, where he found himself suddenly speaking about Saudi Arabia’s role in 9/11: “I mean, look, it’s unfortunate what has happened, but that is not something I can necessarily speak on because I’m a golfer.”
Since that announcement, talks have stalled amid congressional oversight, Jon Rahm has become LIV’s highest-profile defector—a move that did not, despite many’s assumptions, move the needle toward unification—and the PGA Tour has bounced back. At the beginning of 2024, the PGA Tour announced its own deep-pocketed safety net: the Strategic Sports Group, which included Fenway Sports Group; the New York Mets’ owner, Steve Cohen; and the Atlanta Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank. And in 2025, a season in which the PGA’s two most prominent players, Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, took home 75 percent of the majors, the tour saw its ratings skyrocket. Meanwhile, LIV Golf had about the same number of linear television viewers as A Body in the Basement A détente between the PGA and LIV is probably inevitable, but definitely intractable, as the entity with the better product and history holds strong against the entity with an endless well of resources.
To badly paraphrase Darren Rovell, LIV Golf has been terrible for the sport but tremendous for content—and for the players. “We’ve all done better from all of this,” said McIlroy, the initial face of LIV resistance, at the 2025 Genesis Invitational. “Whether you stayed on the PGA Tour or you left, we have all benefited from this. … We’re playing for a $20 million prize fund this week. That would have never happened if LIV hadn’t have come around.”
LIV has also, strangely, been good for Brandel Chamblee. Or, at least, it’s been an opportunity to show people what he’s made of. As someone who was critical of Saudi investment in golf before the LIV tour—he denounced the DP World Tour for holding an event in King Abdullah Economic City in 2019—Chamblee has never moved from that point, and over the last four years, he’s gained renown as the face of the anti-LIV bloc in golf media. In person, he doesn’t soften his take, hammering LIV on both its ethical issues and its competitive merits. “I don’t like where the money’s coming from, and the product is terrible,” he says. “It’s an irrational actor. … Nothing about LIV resonates with people. It does not matter.”
“There’s not a single person on the planet that could tell me what tournaments Bryson DeChambeau is going to. No way they could tell me. Even in my business, they couldn’t tell me. Nobody is going to tell me which tournament Brooks Koepka is in. Nobody.”
There is something beautiful about winding Chamblee up and letting him go. As if he’s looking into a camera instead of your eyes, he zeroes in on his argument and delivers it with conviction. “You want to tell me Bryson moves the needle. I’m like, ‘He moves the needle if he’s playing against Scottie Scheffler in the U.S. Open.’ Bryson doesn’t move the needle in everybody. You want to say, ‘Well, he’s got 900,000 views on YouTube.’ First of all, his YouTube account is owned by the Saudis. … Can you tell me those views are authentic and organic? I call bullshit on that—900,000 views my ass.”
But Chamblee hasn’t just gotten a boost in notoriety due to the spiciness of his opinions on LIV. What’s much more notable is how persistent he’s been in delivering them. In the modern world, the best PR strategy against bad press is to simply wait 24 hours. Nothing lasts. People get bored. Normalization occurs at dazzling speeds. In most pockets of the golf world, LIV has solidified its existence by merely sticking around for long enough. Sure, no one watches it—but the days of its most famous players answering to families of 9/11 victims are long gone. Chamblee, though, is one of the few who refuse to concede that ground. “I share a lot of the same sentiment he shares, in terms of the source of the money and the natural problem that exists behind what is happening there,” says Chris Solomon, cofounder of No Laying Up. “I do not share the stomach that he has to keep bringing it up and to keep taking a beating over it.”
Solomon, as well as everyone else in the golf world I talk to, immediately mentions the bot-driven war being waged on social media between LIV and whoever speaks down on LIV. At one point, No Laying Up resorted to spelling LIV “L-1-V” to stem the flow of dubious accounts into their mentions.
“If you read my Twitter feed, you’d think I’d want to kill myself,” Chamblee jokes.
