The TV Analyst Pro Golfers Love to Hate
Golf Channel’s Brandel Chamblee thinks modern pros are doing it wrong—and he shares his opinion with uncommon bluntness

Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee has become the game’s resident contrarian.
By Brian Costa
March 6, 2018 12:17 p.m. ET

The relationship between professional golfers and most television broadcasters is as warm as the sport is genteel. Announcers speak in hushed tones, often describing players in reverential terms. Networks promote the players, whose exploits fuel network profits, and everyone goes home happy.

Then there is Brandel Chamblee, the Golf Channel analyst who has become the game’s resident contrarian.

Jason Dufner, the 2013 PGA champion, described his on-air analysis as “pure editorial garbage.” Tiger Woods’s agent has called his work “deplorable” and “disgusting.” Rory McIlroy has argued with him repeatedly. And, echoing the general sentiment from some of his peers, the Englishman Ian Poulter tweeted sarcastically last year, “It’s clearly very easy sitting on your arse…thanks for the support.”

The reasons for their animus vary, but the commentary by Chamblee, a 55-year-old former pro golfer, has a recurring theme. He thinks modern golfers are doing it wrong, including the way they swing and the way they train, and he thinks their coaches are making them worse.

Chamblee dispenses these opinions with a mix of advanced statistics, video review and uncommon bluntness. He is a professorial provocateur. And the reactions to him are as notable for what they reveal about golfers as for what they show about him.

“If you play golf for a living, unlike every other sport, you’ve never been criticized,” Chamblee said. “Every other sport has a coach that is yelling at them. Because you’re part of a team, you’re singled out if you make a mistake. But in golf, if you’re good enough to play on the PGA Tour, you’re lauded at every step. Nobody is ever taken to task.”

Chamblee said he does not enjoy getting a rise out of people, but he has shown an exceptional ability to do so. He has faulted McIlroy for hitting the gym too hard, Poulter for not playing to win and Sergio Garcia, the 2017 Masters champion, for his attitude, all of which elicited responses from the players.

He has also provided something of a running soundtrack to Woods’s fall from greatness, saying among other things that Woods’s decline is his own fault and that, before his latest comeback, he could no longer compete with the swing he had. The sharpest responses from Woods and his agent came in 2013, when Chamblee suggested Woods had tried to cheat in tournaments. “If I had to do it over again, I would do it more tactfully,” Chamblee said of that episode recently.

He said he has blocked more than 10,000 people on Twitter for what he deems nasty comments toward him, including a few players. But Golf Channel has stood firmly behind him throughout.

“We encourage our analysts to have strong opinions, otherwise it would be pretty laissez-faire,” said Golf Channel executive producer Molly Solomon. “What I admire about Brandel is he’s blunt, he’s unafraid, he’s fearless, and he’s constantly prepared.”

What qualifies as inflammatory stuff in golf might seem laughable to people not involved in the sport. Chamblee’s tiff with Dufner can be traced to a philosophical difference with Dufner’s coach, Chuck Cook, who is a proponent of a teaching method known as The Golfing Machine, named for the 1979 instructional book by Homer Kelly.

Chamblee thinks the method, with its focus on the geometry and physics of the swing, has robbed players of their natural talent. Cook declined to comment. Dufner, whose agent declined further comment, ended up defending his coach more broadly in a heated online exchange that included Chamblee.

The uproar over that sort of nerdery is partly indicative of the influence Golf Channel can have over the industry. In a highly technical game in which many things are subjective, what gets said on the air can impact which methods – and by extension, which coaches—hold greater sway than others.

David Leadbetter, one of the world’s top-rated coaches, said amateurs are more easily influenced than pros. “Whatever Joe Blow says on the air, it’s like, ‘OK.’ It’s taken as gospel,” he said.

Chamblee is in some ways in the mold of Johnny Miller, the two-time major champion and longtime NBC golf analyst known for his bluntness and occasional criticism of top players. But Miller can only riff for so long while calling live events. As a studio analyst, Chamblee has no live action to interrupt him.

He describes many top players today almost as victims of what he calls overly technical coaches and overzealous trainers. That puts him on a philosophical island in a sport that has become both more athletic at the highest level and more scientific.

Trackman radar monitors have become ubiquitous on driving ranges, giving elite players more data than ever on each practice shot. Technology has made swing video breakdowns easier than ever. Leadbetter, who has coached dozens of male and female tour pros, said young players demand more detailed, technical feedback, which leaves it to coaches to decide how much information is too much. “It’s a very touchy-feely subject,” he said.

But Chamblee said he flatly disagrees with the way players are being taught, saying there has been some “famous impoverishment” of top players in the past 10 to 15 years as a result. That has irked players who feel indebted to their coaches.

“In my mind, I’m trying to tell them to trust their instincts, that they’re the geniuses,” Chamblee said. “I look at some Tour players and think, ‘You’re Leonardo da Vinci, and someone is standing behind you telling you how to paint.’ It makes no sense to me.”
Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com