The golfer: “I have deep, deep empathy for them.”
At a pre-U.S. Open press conference on Monday, Phil Mickelson faced the golf media for the first time since he joined the LIV Golf Invitational Series, and was immediately faced with tough questions surrounding his motivations for joining the Saudi-financed tour.
Among the questions Mickelson was asked concerned the families of 9/11 victims who wrote to him and others playing on the LIV Tour protesting their participation. A reporter asked Mickelson what he would say to those families to explain his decision to play on the tour.
"I would say to everyone that has lost loved ones, lost friends on 9/11 that I have deep, deep empathy for them,’’ Mickelson said. “I can’t emphasize that enough. I have the deepest of sympathy and empathy for them.’’
The question comes after 911familiesunited.org, a group of families and survivors of the 2001 terrorist attacks, wrote a letter to Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed and Kevin Na expressing outrage that the group would become business partners with the new league and participate in sportswashing, according to the New York Post‘s Brian Wacker.
In the letter, Terry Strada, the group’s national chair whose husband was killed on 9/11, points out that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and that the Saudi government assisted the hijackers and have denied their involvement in the years since.
“Given Saudi Arabia’s role in the death of our loved ones and those injured on 9/11—your fellow Americans—we are angered that you are so willing to help the Saudis cover up this history in their request for ‘respectability,’” Strada wrote. “When you partner with the Saudis, you become complicit with their whitewash, and help give them the reputational cover they so desperately crave—and are willing to pay handsomely to manufacture.”
Following Mickelson’s comments, Strada released another statement on behalf of the 9/11 Families United, saying that Mickelson and his fellow LIV Golf participants “should be ashamed.”
“Phil knows exactly what he’s doing, and he and his fellow LIV golfers should be ashamed. They are helping the Saudi regime ‘sportswash’ their reputation in return for tens of millions of dollars, at the very same time our government is rolling out more damning evidence of Saudi culpability in the 9/11 attacks,” Strada wrote.
As the PGA Tour commissioner said Sunday, ‘You’d have to be living under a rock’ to not understand the implications of involving yourself with the Saudis.”