So why keep doing it? Why keep entering the ring, once more unto the breach, whenever an LIV player underperforms at a major, whenever the Phil Mickelsons and Talor Gooches and Anthony Kims of the world tout LIV’s supremacy and encroaching influence? Chamblee boils it down to one reason: “When you ask, ‘Where do the convictions come from?,’ I just look at the world as always obfuscating. Nobody tells the truth. … Everybody lies. I mean, who tells the truth? If it were true that Joaquin Niemann were as good as they said when he plays in those major championships, he would be there. He’s not that good. … Talor Gooch was the best iron player in the world? Zero evidence of that. I look at Jon Rahm finishing in the top 10 in every single event that he played in, and to me that’s an indictment of LIV. It’s not a compliment to him; it’s just an indictment of LIV.”
The world is gray, full of nuance. Look no further than Chamblee, a man with conservative ideals and rounds with Donald Trump under his belt whose most prominent stance is a generally liberal-leaning aversion to Saudi-backed sportswashing (The headlines from earlier this year that Chamblee changed his mind on LIV after golfing with Trump were lacking context. Trump, Chamblee tells me, convinced him that LIV and its steward, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are actually dedicated to building a sustainable, long-lasting golf league, which Chamblee doubted. His main points of contention regarding the league’s ethical issues and lack of competition are still strongly held.) Sports, on the other hand, are black and white. People lie, but numbers don’t. As far as Chamblee is concerned, he’s on a hunt for truth, and he’s sure he’s discovered it as far as it pertains to LIV Golf. He loves the game, believes in his core that it’s being destroyed, and is willing to fight endlessly to save it—no matter how flooded his mentions get, no matter how many times Mickelson calls him a “psychotic, no matter how inured or distracted the audience grows.
“You don’t always know where Brandel is going to fall on a certain argument, and I think that that’s one of the reasons why he’s become the voice of the game,” Van Valkenburg says. “Even the people who dislike him are going to tune in and see what he has to say, because it’s like, ‘Oh, Brandel might surprise me on this.’”
There’s an inevitable irony in parsing the negative reactions Brandel Chamblee seems to inspire. Most of the reasons for disdain are also the reasons he’s one of the best commentators in sports. The confidence, the conviction, the conflict: These are all traits that make for good TV. Plus, the confidence is born out of obsessive preparation, the conviction is honest, and the conflict is a natural product of the first two things. A more likable Brandel Chamblee would mean a less effective Brandel Chamblee.
“I honestly believe that someone should strive to be paid the highest compliment and the harshest criticism and not care about either of them,” Chamblee says. The criticisms are of pompousness and sanctimony—again, just look at the mentions on any of Chamblee’s posts for a refresher. So what are the highest compliments?
“He’s essential to the golf world,” says Solomon, who himself has gone to war with Chamblee and emerged triumphant, a loss that Chamblee took sportingly. “Great storyteller, great hang, and he’s one of the few people out there in golf that’s willing to put himself out there, does not care what people say. I envy him in his ability to just completely eliminate what he thinks the reaction to something might be and take it all on the chin.”
“People are always like, ‘What is he like actually?’ And I’m like, ‘Brandel’s the best,’” says Savannah Thompson, an associate producer at NBC Sports who works closely with Chamblee on Golf Central’s graphics packages. “He fully cares about the people that he works with. And he’s committed to golf, but I think he commits himself fully, like he does with golf, with the people in his life.”
“He is the most provocative thinker we have now that Johnny [Miller] has retired,” says Lerner. “And the other thing about Brandel I would say from where I’m sitting: He’s generous on set. He sits in the middle—he’s SGA, he’s Jordan, he’s the high-volume scorer. We know that—I need to put the ball in his hands and let him create and work some magic. But he’ll turn around and say, ‘Richie, it’s like one of your essays: high level.’ He’s constantly looking to elevate his partners in a genuine way. … You know that every day is going to be interesting, going to be alive. We’re going to have some laughs, and we’re going to talk the shit out of golf.”
Paul McGinley, the former PGA Tour player and European Ryder Cup captain who stepped into Live From’s third chair in 2023, specifically remembers one of his first shows with Chamblee, at the Players Championship—the aforementioned debate that would become legend. After a brutally windy day, Chamblee unleashed the take that TPC Sawgrass’s famous island par-3 17th hole wasn’t a great hole: too penal, too late in the round, too subject to chance. McGinley came out swinging in the opposite direction, and what unfurled was a nearly 10-minute debate about the merits of the hole, the test a hole should be asking of the best players in the world, and the essence of what defines golf at its very core. “The people in my ear got quiet,” McGinley says, “which I knew was rare.”
McGinley notes the moment to highlight Chamblee’s aptitude and endurance not as a debater but as a facilitator. “He wanted to see if I could go there,” he says. And, to McGinley, when it was clear that he could, Chamblee dug in even more—not to hopelessly cling to a losing argument but because he knew it was a moment for his new colleague to shine in front of an audience who was unfamiliar with him at the time. “He knew I was getting the better of him, but I think he took it on the chin because he knew it was a good segment.”
“I remember that, and I remember that I felt like he actually won that day,” Chamblee says when I ask him about it. “If Paul was sitting here right now, I would say, ‘It was a great debate, but you were wrong,’ just to get his ire up. … But it is great drama, and Paul’s points were very good.”
“I can remember like yesterday exactly where I was when [producer] Jack Graham said to me, ‘We want commentary to be like you’re sitting at the 19th hole or in your living room with your buddies, talking about golf,’” Chamblee continues. “And maybe it happens a couple times a week, but when it does, you’ve got gold.”
Brandel the teammate is on display in the trailer at East Lake. On the Golf Central preshow, Johnson Wagner—the newest member of the core team, a former tour player with a resplendent mustache who’s quickly gained a niche following by embarrassing himself on national TV while attempting to re-create the most absurd shots hit by the pros in a given week—previewed a particularly nasty shot alongside the 16th green that might trip players up should they get too greedy approaching the pin. So when, hours later, Justin Thomas puts himself in that same exact spot—and proceeds to flub a chip shot that eventually rolls right back to his feet—Chamblee jumps up out of his chair and runs into the other room looking for his colleague. “Johnson! You son of a bitch!” he screams.
“We have to go back!” he yells, like Jack Shephard in Lost, thrilled not only for Wagner’s prognostication but because this means they’ll have a great segment in the upcoming postgame show. “We have to go back!!!”
“Go ask some of the producers what a gift Brandel is,” says Lerner.
“The guy keeps on coming,” says Hegarty, his producer. “You can’t stop him. He gets into an argument with Tiger, he gets into an argument with Rory, or he gets into an argument with Collin Morikawa, and then the fans are coming at him, and the audience is coming at him—and he just keeps coming. At the end of the day, he’s got people that love him, and he’s got people that want to trash him. But he just keeps coming.”
The skies at East Lake are turning ominous. Thunderstorms have hit Atlanta nearly every day for the last week, and the approaching black clouds guarantee that this Thursday afternoon will be no different. A runner for the Golf Channel interrupts a conversation between Chamblee and Lerner about Im Sung-ja to let them know that they’re going to be shuttled across the club’s property to the Golf Central set earlier than planned, before lightning rules out transportation altogether. Chamblee turns to his desk and starts scribbling on his legal pad faster than usual.
When we get to the set—a tiny, enclosed space suspended above the ground on the far side of East Lake’s pond, in between the eighth and 15th tee boxes—it’s already shaking. Someone immediately asks if the structure is grounded, in case it gets struck by lightning. “We might be hunkered down in here,” says Chamblee. “Did anyone bring any whiskey?”
Rain starts falling. Sirens start erupting. The hits of thunder grow louder and longer. Eventually it’s raining so hard that water begins to seep through the set’s makeshift walls and drip down the inside of the window behind Lerner and Chamblee. For a brief moment, it feels like we’re in the middle of the ocean during a squall. It’s like they’re a pirate radio for golf.
Amid the chaos, though, Chamblee is contained. Everything is swirling around him—the noise is getting louder—but he seems to be in the eye of this storm. As cameramen rush to their positions and the clock to air begins to count down—we’re live in 10, nine, eight—he folds his hands and lays them on the desk. A grin of sly contentment forms across his face.